Star Trek in Imax: Beam me up!

About five minutes into the Imax version of Star Trek the other night, there was a moment that was awe-inspiring. It actually inspired me to say "aaawww," though it was probably more an "ooooooo" or maybe "whooooaaaa," as saying "aaawww" would have made people think I was sad or whiny or maybe petting a puppy. Then they would have thought, "I wish that bonehead would shut up." We were, after all, watching a movie at the Museum of Civilization, and I wholly agree with the view that movie-talkers should be tarred and feathered with hot buttery topping and licorice all-sorts.

Anyhow, it was the moment when the boy James T. Kirk, already a rebel, sends a vintage Corvette soaring into a deep canyon. The camera follows from above and suddenly -- "whooooaaaa!" -- the ground falls away a few thousand feet. I jerked slightly forward, as if falling with the Corvette, and almost dropped my $8 popcorn. This is what Imax is for, this physical sensation of being in the film, and that split-second when your body reacts before your brain tells it to settle down, clown.

I saw Star Trek a while back on a so-to-speak normal screen at the World Exchange, and it was great. It gets my vote as the best movie in the Star Trek franchise, with careful casting of new faces in iconic roles, crisp special effects, and some breezily clever explanations for Trekian hallmarks ("All I have left is my bones," says a young and recently divorced Bones McCoy). It also has a story that -- in the context of time travel and Vulcans and tiny drops of "red matter" that can create a black hole faster than you can say "live long and pr-aaiiieeeyyyhhh!" -- seems entirely plausible.

It has its weaker moments, such as when Kirk cites regulations to remove Spock from the captaincy of the Enterprise because the crazy Romulan they're fighting killed Spock's mother, thereby making the pointy-eared son emotionally unfit. Yet the same Romulan killed Kirk's father, albeit years earlier, though that seems a fine line to walk when staging a coup on your boss.

There's also a fundamental similarity to Terminator: both films are about an assassin from the future dropping in to kill someone to prevent future events from happening. There's even a scene when Spock crouches on the teleporter in almost the exact position assumed by the terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) when it arrives on Earth in the first movie of that series. Homage, mayhap?

Not that Star Trek needs to mine other sources for ideas. It is its own template, from which almost every later space TV show or movie has been in some degree cut. That's why it gets the Imax treatment, and a whole new impact.

Star Trek wasn't filmed in Imax, but it has been enhanced and enlarged for the Imax screen, and the results put the stellar in interstellar. When a dozen or so Federation starships kick into warp drive, they shoot like giant bullets of blue light into the wild black yonder. When Kirk hangs by his fingertips over some gaping chasm -- which he does with alarming regularity -- you get a visceral sense of his precipitous position, as if you're strapped into a chair looking down into the abyss.

It's the same Star Trek that played in normal theatres, but at the Imax it somehow has more oomph, more grandeur, more of everything it's made of. It's like turning a space movie up to 11, as the lads in Spinal Tap would say. It's one bigger.

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It's hard to imagine a movie less like Star Trek than Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser: no space, no special effects, no big budget, no famous faces and no pop-culture legend to build upon. It does, however, have that most simple and curious of competitions, the game rock, paper, scissors, which makes eeny-meeny-miney-mo look cerebral.

Our hero, Gary Brewer, is a dedicated tosser, out to win the "RPS" world championships with the unwavering support of his girlfriend Holly Brewer and his enigmatic, idiotic friend Trevor.

Gary is played by Tim Doiron, a former Ottawa resident who also wrote the film and co-directed it with April Mullen, who plays Holly. It's their first feature, and it's been fêted at film festivals in Edmonton, Los Angeles and Britain. They've also scored a distribution deal with Alliance Atlantis, so it's now in

It sometimes has the homemade feel of a first feature, but it's funny and entertaining. There could be less of Trevor (Ryan Tilley), whose character is one-dimensional and too determinedly wacky. There could be more of Baxter Pound, Gary's nemesis on the RPS circuit, irresistibly played by Peter Pasyk as a jumpy man who relishes his power over Gary's self-esteem, openly courts Holly with googled snippets from the Romantic poets, and is absurdly egotistical.

The film is a mockumentary, a mix of real and not real. The camera crew follows Gary in the days before the world championships, as he trains relentlessly, but is saddled by his inability to "toss paper" since his dog died.

It's all very silly, in places hilarious, and overall a good bit of fun.

Read Peter Simpson's blog at ottawacitizen.com/bigbeat

Movie Info

Star Trek plays Thursday through Sunday to Sept. 17 at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau. For schedules see www.civilization.ca/imax or call 819-776-7010.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/travel/Star+Trek+Imax+Beam/1937527/story.html