Re: Sea monsters 3D

[Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com>]

Amanda Northrop writes:
 > I saw a preview for Sea Monsters before seeing a dino IMAX movie...it
 > looked really good...like a lot of fun!  I'd go see it in a heartbeat.

As it happens, I am in Washington DC at the moment for my day-job, and
I had a free day on Monday because Columbus day meant that the Library
of Congress was closed.  Needless to say, I spent the day at the
Smithsonian, and I watched the _Sea Monsters_ IMAX once I'd seen as
much of the ?Brachiosaurus humerus as I could usefully see.

I liked it.  A lot.  (The film, not the humerus.  Well, the humerus
was OK too, but the whole shaft was reconstructed.)  Admittedly I am a
sucker for this kind of thing -- I loved WWD and even JP -- but the 3d
was used well and the marine creatures were pretty convincing to my
untutored eye.  I particularly loved the mosasaur hurtling out of the
water towards the camera -- a shot so good they couldn't resist using
it twice, but that's OK because I'd have rewound and watched that bit
again if I could.  Also the Star Wars homage, in which the Star
Destroyer-like ?Styxosaurus cruises slowly and inexorably overhead.

Needless to say, there are nits galore to pick, but I don't like to
let that spoil my fun.  Oh and there was one moment when the 3d was so
convincing at the gut level that I lunged to my side to avoid being
impaled -- just couldn't stop myself :-)

 _/|_    ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <mike@indexdata.com>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  If two decades of commercial programming have taught me anything,
         it's NEVER to trust dual CPUs, "uninterruptible" power supplies
         or RAID disks.