This large format IMAX short portrays a couple of real life adventurers, cavers who travel around the world exploring virgin caves looking for "extremophiles," bacteria that thrive in extreme conditions of heat and cold, or in environments that would poison, starve, or suffocate more typical bacteria. There's nearly as much adventure getting to the caves as in them, as our intrepid pair visit arctic outposts, climb canyon walls, paddle down raging rivers, and dive into jungle sinkholes.
But hang onto your hats, guys. While the action in this movie is as macho and extreme as you can imagine, the adventurers at the heart of this film are female, including microbiologist/caver Dr. Hazel Barton, and Nancy Aulenbach, a 98-pound school teacher whose small size makes her especially proficient at cave rescue, and whose accomplishments as a caver have resulted in her being inducted into the Explorer's Club.
On the adventure side, this film can't be beat, with spectacular outdoor photography. The action starts with search for unexplored caves in the cliffs of southwest canyons. The sequence includes spectacular aerial photography (almost an IMAX requirement), amazing scenery, spectacular rock climbing, and some amazing white-water kayaking.
The scene soon shifts to the artic, where the pair fly by helicopter to an isolated camp on the Greenland ice-cap. Their mission, to seek bacteria from ice hundreds of feet down inside ice caves. These caves are as dangerous as they are beautiful. The glacial ice is in constant motion, and often explosively unstable. The team has to wait for a four day cold snap to stabilize the ice enough for a record descent.
Next, the pair travel to the Yucatan peninsula to explore jungle caves. Their mission to find an uncontaminated layer where fresh-water mingles with ocean salt, a specialized environment where only extremophile bacteria can survive. Such layers can only be found in the deepest regions of unexplored, underwater caves.
If you aren't familiar with cave-diving, it combines the most exciting, and dangerous, aspects of caving and scuba-diving. Divers wear special rigs with "side-saddle" air tanks to allow them to squeeze through narrow spaces. If the openings are too tight even for this, the divers remove their tanks, push them through first, then squirm through after. Because it's easy to become disoriented and visibility can quickly be reduced to zero by silt and mud, the diver's life depends on a "dive line." The dive line is a spool of cord fed out behind the divers. Plastic arrows are periodically attached to the line to point lost divers toward the exit. The cave diving sequences are the best of a good bunch in this film, combining the pure thrill of exploring the unknown with a constant feel of palm-sweating danger.
THE ADVENTURE BOTTOM LINE
Fantastic Caves keeps the adventure needle well into redline for most of its running time. Many of us will never visit a cave, much less squirm into unexplored darkness in search of something no human has ever seen. The film crams a wide variety of extreme experiences into its short running time, does so logically, and takes us along for a ride. Moreover, given the fragile and dangerous nature of these places, it's prehaps better that most of us visit only from the safety (for us the caves) of a threater seat.
Highly recommended for AT fans (and their young proto-fans).
Four ATs.
THE GEAR BOTTOM LINE
In addition, you'll get to see a wide variety of adventure gear in use, caving gear, cold-weather camping gear, arctic wear, climbing gear (both rock and ice), white-water kayaks, bush planes, cave diving gear, and even underwater scooters.
One could quibble about the lack of adventure vehicles, but it compensates in other areas. There's enough inspiration here for half a dozen good Adventure Team sets (are you listening, Hasbro?) and plenty of individual kitbashes. In particular, with an additional tank (so one can be clipped to each side of the Harness) and the addition of some lights and a dive-line reel, "Danger of the Depths" could be kitbashed into a dandy cave-diving rig.
Four ATVs.
THE PAINTHEAD BOTTOM LINE
Sorry, kids, nothing here for the military set.
Zero paintheads.
THE MOVIE BOTTOM LINE
While it's tops in adventure, I can't escape a few cinematic quibbles I have with the film. First, the film opens with a cheesy outer-space sequence that ultimately has little to do with the body of the film. If Journey into Fantastic Caves delved into other aspects of extremophile research (namely the origins of life on Earth, and the possibilities of life on other planets) the opening might have made some kind of sense, but the film curiously ignores these subjects. Instead, it focuses completely on the use of these strange bacteria in medical research. Perhaps they were afraid or confusing their audience, but the decision seems curious and simplistic.
Also, the film uses an especially annoying narrative device. One of our heroines is an elementary school teacher on sabbatical, and sends periodic video reports back to her students. These video clips are framed in a web page that the children are supposedly viewing. Seeing a poorly designed (and obviously phony, check the generic browser menu bar) web page blown up to a fifty foot IMAX screen is lame beyond imagining. Somebody obviously, probably back in the dot-com era, though this was cool and hip. Wrong. In an IMAX film, it's just plain stupid.
These are minor quibbles that occupy relatively little screen time, and IMAX films are more about the images, but they detract from what easily could have been a better film. Still recommended, but with a few qualifications. Three and one-half stars.
(Though I highly recommend the IMAX experience, this film is also available on DVD. Click here to view this title on Amazon.com.)
No paintheads