Don't bother with IMAX versions -- even the real IMAX

Rating: 5/10 (18 May 2009)

All in all it was a decent Star Trek story, and acted reasonably well, but from standpoint of special effects and technical matters generally, it just doesn't measure up to the standard established by many other movies in recent decades. The quality of the directing and editing also leaves much to be desired, particularly the fights scenes, where it is apparent that instead of having the stunt professionals take over and/or teach the actors how to pretend fight, they just had them go through some slow motion choreography and then tried to simulate fighting by chopping up the sequences very badly. This is one of my particular pet peeves with certain movies and certain directors. If there is going to be a fight in a movie, it should look like a fight, and the technique of chopping up the film to the point that you can't really see anything at all just does not achieve any realistic effect.
I made the unfortunate decision to see this movie at a regular, full-size IMAX theater, and this was a disaster. It has been widely reported that many of the screens at regular theaters are nowadays being promoted as IMAX, but using screens that are not particularly large, and using digital projectors, actually DLP projectors, instead of the big projectors that real IMAX theaters use, which run 70mm film through, oriented sideways. If there is any point at all to these digital IMAX theaters, it is so that real IMAX movies can be shown in regular theaters. But when you start off with a film that was shot in 35mm Panavision anamorphic format using an aspect ratio of 2.35 : 1, it is difficult to find any point in presenting this on any sort of IMAX screen at all. Even if they stick with the same original 2.35:1 Panavision version shown in regular theaters, the only discernible advantage of converting the film to digital media and using a DLP projector, is that of reduced cost. But for the real IMAX theaters, the problems are more significant, starting with the need to transfer the movie from the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio to the IMAX aspect ratio, which, at 1.43:1, is only slighter wider than old-fashioned non-HD television (1.33:1). The problem is entirely the same as the familiar, long-standing problem of how you show Ben Hur on a regular old-fashioned TV set. They obviously would not get away with having black bars on the top and bottom of the screen (it would have been 40% of the total IMAX screen area), so they had to pan-and-scan. That's right, folks, the IMAX version that you paid an extra $5 to see on the giant IMAX screen is a pan-and-scan version. The 35mm negative film doesn't have nearly the resolution needed for this large a screen, so what you see is a large pan-and-scan version that is so blurry as to be distracting. On many of the close-up scenes where two of the actors were interacting, they were unable to get them both into the frame, and it was apparent that they were panning and scanning back and forth between the two actors, whereas the original undoubtedly had a stable camera view with both actors. This was very noticeable in several places, particularly toward the end when the two Spocks were conversing. When they panned to Leonard Nimoy they also zoomed in on his face, which makes sense given that you have decided to pan to him, but in addition to the loss of detail that happens when you try to blow a picture up too large, something else had to have been done incorrectly, because the image was blurry beyond what you would believe if you did not see it for yourself. I noticed this several times throughout the movie, and my guess is that whatever sort of camera they used to photograph the original movie (the process that they refer to as "converting to IMAX format") was not properly focused on the film whenever they panned away from the center of the frame.
Bottom line, the IMAX (real IMAX) pan-and-scan version of this movie is a technical abomination, and I encourage you not to encourage the jackasses who made the decision to do this, whoever they are, by rewarding those jerks with your money. Any movie that is shown on a regular IMAX screen ought to be filmed originally in an aspect ratio very close to the IMAX aspect ratio. Ideally, it should also be shot using regular 70mm cameras in the very least, but the issue of resolution is secondary to that of the aspect ratio. The Batman movie that was shown in the large IMAX theaters was shot specifically for the IMAX theaters using either IMAX cameras or some other camera suitable for IMAX screens, which is why on the DVD, it still has the IMAX aspect ratio. You can shoot a movie in a widescreen format, or you can shoot a movie in IMAX aspect ratio, but no way, no how can you shoot a movie in the widescreen format in which this movie was shot and then try to show it on an IMAX screen.