Wild Safari 3D
Now playing at the CN IMAX Theatre.
Check out anyone's Ten Things To Do Before I Die list and chances are there's an African safari on there somewhere. But thanks to the astronomical price tag of such a dream vacation, the closest most will ever get to the Dark Continent's animal kingdom is at one of the jungle-themed Rainforest Cafes. Enter Wild Safari 3D, a film with the brilliantly simple idea of putting you on an unscripted 4,800-kilometre expedition of South Africa's greatest nature reserves.
Wild Safari is yet another example of a straightforward IMAX documentary trumping the ones with superfluous narratives or special effects. Here, director Ben Stassen and his crew know that the gigantic screen's strength, especially in 3-D, is its you-are-there quality-in this case, the "there" being the back seat of an open all-terrain vehicle. In front of you sits the driver, unpretentious guide/zoologist Liesl Eichenberger, with her shotgun handily strapped to her dashboard. Together, you manoeuvre dusty saharas and tangly brush in search of Africa's so-called Big Five animals: elephant, Cape buffalo, rhino, leopard, and lion.
The appeal here, versus regular wildlife films, is that the camera crew isn't lying in wait for some predator to conduct a showstopping, blood-spewing massacre. Instead, the viewer gets the real feeling of stumbling upon an animal going about its daily life, whether it's a white rhino taking long, pensive pauses between slurps at a watering hole or a stunning leopard lolling lazily in a tree. Surprisingly timid rhinos back away from the vehicle, while a mother elephant sticks her nose out to smell you. In place of voice-of-God narration explaining each species' mating habits and dietary needs, we get Eichenberger's utterly unaffected, and far more interesting, off-the-cuff observations. Of a baby elephant playfully flailing its trunk, she says it's "just trying to figure out what the thing is in front of its face". Adding to the realism is the fact the film takes pains to show how long it takes guides to track down animals.
About the only complaint is that Wild Safari suffers from too-obvious South African tourism boosterism. It's not the most spectacular IMAX film, but this is one of the most satisfying. And although the act of viewing this may not make it onto anyone's to-do-before-croaking lists, it still beats eating chicken wings amid animatronic monkeys and fake thunderstorms.
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