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March 19, 2005

Do the Evolution, Imax Remix

Last year, it was stickers in school books in suburban Atlanta. This year, it's IMAX movies, according to the New York Times, which reports that some Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are now refusing to show ceratin Imax films that refer to evolution, I mean "biological changes over time." The highlights:

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.

So a brief speculation that life on earth may have begun inside volcanoes leads several Imax theaters to pass on 2003 release, Volcanoes because several viewers regarded the film as "blasphemous." Like the cinetrix, I'm no big fan of Imax or the cinema of attractions, but things are getting out of hand when science museums are so cautious that they are self-censoring legitimate scientific research. Oh those reality-based documentaries!

Posted by chuck at March 19, 2005 2:08 PM

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Comments

Posted by: cynthia at March 21, 2005 11:55 AM

Posted by: Scrivener at March 21, 2005 12:00 PM

Posted by: Chuck at March 21, 2005 1:34 PM

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