MOVIE REVIEW : A Lush and Saddening ‘Rain Forest’

If the IMAX film format--with its gigantic, audience-swallowing frames, immense focal depth and razor-sharp clarity--is the ideal medium for recording and transmitting the visible world, then the latest IMAX film, “Tropical Rain Forest” (Mitsubishi IMAX Theater, California Museum of Science and Industry), is an invaluable document. And a poignant one, because what it shows us--huge sections of tropical rain forest land in both hemispheres--is a part of our world that is fast disappearing.

Vanishing, in fact, at the rate of 80 acres a minute, according to the film’s press materials, with more than 2 billion acres gone already, and only half the original area left undestroyed. And vanishing at an increasing tempo, up 40% during the last decade. At one point in the film, an overhead camera shows us some of the fertile mountain area still left, and then gives us a visual projection of its appearance in several decades. The contrast is stark, terrible. Lush mantles of foliage are replaced with barren hillsides, covered with stumps.

What exactly is being lost? That’s the film’s major strength: Re-creating the environment for us in 38 packed minutes. With the forest sounds as an aural backdrop, we see damp vegetation, fierce sunlight, blazing flowers, trees towering into a billowing circus-tent of greenery. Mile-high cataracts of water plunge in explosions of steam and mist. And dozens of animals, including squirrel monkeys, flame-and-fruit colored macaws, huge snakes and a Ulysses butterfly shown, for almost a full minute, struggling out of its cocoon.

What we’re seeing, from the vast overhead vistas down to close shots of ants swarming over rotting tree bark, is a magical, interrelated ecosystem, one which, narrator Geoffrey Holder reminds us, took more than 400 million years to develop. That’s how the forest is revealed to us: layer by layer, as it developed biologically over the years. The perspective shifts. What we see begins to resemble not a forest, but an immense work of art: intensely complex and beautiful, alive in all its parts.

After being immersed in that paradisiacal vision, the current end-point of those 400 million years becomes chilling. In seemingly flat, neutral images, which IMAX gives us at almost life size, loggers rip into the huge trees with chain saws.

And, when the trees come crashing down, tearing loose dozens of neighboring branches as they fall, it really looks like an act not of enterprise, but of vandalism. The rain forest Indians, we’re told, practiced natural conservation, “slash and burn” agriculture in which one area of the forest was cultivated, then left to re-grow itself. But here, all the trees seem disappearing into an endless maw: feeding an immense appetite for new land, cattle territory, wooden materials and, of course, paper goods, books and newsprint.

Recent documentaries, like “Blue Planet” have used IMAX’s ability to capture nature in the service of ecological messages. “Tropical Rain Forest” obviously does, too. And, if director Ben Shedd and writer Simon Campbell-Jones’ film has a major flaw, it may be in not making clear to us the root causes of the current devastation. Why are the forests decimated at such a rate now? What can be done, realistically, to stop it?

It’s sad to think that, without some compromise, a hundred years from now, all the magical world we see here may exist only on films like this, and that “Tropical Rain Forest” (Times-rated: Family) may be nothing but a record of a curious, nearly unimaginable time: a portrait of what used to be.

‘Tropical Rain Forest’

A presentation of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Director Ben Shedd. Producers Marian White, Shedd. Executive producer Mike Day. Screenplay by Simon Campbell-Jones. Cinematographer Timothy C. Housel. Editor Vincent Stenerson. Sound Michael Stearns. Narrator Geoffrey Holder. Running time: 38 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.