Is tale about Mars rovers big enough for Imax?

Is there life on Mars? This question has long vexed theologians, scientists and David Bowie. When NASA planned to launch two specially made unmanned rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, filmmaker George Butler decided to document the process of designing, building and launching the vehicles and the mission to examine geologic samples on the surface of our galactic next-door neighbor.

The rovers were able to send back high-resolution images of the planet, which, projected to Imax size, have a clarity and arid crispness that capture the scope and scale of what being there might actually be like. Not having a way to capture images of the machines at work means that too much of Butler’s film -- his credits include “Pumping Iron” and the Imax film “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure” -- is disappointingly made up of computer simulations. As strange as it sounds, the rocket launch in a documentary “presented as a public service by Lockheed Martin in collaboration with NASA” seems lackluster and unconvincing compared with a similar sequence in something like the movie “Armageddon.”

Much of “Roving Mars” is taken up by shots of Mission Control or technicians attending to the rovers preflight, none of which fully takes advantage of the added size and heft of the enormous dimensions of Imax. When a parachute test deploys, however, unfurling across a black background like some lurching sideways jellyfish, the effect is startling and breathtaking, finding unimagined beauty in an unlikely place.

The true implications of what the scientists find -- that conditions for the existence of life on Mars, even billions of years ago, mean that life may also exist elsewhere in the universe -- are only hinted at, as if such heavy metaphysical questions are too big for even an Imax-size screen.

*

‘Roving Mars’

MPAA rating: G

A Buena Vista Pictures release. Director George Butler. Writers Butler, Robert Andrus. Producers Butler, Frank Marshall. Director of photography T.C. Christensen. Editor Nancy Baker. Music Philip Glass. Running time: 40 minutes.

In selected Imax locations.