Movie Review
Space Station Orbits Into The IMAX
By Jan Aaron

Space Station 3D, the latest 3D movie at the giant-screen Imax theaters nationwide, offers 47 minutes of mainly awesome images. The film is presented by Lockheed Martin Corporation in cooperation with NASA and directed by Toni Myers. Narrated by Tom Cruise, it focuses on space exploration as an international exercise in cooperation requiring the participation of astronauts from America, Russia, Japan and around the world with a common objective: the construction of the International Space station scheduled for completion in 2006.

The message of all-inclusive cooperation also is relevant to the classroom. In one scene, an astronaut says: “There are no nationalities in space.” A good lesson for students, too.

Most awe-inspiring, however, is the way the Imax 3-D process takes the viewer right along into the astronaut’s life. Astronauts themselves, trained to get professional results, filmed these scenes inside the space station. They show astronauts floating weightlessly, sleeping in pod-like bags tethered to the ship, slurping liquids out of midair, and making notes on floating clipboards. They wear shorts and t-shirts with bare feet. Much of the movie was filmed with a camera attached to the cargo bays of the US Space Shuttle which gives a grand view of the earth below and the galaxy, too. There are also resident extraterrestrials — children’s toys as cheerful reminders of home, hanging out with the rest of the team.

Not all of Space Station 3D was filmed in space. Some sequences take viewers to a virtual reality lab where the astronauts train, into a classroom where kids talk via ham radio with the astronauts in space, and to a spaceport in the desert of Kazakhstan, where amazingly the blast off seems to break the 3D glasses.

According to a CNN poll, 86 percent of the respondents said they’d buy a ticket for a space flight if money were no object. The closest most of us will get at a reasonable price is Space Station 3D at the Imax.# (Not rated; Loews Cineplex, Lincoln Square & Imax Theater, 66th & Broadway; (212) 50-LOEWS)

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