Quick summary: IMAX is worth seeing. The Day The Earth Stood Still, on the other hand, is not, especially if you enjoyed the 1951 classic.

Some will snark that Keanu Reeves ruined this film. I say that he did not. His behaviour was alien because it was supposed to be alien. Klaatu did not come here to be our friend; he came to give warning.

Unfortunately, my sense of this newer interpretation is that it ended very abruptly. It was almost as though the screen writers suddenly decided that they had done enough work on the project and slapped an ending on it. It was equally lame to an ending where the lead wakes up to find the whole thing had been a dream.

That said, we did see it on the Capital District’s first IMAX screen, in theatre 1 at Regal cinemas in Crossgates mall. The technology in no way disappointed. Sitting as we were in the third row, the view is large enough that you turn your head to see different portions of any given scene. The screen installed — no exaggeration — is 100 square feet larger than the floor plan of our house, and displays a beautiful, 8.8 megapixel picture backed by one of the best sound systems possible. It is indeed very impressive.

Alas, it could not save this story.

Update: Apparently, the picture is actually 4.4 megapixels. For some reason, I thought digital IMAX was using 4k projectors (4096x2160), but they are actually using two 2k projectors (2048x1080), carefully aligned to have overlapping pixels. The picture is still quite nice.