Live Long and Prosper

I last wrote about IMAX  films over ten years ago. In that article, which was prompted by the IMAX film Everest, which the filmmakers made by lugging a camera to – you got it – the top of Everest, I wrote: ‘Seduced by the medium’s breath-taking scale, IMAX film-makers often sacrifice content in their scramble for dramatic effect.’ That was then, though, and this is now, the moment when what constitutes ‘breath-taking’ has taken a light-year leap forward and content has been … well, thought about a little harder. It’s the year when J.J. Abrams’s movie Star Trek – the ‘greatest space adventure of all time’ – exploded onto screens and into my consciousness and thus scrambled any affection I may have momentarily had (actually, most of my life) for slow burning ideas, modest thinking, subtlety and complexity. I saw Star Trek last night on the biggest screen in the UK – the BFI IMAX screen, which is higher than five double decker buses, wider than the width of an olympic swimming pool and accompanied by a 11,600-watt digital surround-sound system – along with some of my colleagues from frieze. We sat in the front row, a decision that was akin to paddling in the shallows of Niagara Falls. In 1895, when the Lumière Brothers showed a film of a train, members of the audience apparently fled in fear. I now know how they felt. I don’t think I have ever been so overwhelmed – nay, immersed – in such images in my entire life: they defy logic, sneer at linearity, explode and reassemble, saturate your eyes and mind with psychedelic wonder and then baste it all in wild shards of terror and layers of ludicrous schmaltz (and that’s just the first ten minutes). I wonder if this was what it was like in the 19th century when city people first experienced the wild west via the diorama? Or saw Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of ice or John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings of God’s wrath? Who knows? There is a sequence of astonishing beauty in Star Trek, when ‘The Red Matter’ (it’s red, it’s matter, that’s all you need to know) filled the screen and floated and bubbled its way across this enormous surface and it was like being gladly trapped in the beautiful illogic of someone’s else’s dream. I was never a particular fan of Star Trek – but then I’ve never really thought about it, although I’ve always vaguely enjoyed the kitsch/utopian/surreal episodes from the 1960s – but watching it last night, or, to use the preferred IMAX term, ‘experiencing’ it, I felt quite dazed by the sheer, extraordinary possibilities of image technology I was witnessing, despite the fact that most of the time I had no idea what was happening, or why. I did know one thing, though: I was happy. In fact happy is too small a word but I can’t think of a better one right now, because Star Trek has made me feel kind of diminished but in a weirdly good way because if life aboard the Starship Enterprise is about anything, it’s about possibility. I’d prefer not to elaborate on this right now, as I need to mull on it and I’m still sort of dazed, but I just want to suggest that if you haven’t seen Star Trek, you might want to. Just make sure it’s on a big screen. If you don’t, you’re out of your vulcan mind.