MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Discoverers’ Takes Journey Through History and Nature

“The Discoverers,” the new IMAX attraction at the California Museum of Science and Industry, takes as its starting point the mammoth historical study by Daniel Boorstin about pathfinders throughout the ages. It’s the sort of subject that lends itself all too easily to the reverential treatment that plagues “educational” movies for students, and “The Discoverers” (Times-rated Family) isn’t immune to the plague.

Whenever we see Isaac Newton pondering the nature of prisms, or Magellan showing off his profile, the film lapses into waxworks--waxworks five stories high on the big IMAX screen.

But the thrill of discovery is in this movie anyway. Directed by IMAX veteran Greg MacGillivray, working from a script by Dr. Boorstin’s filmmaker son Jon Boorstin, “The Discoverers” has some amazing footage of dolphins, a computer-enhanced simulated high-speed tour of the surface of Venus, and some unique time-lapse photography of the Aurora Borealis. (The magnetic waves coursing through the frozen Alaskan night are ghostly, seraphic.)

The enhanced fluidity of this movie is due to the development of a more lightweight IMAX camera--32 pounds compared to the usual 75. We’re put into the point of view of the various “discoverers,” who also include Don Marcelino Sautuola and his daughter Maria, who discovered prehistoric cave paintings in Altamira, Spain, in the 1880s. The camera zooms through the caves as hellbent as Freddy Krueger in search of prey. (Let’s hope the slasher schlockmeisters never get hold of this IMAX process: They’ll send the entire audience to the emergency room.)

“The Discoverers” has enough eye-popping flying sequences across mountains and canyons to satisfy a primal fantasy urge in moviegoers of all ages. Movies don’t often give these kinds of bigger-than-life pleasures anymore because most film artists have been thinking small. “The Discoverers” isn’t art but, like most of the IMAX movies, it makes you aware of why you first liked movies as a kid. Maybe that’s why, at the screening I attended, most of the kids in the audience were uncharacteristically rapt.

‘The Discoverers’

Produced and directed by Greg MacGillivray. Executive producers Dr. Jeffrey W. Kirsch, Jean Xavier Orhand. Written and visually conceived by Jon Boorstin. Cinematographers Richard Michalak, Miguel Angel Trujillo, Brad Ohlund. Editor, Co-director Stephen Judson. Costumes Merrily Murray-Walsh. Music Steve Wood. Production design Thomas A. Walsh. Art director Betty Grenn. Set decorator Libby Woolems. Running time: 40 minutes.

Times-rated Family.