POSTHOC RATING:  * ½ The IMAX Nutcracker: family film in 3-D.  Starring Miriam Margoyles, Lotte Johnson, Benjamin Hall, Heathcote Williams and Harriet Thorpe.  Written and directed by Christine Edzard. Now playing at the IMAX Metreon.

POSTHOC RATING:  ** ½ L-5: First City in Space: science fiction in 3-D.   Starring Colin Fox, Rachel Walker, Denis Akiyama, Genevieve Langlois and narrated by Martha Henry.  Written and directed by Toni Myers. Now playing at the IMAX Metreon.

The two new IMAX 3-D films, now playing at the Sony Metreon’s IMAX theater, are films produced a few years back that are now getting their first run here.  It appears IMAX is running through their back catalog, while getting ready for the upcoming premiere of Fantasia 2000, early next year (and that’s something to look forward to).  It’s certainly understandable, but it’s clear that least one of these films may have been better off staying on the shelf.

They’re both a couple of high contrast pieces.  One is a futuristic docudrama set on a possible city in space.  The other is a throwback to the past, a straightforward re-telling of the E.T.A. Hoffman fantasy that inspired Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky to create one of his most enduring musical works, The Nutcracker.    Both make use of the current return of the 3-D rage. With one it works out OK, while the other makes you wonder why they bothered.

Symphony orchestras and ballet companies across the world needn’t lose a wink of sleep worrying about the impact of The IMAX Nutcracker because frankly it will have little.  It’s a handsome, but dull, listless affair that, except for its set design, costumes and the marvelous collection of Victorian toys, wouldn’t hold a Christmas candle to a high school ballet production.

The story is simplicity itself: Clara (Lotte Johnson), with her family, pays a Christmas visit to her spectacularly eccentric Uncle Drosselmeier (Heathcote Williams), a monocled gentleman with a wild thatch of black hair (it looks like a black Scottie terrier dozing on his head. I kept waiting for it to bark.) He is also a passionate collector of the most incredible elaborate set of antique toys ever gathered under one roof.  Among the most intriguing of them is a sugar plum palace kept safely under glass to protect it from the mice of whom, Drosselmeier warns, “You can’t be too careful . . ..”

But the most important toy of all, of course, is the homely wooden Nutcracker soldier that Drosselmeier makes a gift of to Clara. On the way home her bored and jealous older brother Frederick (Daniel Wylie) rips the Nutcracker out of her hands and throws it into the middle of a frozen pond.  Clara tries to retrieve it and, like Alice down the rabbit hole, falls through the ice and into the fantasy wonderland of the Nutcracker. There she gets caught in a war between an evil kingdom of ravenous mice and the miraculous Christmas House full of toys they are attempting to devour.  Clara rescues the toys from the Mouse King.  The Nutcracker turns out to be a handsome prince (Benjamin Hall) who takes her to the Sugar Plum Castle and soon Clara is returned safely and happily to the warm bosom of her family.  

Doing a non-ballet feature version of the Hoffman tale may be a good idea, but this is not the way to go about it.  Writer-director Christine Edzard (Little Dorrit and Tales of Beatrix Potter) seems at a loss in handling the out-sized technology of the IMAX camera.  The otherworldly Nutcracker house is a lovely atmospheric feat of design, but the huge cameras they use to film it makes it look like they used a telescope to peer inside a toy box from three feet away.  Her direction is confusing and claustrophobic and the use of 3-D does more to distract than enchant. In fact, it’s all but useless. The battle between the mice and the toys is clunky, confusing and unexciting.  You can’t see the toybox for the toys.  The film, for all its elaborate and rich attention to detail, is overstuffed and leadfooted.

The film layers in Tchaikovsky’s score nicely, if unspectacularly throughout (though at one point, incredibly, they use a passage from his 1812 Overture!).  The performances are, typically for a children’s film, broad and melodramatic.  And the handmade toys dazzle the eyes and warm the nostalgic heart.  But the film also exemplifies how the 3-D process simply isn’t suited for narrative features.  The 3-D gimmick is an example of cinema at its purest. In a narrative film a war develops between the process and the storytelling.  Inevitably, both lose. We wind up with something flat and, ironically, one-dimensional. 

The same problem, narrative, also gums up the second IMAX feature that opened L-5: City in Space, but here at least the 3-D process makes more sense.  The film, produced in close collaboration with NASA, tells of the life of a little girl Chieko (Rachel Walker) on the gigantic eponymous space station, spinning at the perfect gravitational balance point between the earth and the moon. This is a portrayal of life in outer space as it might be based on what we currently know. 

Here the use of 3-D at least is apropos to the setting and subject matter.  There are several astounding shots of comets rushing at us (though the animation looks a little ragged) and awe-inspiring shots of this unique, fantastic wheeled structure, where gravity is created by having it turn at one revolution per minute. It’s fascinating to learn about the various technical problems and challenges we would encounter if human civilization ever sets up house in space. The visuals are often tremendously appealing.

As a “plot” they might have used a simple My First Trip to L-5 approach, which would have kept things simple, given us as nearly a complete look at this cosmic environment as possible and maybe even provided for some comic relief.  But no sooner are we settled into riding this most fantastic of Ferris wheels then it’s off to Saturn’s neighborhood, where a rocket designed to steer a passing comet near the Earth so L-5 can retrieve the water from it, has become stuck on the selfsame comet.  Chieko’s father Mori (Denis Akiyama) a flight commander and engineer takes on the Mission of flying onto the comet and fixing the rocket. 

Besides taking us away from the central point of the movie, this thoroughly routine plot lacks any suspense, except for maybe very young children who’ve never laid eyes on an episode of Star Trek. It’s a family film so why worry if Mori’s going to accomplish his mission and get home safely?  I sure didn’t.  The film cuts back and forth between Mori in his spaceship (again some eye-popping imagery of him dodging his spaceship through some huge icy boulders) and Chieko, her mother Genevieve (Genevieve Langlois) and her brilliant scientist Grandpa (Colin Fox) hovering around the 3-D holographic communications panel.  Believe me it’s boring.

Still, L-5: First City in Space at least deserves credit for marrying the 3-D process with the worthy subject of space travel.  When the IMAX 3-D points its camera in the right direction, the results can be tremendous and awe-inspiring (as in the documentaries Everest and Into the Deep).  But when they try fictional stories, they go nowhere, becoming as pallid, uneventful and unfocused.  With 3-D, the story is not, nor likely ever to be, the thing that envelopes an audience in the wondrous world it tries to create.