Jaw-dropping visuals, paired with an irritatingly unfocused script. Jennifer Lawrence’s narration darts around from topic to unrelated topic with little rhyme or reason — California water use, the effect of zero-G environments on human eyeballs, the search for life-sustainable exoplanets. No topic is off limits. It’s as if filmmaker Toni Myers made a laundry list of everything she found interesting, and then justified including the whole list with “the movie is about the earth, and hey, everything’s related to the earth!”But the visuals win the day: Eye-popping photography of the earth from 250 miles up, all shown in glorious IMAX 3D. There are some things I had never seen before, like a band of thunderstorms across the Midwest flashing like fireflies, or fires raging in the Amazon rain forests across South America. And the footage of life inside the International Space Station really allowed the 3D to pop.This was movie #4 in the currently-running IMAX Documentary Showcase playing in select IMAXes across the country. The next one, in two weeks, is Hubble 3D, from the same filmmaker. (Sadly, I won’t make it to that one.)
