•	Features
•	Lead In
•	Opus
•	Gray Matters
•	Top Shelf

< May-June 2008
	Lead In
Beautifully Disappointing IMAX’s new Grand Canyon film comes off scripted Christian Knight

For the thousands of river-runners who never seem to land the Grand Canyon invite, MacGillivray-Freeman is offering an $11-consolation prize of sorts: Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk.

Like all IMAX films, Grand Canyon: River at Risk—which debuted in March—relies on the incredible imagery of its setting and the ability of those $1 million cameras to capture it. It does this well, but its cinematography overwhelms the film's contrived storyline.

To translate the urgency of this planet’s water shortage into IMAX theaters, writers Jack Stephens and Stephen Judson tell the story of a father’s graduation present to his daughter. That gift—a rafting trip through our nation’s most celebrated waterway—certainly makes sense, especially when it comes from a guy like Wade Davis, a celebrated anthropologist and explorer. But the way producer Greg MacGillivray tells it, the experience leaves you wondering: “Is this really a documentary?” (A phone call to the production studio confirmed that it is.)

With the exception of the occasional interview, the characters in the film—Davis, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Shauna Watahomigie, and their daughters—don’t directly interact with the cameras. They simply live. They carry buckets of water from the Colorado shore into some rocks (where are they going and why aren't the guides carrying the water pails?), point at a rattlesnake where one doesn’t exist. (Until that is, the camera finds a rattler in a conspicuously different spot.) Apparently the viewer is supposed to believe those 350-pound cameras just happened to be running when Cree Watahomigie decided to splash across a sunlit backdrop of Havasupai Falls and into her mother's awaiting arms. Those cameras cost $2,000 per minute to run.

“You go in with a blueprint, an idea of many of the shots you want to get,” says Lori Rick, a spokesperson for MacGillivray-Freeman. “But you then let it evolve and react and adapt accordingly. You want to film things as they happen.”

As they happen?

Like when RFK, Jr. discovers the single identifiable rock pictured in a century-old photograph? Or my favorite, as a guy welds his oar frame—sparks flying into the screen—and the film's narrator, Robert Redford, says “we have tools they didn’t,” referring to John Wesley Powell's first expedition 139 years earlier. It just seems a little too convenient. I mean who takes power tools down the Grand Canyon?

Perhaps I’m sounding like one of those self-appointed movie detectives who points out all the flaws in an action-adventure film (“Nobody could take that many punches!”). But this is not Rocky IV. It’s supposed to be a documentary about a topic that many people still doubt or ignore, claiming the propaganda is all made up.

If I were basing my opinion of global warming and water consumption purely on this movie, I’d probably agree.

The film does offer at least one valuable truth: that doing the little things, by changing our showerheads and hose nozzles, by involving ourselves in local governments, we can conserve thousands of gallons of water every year. And judging by the river, whose existence depends on our involvement, those changes seem pretty darn necessary.