MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Niagara’ Makes a Big Splash at IMAX

“Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic” (IMAX Theater), may be a movie title you can’t say very fast, but the film splashes by at a ferocious clip.

In the 41 packed minutes of this newest of the IMAX movies, we swoop over the falls at the Canadian-U.S. border, watch the turbulent waters race along at a rate of 1.4 million gallons a second, soar right over the 400-foot main drop, and plunge to the tempestuous eddies and waves of the Whirlpool Rapids below.

Called “Thundering Waters” by the Heno-Hinum Indian tribes that lived there, Niagara is definitely one of the world’s most spectacular views: never more spectacular than when caught on the five-story-high IMAX screen. Not the world’s largest waterfall--Venezuela’s Angel Falls eclipses it--it’s certainly the most storied. And that’s what most concerns filmmakers Kieth Merril (filmmaker-writer) and Ben Burtt (writer-editor-sound designer).

The movie is heavy on cliffhangers: from the “strange and beautiful” Indian “maiden of the mist,” Lelawalla, mingling her spirit with the thundering waters, to the hair’s-breadth 1960 rescue of a family swept to the brink, and over it, after their boat overturns.

Teacher Annie Taylor and her black cat go over the Falls in a barrel; French aerialist Blondin (played by modern French aerialist Philippe Petit) crosses it on a high wire; excursion boats are thrashed from stem to stern in the rapids. Heading toward the edge is almost a motif, like one long replay of the climax of D.W. Griffith’s “Way Down East” with waiflike Lillian Gish swept on ice floes.

Except, that none of these actors can touch Gish--not even at barrel-riding. That’s the problem with “Niagara”: too many myths and miracle, not enough magic. Like most IMAX documentaries, its value comes from sheer spectacle. The weak sections are the dramatic ones, where every stiff gesture and line reading comes across larger and more obnoxious than life.

Merrill and producer Rick James made the excellent “Grand Canyon: Its Hidden Secrets,” and perhaps they didn’t realize that it was the Grand Canyon that drew audiences--not the “hidden secrets” re-created in a series of stagy tableaux.

Yet it could be a splendid narrative medium, maybe the ideal format for directors like Steven Spielberg. The flaws of the otherwise admirable “Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic” (Times-rated; Family) hint at that wasted potential. When the thundering waters speak, this film has majesty. When the humans open their mouths, it goes poof. ‘Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic’

A Destination Cinema Inc. presentation of a Seventh Man Films Inc. production. Creator-Filmmaker Kieth Merrill. Producers Nicholas J. Gray, Richard W. James. Screenplay by Merrill, Ben Burtt. Cinematographer David Douglas. Editor/Sound Designer Burtt. Music Bill Conti. Production design Tony Hall. Running time: 41 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.