Quote:
Originally Posted by Catenary
Saw it Friday night in Imax at Blair. It was a great movie, but I'm not sure what exactly makes a movie "Imax." The screen was bigger, but so was the theatre, so it felt about the same size. The sound just seemed louder, and I guess the screen was curved a bit. It just didn't feel that different than any other screen at Scotiabank Theatre, which are fairly large to start with. I suppose if I compared it to South Keys, then I might have something else to say.
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^That's not a true IMAX screen so you're right actually. There are a lot of fake IMAX screens branded with their name (people call them LIE-MAX) that are just retrofitted theatres where they extended the screen edge to edge and moved the seats closer and called it IMAX. A typical
LIE-MAX screen is 16 meters high (probably what the Gloucester one is), with a widescreen 1.78:1 ratio. A
real IMAX is super tall and wider, up to 30 meters tall with a fullscreen 1.44:1 ratio generally. You'll know the difference the second you walk into the theatre. Besides the towering screen, you'll see the rows tend to be extra long, and maybe only ten rows or so of seats. You'll always want to sit in the back row in a real IMAX cause the screen feels so close and so giant.
A real IMAX screen will make you feel like you're floating with the camera as it moves, and you might actually clutch your seat because the giant screen enveloping your field of vision gives the illusion that you're not tethered to the ground at certain moments. It feels almost like a ride, without the need for 3D (although that makes the effect even more pronounced) or any moving seats, etc. Just a giant screen.
75% of Dunkirk was designed for the true IMAX ratio (1.44:1), so you're actually still missing a significant chunk of the visuals on the top and the bottom that are cut off in LIE-MAX (1.78:1) and even more so in standard theatres which are showing it in super wide 2.35:1 ratio I believe.
It was also shot on IMAX resolution 70mm film cameras which are 9x higher resolution than your standard 2K resolution theatre (and the LIE-MAXes only show it in 2K, not in the full resolution).
Unfortunately, the only real IMAX that exists in Ottawa is at the Canadian Museum of History which no longer shows IMAX features (they did do it for The Dark Knight but I called them up for Dark Knight Rises and they said they no longer were showing feature/fiction films). It's a shame because Dunkirk would fit in well at a history museum.
Toronto has the incredible IMAX at Scotiabank Theatre (Toronto Scotiabank, not ours). I saw U2:3D there many years ago and it felt like I was floating on a sea of the concertgoers as the camera swooped into the stage. I actually said coming out of it that it felt more thrilling than being at a concert live, and I wasn't particularly a U2 fan or anything.
I specifically refrained from watching Dunkirk in Ottawa because of the lack of options of seeing it properly. I'm going to Montreal this coming weekend and am crossing my fingers that the Banque 12 Scotia there will still be playing it (I believe that is a real IMAX screen there from the little info I can find online so I'm taking the gamble of seeing it there instead).