A present in time for Earth Day

“Sacred Planet” may well be the right movie at the right location, the Universal CityWalk Imax. After taking children to Universal Studios Hollywood, that acme of commercialized high-tech pop fantasy, and running the boutique gantlet of CityWalk, adults and children alike could benefit from the sharp contrast of a beautiful, low-key, 45-minute giant-screen journey to a clutch of the planet’s last remaining locales of unspoiled grandeur, where indigenous people still live in harmony with nature, as they have for millenniums.

It is true that “Sacred Planet,” which is also opening at the Irvine Spectrum Imax, is much like other Imax nature films that peer across vast snowy mountain ranges, cut through jungle thickets, survey African plains teeming with wildlife and plunge to a magical undersea world of exotic fish and fanciful coral encrustations.

At the same time, it’s an ideal film to open on Earth Day, for in the least preachy way possible it celebrates the natural world to make viewers pause and consider the profound importance of preserving the planet. As narrator Robert Redford tells viewers at the film’s end, although we’re the species that threatens all others and despoils the planet, it’s we who are really endangered.

Director Jon Long and his collaborators highlight indigenous peoples the world over who have a reverence for the Earth that the majority of mankind has lost. The Navajos revere Earth as a mother, and others see all of life as interconnected, with each element essential. The film covers a vast amount of territory in a mere 45 minutes -- from the last remaining old-growth forests of British Columbia, to Alaskan mountaintops and glaciers, to the Grand Canyon and other red rock canyons, to the rain forests and undersea world of Borneo, from sacred Thai ruins to remote deserts in Namibia and expansive beaches in New Zealand.

“Sacred Planet” takes leave of its audiences not only with a sense that there’s a lot to be learned from indigenous peoples but also, given the relentless incursions of the modern world, it’s unlikely that they will be able to sustain their ancient way of life beyond another generation or two.

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‘Sacred Planet’

MPAA rating: G (general audiences)

Times guidelines: For all ages.

A Buena Vista Distribution release of a Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a New Street/Allied Films production. Director-editor-music director Jon Long. Writers-producers Karen Fernandez Long and Jon Long. Executive producer Jake Eberts. Cinematographer William Reeve. Running time: 45 minutes.

Exclusively at the Universal City Imax, Universal CityWalk, (818) 760-8100; and the Spectrum Imax, Irvine Spectrum, where 5 and 405 Freeways meet. (800) FANDANGO Ext. 140.