An Academy Award Winner &_A Nominee At IMAX

SOUTH NORWALK — Only a handful of IMAX movies have received Academy Award® nominations, but The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk is offering the rare chance to see two of them beginning January 12 when Amazon and The Old Man & The Sea open on the aquarium theatre’s six-story screen.

Until then, the public is invited to enjoy the final weeks of screenings of Galapagos, the latest film to be featured in South Norwalk. Continuing to January 11, Galapagos takes viewers beyond the footprints of Darwin for larger-than-life encounters with marine iguanas, sea lions, hammerhead sharks and bizarre deep-sea creatures.

The film follows a young scientist, Dr Carole Baldwin of Smithsonian Institution, on her first explorations of the famous Galapagos Islands. Viewers watch as she meets up with some of the islands’ well-known birds and land animals and then dives into the Galapagos’ deep and largely unexplored offshore waters — waters, Dr Baldwin says, “Darwin saw only through the bottom of a glass-bottomed bucket.”

The extremely isolated Galapagos Islands have held scientific — and public — interest since Charles Darwin’s research there 160 years ago led him to his famous theory of evolution by natural selection. That theory, Dr Baldwin says, “would forever change our view of the natural world.”

As Dr Baldwin begins exploring the islands’ sometime lush, sometimes harsh environs, narrator Kenneth Branagh explains how Galapagos’ finches, tortoises, cormorants, marine iguanas and other species of animals have physically adapted to survive. Audiences also learn how the volcanic island chain is, as Dr Baldwin explains, “a land still in the process of creation.”

The film then plunges into the world the marine biologist knows best. As she scuba dives along coastal reefs to collect marine life for study, she encounters huge schools of fish, playful sea lions, prowling hammerhead sharks and moray eels.

To explore the islands’ deeper black waters, Dr Baldwin climbs aboard a two-person submersible with a huge domed front window. Sucked into tubes for examination back up at the surface are unusual fish, sea cucumbers and other never-before-seen creatures “as weird and wonderful as any that Darwin collected,” Mr Branagh says.

In addition to multiple daily showings of Galapagos, The IMAX Theatre at The Maritime Aquarium is continuing to screen Mysteries of Egypt at noon each weekday and Everest each Saturday and Sunday at 5 pm.

New Films For

The New Year

Amazon was a 1997 Oscar nominee for Best Short Documentary. The film traces the mighty Amazon River along its 4,000-mile journey from its source in the Andes Mountains down through rain forests and out to sea. The Amazon is home to more than 5,000 species of fish, while more then 60,000 species of plants line its banks.

Audiences meet some of the exotic creatures reliant on the Amazon, from piranhas and pink dolphins to jaguars and tapirs. Equally compelling are the shared efforts of two medicine men from vastly different worlds: a tribal shaman and an American ethnobotanist working to unlock the medicinal secrets of rain forest plants.

The film also offers a rare peek into the lives of the Zoë, the most recently contacted indigenous tribe in the Amazon rain forest.

Amazon is narrated by the Academy Award-winning actress Linda Hunt (The Year of Living Dangerously) and was directed by Kieth Merrill, whose IMAX credits include the previous Maritime Aquarium favorite Grand Canyon.

The Old Man & The Sea won the 1999 Academy Award for Best Animated Short. The classic Hemingway story of courage and triumph explodes off the giant screen in a beautifully animated film made, amazingly, from 29,000 images hand-painted on glass by the Russian artist Alexander Petrov.

Hemingway’s Santiago is a proud old man battling self-doubts during a long run of bad fishing luck. Determined, he sails alone far out to sea and finds himself in the battle of his life with a giant marlin.

The IMAX film includes a live-action prologue Hemingway: A Portrait, a fictional retrospective set in a new agency at the time of the writer’s death in 1961. Through newsreel footage, audiences learn about Hemingway’s achievements and also his demons.

Amazon will be screened daily at 11 am, noon, 2 and 3 pm through June 14. The Old Man & The Sea can be seen daily at 1 pm, with extra shows at 4 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Weekend evening double features of these films will also be available into mid-June, with screenings each Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 7 pm. Contact The Maritime Aquarium at 203/852-0700 for details.