The Great Lakes on the great big screen

[Spiel]

The Great Lakes on the great big screen

 

 

March 14th, 2009

John Law / Niagara Falls Review

 

 

Growing up near the Great Lakes, director David Lickley thought he knew plenty about the massive freshwater system.

 

Then he started filming his IMAX movie Mysteries of the Great Lakes, and discovered he’s a novice like everyone else.

 

“I realized I really didn’t know very much at all,” says the filmmaker, whose big screen nature flick opened Friday at the Niagara IMAX Theatre.

 

“Some of the issues, the events, the critters … most of it I learned on the way through this film. And I’m a biologist, so I kind of prided myself on being fairly knowledgeable.

 

“But I think most people - even if they live on the Great Lakes -will find about 90 per cent of the things in the film will be new to them.”

 

Six years in the making (four of them just securing financing), the 45-minute, $6-million production offers one spectacular visual after another, including a majestic shot of the Horseshoe Falls in the opening moments. Lickley calls it the “icon” of the Great Lakes, and an appropriate place to start the story.

 

From there, the film examines how the falls went dry for 3,000 years, how nature has adapted to the 16,000 kilometres of Great Lakes coastline, and how one man -biologist Ron Bruch -is trying to reintegrate the world’s oldest and largest freshwater fish into the system.

 

The narrative connecting the film follows Bruch and his love of the sturgeon, which once thrived in the lakes but was decimated in recent decades by overfishing and polluted waters.

 

Dating back 130 million years, the prehistoric giants can grow to 200 pounds and live for more than a century. But as the film’s narrator Gordon Pinsent explains, “to the newly arrived Europeans, the sturgeon was nothing but an ugly nuisance.

 

“A fish that once dominated the Great Lakes declined by 99 per cent.”

 

Lickley also got fascinating footage of bald eagles raising their young. It required hiding a huge IMAX camera in a tree, 24 metres off the ground.

 

“That’s never been done before in our format,” he says. “They’re difficult birds to get access to, and they spook very easily.”

 

The film has been leased to 11 IMAX theatres across North America, and has been playing at Toronto’s Ontario Science Centre since May.

 

Niagara IMAX Theatre spokesman Murray Mold says a recent screening for educators resulted in several schools booking matinee performances.

 

It will screen at noon and 6 p. m. daily through the summer, alongside the theatre’s flagship movie, Niagara: Miracles, Myths & Magic, which has been shown continuously for 23 years.

 

“We feel the two movies really complement each other,” says Mold.

 

Tickets cost $12.50 adults, $9.50 children.