The IMAX Experience

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Friday afternoon I took beautiful 45-minute ride down Chicago's lakefront path to the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park. My destination, Mysteries of the Great Lakes, an IMAX movie from Science North Productions, a Canadian production company. While the majority of children in the museum seemed to be heading for the new Harry Potter exhibit, there were several school groups and a handful of us non-chaperone adults. Last year on the Great Lakes Town Hall, Dave Dempsey asked if the film did the job of making "the Great Lakes and their fate engaging and action-inspiring" I have to respond that the film did an amazing job of engaging the audience and a depressingly poor job of inspiring action.

First let me address the engaging aspect of the film. While waiting to be let into the theater I overheard a woman saying something along the lines of "We are right here by the lake, I figured we should find out something about it." This is a brilliant example of how place-based education should work. The audience was already engaged because at that moment they were right there on the shore of Lake Michigan. The first several minutes of the movies were spectacular views from the sky over uninhabited islands, past tall cliffs, along massive sand dunes and flying down Niagara Falls. The film gave a short explanation of how the lakes were formed then went straight into what would be the central theme of the film, engaging viewers with fantastic footage of Great Lakes animals. The audience cooed when there was a cute otter on the banks of the lake, followed by a montage of baby birds and their parents, fields of baby seagulls, swans following their mother and fuzzy chicks in a nest with tall white egrets towering above. The film's central plot is the efforts of biologists trying to bring the Lake Sturgeon back from the brink of extinction. There were several segments about this process that were woven throughout the movie. They did not try to make these large, prehistoric creatures warm and fuzzy but used the tactic of biological entitlement repeating ideas and statistics like the sturgeon has been around for 150 million years and in just the past 100 years 99% of them have been wiped out by humans. They also make the human connection between one female fish that had been tagged and the biologist that has been following her for over a decade. All of these human, animal, Great Lakes connections started to create a compelling story of why the Great Lakes need to be protected.

Then the movie went into a series of disconnected tangents including alternative energy and hydroelectric dams, Native American spiritual beliefs, the shipping industry, the locks at the St. Lawrence Seaway, shipwrecks, a caribou sanctuary and bald eagles. While there was some attempt to unite these topics by saying why each of them was mysterious, powerful or unique in some way, it felt very disjointed. I do not know what the funding structure was for the movie but the sponsor page included a shipping group, power company, business development organizations, and the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation and it appears the random topics actually had more to do with the sponsors of the film. Maybe they were just trying to cram too much into one movie but I couldn't help wondering if some of the topics in the movies were more like product placements. This was especially true with a close up of the back tail of a shipping vessel with the logo of one of the sponsors, then discussing how shipping saves carbon emissions compared to trucking the same amount of freight on trucks. Not that I doubt this is true but these segments felt out of place and distracted from the overall message, of the movie, that the Great Lakes are unique and worth protecting.

The big failure of this movie was that at no point do they discuss what people can do to help. Here was this room full of people, awed and amazed at the scenery who paid an extra eight bucks on top of museum admission to see this movie and all they left with was an interesting story. There were some amazing, poignant moments in the movie. In one segment, they followed two sets of bald eagle pairs with baby chicks. One nest is doing well and in the other the chicks are sick and one dies because the parents are feeding them sea lamprey full of mercury and heavy metals. The narrator states that the mother does not know that she is accidentally poisoning her baby, and then the scene ends. In another segment in the final moment of the sturgeon story, the narrator states, "If we can save this fish that has survived for 150 million years, maybe we can save the Great Lakes." After both of these moments I wanted to yell "Tell us how to save the baby eagles!" or "How can we save the Great Lakes?"

The movie was beautiful, charming, had some very interesting stories and completely missed a golden opportunity. Something I learned from day one working at Biodiversity Project on environmental messages is that you never teach about a threat without offering a solution. It could have been so easy. On the movie's webpage there is a link GoBlue.org, a website focused on water conservation and actions people can take at home. Even just flashing the website at the end of the film would have been something. Instead as we were leaving I heard only one comment "That was interesting." Interesting will not compete with the Harry Potter exhibit. Interesting will not leave an impression. Interesting is not enough to protect the Great Lakes.