The Indiana State Museum’s newest IMAX documentary, Titans of the Ice Age 3D, comes in conjunction with its latest exhibit. Ice Age Giants: The Mystery of Mammoths and Mastodons runs from Nov. 15 into August 2014 and features the bones and skeletons of mastodons and mammoths discovered in Indiana.
Directed by David Clark and narrated by actor Christopher Plummer (The Insider, The Sound of Music), Titans of the Ice Age is essentially the real-life version of those animated films people only remember for that scrappy squirrel hopelessly chasing after a nut.
There aren’t any squirrels to be found here. However, there are saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, and wooly mammoths, recreated by hit-or-miss CGI in their original habitats of beautifully depicted Utah and South Dakota, as they would have looked during the final days of the last of five Ice Ages our world has experienced.
The documentary is primarily poised to show how these “titans” of the day—including the mighty ground sloth—died off and were preserved for thousands of years by tar pits and hot springs. But don’t think this film focuses solely on extinct animals: It finds time over its 35 minutes to touch on the Earth’s history of climate change, going into the effects of greenhouse gases on today’s .
While the content in Titans of the Ice Age is more than worthy of a documentary, it’s the sort of stuff that can likely be viewed on the Discovery Channel or History 2—that channel without pickers, pawners, and alien conspiracies. The IMAX film technology is best utilized in documenting tangible subjects and environments rich with detail to be explored. While there are plenty of real environments to be seen here, especially with snow-covered mountain ranges serving as backdrops, the desired effect is lost among these computer-generated “titans.”
Nov. 15, 2013, through Dec. 31. Showtimes daily at 11:15 a.m. and 1:35, 3:55, and 5:10 p.m. (Subject to change; call for updates.) 650 W. Washington St., 317-233-4629, imax.com
