A documentary by David Lickley. Rated G. Now playing at the Omnimax Theatre

By now it’s a given that most IMAX films leave you wanting more, and not always in a good way. But Gold Fever pulls off the trick of having exactly the right amount of material for the task at hand.

The megascreen movie, new to our region, was actually made about 11 years ago in a celebratory nod to the Klondike gold rush of a century before. Wonderful old tintypes, here seen with mile-high details of the Yukon craze, convey what followed the pioneering efforts of obsessive George Cormack and his companions. And these scenes are interspersed with modern methods for hunting down the yellow stuff, especially as practiced by Al Doherty, a seasoned geologist who survived a grizzly mauling to maintain the search in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

Written well by Stephen Low, director of the recent Ultimate Wave Tahiti, and produced and directed by David Lickley, who also made the popular Bears (only Stephen Colbert disliked it), the film also contemplates the social, technological, and monetary roles of gold around the world, with quick stops in India, Thailand, and Mexico, where dazzling metal leaves are wrapped around churches and temples.

There’s a longer visit to Ghana, during a gold-splattered fete to an elderly and palsied Ashanti king, Otumfuo Opoku Ware II (who subsequently died). And we also see inside the Royal Canadian Mint and travel to northern mines where gargantuan trucks haul tons of dirt containing specks of valuable yellow dust extracted from far below.

The attraction of gold is obvious, but the 40-minute Fever made me consider—although the narration never hints at such a thing—what could happen if human beings channelled the cost of this preposterous toil into nurturing life on the surface of the planet.