FINAL CUT: Giant Steps Are What You Take

There are a great many ways to spend your time and money on the Las Vegas Strip. You can take a seat at one of the many sitcom-themed video slot machines and slowly lose your money a dollar at a time. You can slip ten dollar bills into the g-string of the comely young woman writhing about your nether regions. You can while away the day in a store devoted entirely to the glories of Coca-Cola. Clair opted to spend the afternoon getting a Swedish massage. And me? What would I do with a day in Las Vegas? Go to the Luxor and take in a 3-D film on the IMAX screen about space. Welcome to my brain.

The idea was planted in my head as we rode the moving walkway -- the incredibly long moving walkway -- from Excalibur to Luxor, and I spotted a poster advertising a movie I was quite eager to see: Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D. The bozos at Navy Pier only kept it around for a couple weeks, so my opportunity seemed to have come and gone But here was a chance for Vegas to earn its keep. With my wife ensconced in the lap of luxury, I was off to the movies.

This movie is the latest expression of Tom Hanks' affection for the glory days of the space program. As executive producer, as well as the film's narrator, Hanks is following in the footsteps of Apollo 13 and From the Earth to the Moon in creating movie monuments to the first steps of lunar exploration. I can't accurately gauge how many people share his enthusiasm. I mean, I do. I suspect I'd be doing the exact same thing he is if I had the resources. But it wouldn't surprise me if people rolled their eyes and said, "Again? Jeez, Tom. Move on." We're not exactly covering new ground here. It's ground I'm more than pleased to go over again, but not necessarily new. It's you and me, Tom.

But the idea behind Magnificent Desolation is a good one: if we take the big IMAX screen and current 3D technology, and put them together with state-of-the-art special effects, we could show people what it might actually be like to stand on the moon. Filmmakers are still trying to get a handle on what works best on the really huge screen -- I've seen an awful lot of sharks and rainforests. So this seems like a positive development, moving actual production into the domain of the documentary.

A quick word about the Luxor IMAX. My previous encounters with IMAX technology have either involved huge screens in traditional theater settings or enormous domed OMNIMAX screens. But the Vegas version was something altogether new: seating was on levels stacked almost directly on top of one another, like decks on a ship. You walked up a ramp to get to the proper level, and you were essentially looking straight down on the next row, while the row above looked down on you. It was a wall of seats. It had a bit of the feel of a ride, too, especially when the handrails lowered to become a kind of safety bar. I see the benefits as a viewer, in that everyone has an unimpeded view of the screen, and is roughly the same distance away. And I suppose it saves space, not needing a big auditorium. (Costs you a lot of revenue, too.) But it's also a little unsettling. You may feel trapped with people on either side of you at the movies, but it's nothing compared to having a metal bar keeping you in your seat.

So it's in this atmosphere that we get our first look at the moon. It's actually a combination of real photos that have been digitally adapted to fill the screen and new footage shot on a soundstage. The effect is striking. The moon seems both more vast and smaller when viewed in this manner. It's appropriately otherworldly, making the moon seem newly alien to an audience that has grown bored.

I will admit that the use of 3-D doesn't add all that much. The thing about 3-D is, even at its best, it doesn't really look like real life. There's unusual depth, but no shape. Essentially, you're looking at a great big ViewMaster. In fact, the film's most dramatic image -- astronauts standing at the edge of the vast Hadley Rille -- is conveyed entirely through the huge screen, with the third dimension providing none of the vastness or height of the location. It's interesting, but ultimately unnecessary.

In a way, that's all Hanks and director Mark Cowen have to sell. Beyond a series of inspirational quotes, read by well-known actors in a weird Civil Warish touch, it's all about the stunning imagery. And evidently, they can't make it fill 40 minutes, because they end up doing something incredibly damaging to their film: they start making stuff up.

Everything went by the book on the moon, Hanks tells us. There were no life-threatening disasters, no last-minute contingencies. But what if there were... he ponders. Oh, yes, we now get to see a fictional mission, wherein a mishap with the rover forces two injured astronauts to make a long trek back to their lander. Since we don't know these people, and since they don't really have anything to do with the real-life astronauts whose exploits we have been re-living, there's not much suspense concerning their fate. If anything, it's a nifty piece of filmmaking, and demonstrates the potential of putting Hollywood in the IMAX format, as well as the opportunity for a dramatic film set in space that observes the laws of physics. But it's seriously out of place in the context of things that actually happened.

Worse is the framing device of a young girl named Veronica Lugo, who tells us that she will grow up to live and work in space, and has a crudely-drawn picture to illustrate the point. I'm not dissing the child or the picture. But when her drawing comes to life and the crayon images start flying through space, I begin to question the authenticity of the artwork. And when we see a potential future for the girl, in which she oversees mining operations on the far side of the moon, I'm no longer sure there really is a Veronica Lugo. It's manipulative, and there's no need for that.

In fact, it's when I saw this grown-up Veronica Lugo in action that I realized what I was really looking at: propaganda. It's an advertisement for space travel. Which is interesting, because I'm a big fan of space travel, and if this were a product readily available to me, I would definitely buy it. But this back-door sales pitch, trying to sneak it in under the guise of history, is insulting. Magnificent Desolation is a remarkable piece of filmmaking. It actually succeeds in the impossible task of making a walk on the moon tangible to an audience. You get to be there. That should be sales pitch enough. But the burden of fiction, the weight of scenes included to try and make the film "more exciting", eventually becomes too much for this little film to carry. The moon should have been able to handle everything all by itself. But all that Hollywood finally got in the way.

I have one more gripe, and maybe it's petty, but it's huge to me. The film ends, as so many of these do, with a roll call of the astronauts privileged enough to voyage to the moon. Among them is Apollo 13 command module pilot Jack Swigert. Which the caption spells as "Swigart". Right there, probably a foot tall on the damn IMAX screen, is his name misspelled. I was stunned. Tens of millions of dollars went into re-creating the lunar experience, and we couldn't spend one cent on a proofreader? I'd have done it. I'm in the book. More to the point, didn't Tom Hanks get to see the movie? How could this happen? And considering how much of the film is dramatized and re-created, how the heck can we trust it? One of the few things we rely upon as fact, the filmmakers get wrong. These things matter. If you intend to portray yourself as a historical record, you'd better get it right. And if this seems petty, remember that it was a math error that blurred the Hubble. It was a tiny miscalculation that lost the Mars Observer probe. An open valve killed the crew of Salyut 1.

In space, details matter.