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The first fiction film made in IMAX 3-D,
Wings of Courage is based on a true story about the first air-mail service in South America to fly across the Andes. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (who has made a career of taking his camera into uncharted territory), it stars Craig Sheffer, Tom Hulce, and (in a cameo) Val Kilmer. But it's really Sheffer's movie: He plays Henri Guillaumet, who tries to cross the Andes in a biplane in 1930. When bad weather forces him down, he must walk out--and what a walk it is. Sheffer did many of his own stunts on the sheer rock faces he must traverse. Not for the acrophobic; mercifully, Annaud didn't use the 3-D to create thrill-ride effects, but the scenes in high places are effective nonetheless.
--Marshall Fine
Shriek as a light airplane flies out of the screen and clips you on the nose! Thrill to giant landscapes that unroll before your eyes! Sleep as the plot gets really boring! The first feature film to be made in Imax 3-D has to be watched through a special headset (satisfyingly chunky) and lasts forty minutes (gratifyingly short). Craig Sheffer plays a pilot in 1930 hired to fly mail across the Andes; he tries, fails, tries again, crashes, then walks the rest of the way, while his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) sits at home feeling worried. The flying scenes are big and bombastic, and the sound quality makes you feel as though a small chamber orchestra were sitting on top of your head. But instead of rethinking the shape of the drama to suit the format, the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, has taken a small, simplistic plot, filled a couple of lonely roles with flat performers, and marooned them in the midst of a spectacle that is not so much a movie as a demonstration. With Val Kilmer and Tom Hulce. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
