THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Has over an Hour of IMAX Footage!
Remember how incredible it was seeing those IMAX shots in The Dark Knight? There was only about 15-20 minutes of IMAX footage in that film, and it was pretty spectacular. Thanks to a report from The Wall Street Journal we learn today that Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises will include over an hour of IMAX footage! Over an hour! How awesome is that! This makes it the largest use of the IMAX format in a Hollywood film.
My preferred choice of movie-going is IMAX, especially when the film is shot in IMAX. I still think 3D is a gimmick, but IMAX is the future. I feel more immersed in an IMAX movie than a 3D movie, and I can't wait to see The Dark Knight Rises in the epic scale of IMAX badassdom.
It will be interesting to see who will be the first director to make a feature length IMAX movie, and what movie that film will actually be. Nolan seems to be leading the IMAX charge, so there's a solid chance it could be him. Here's what Nolan had to say about the IMAX format in a recent interview with the DGA,
[T]he operatic quality of 'The Dark Knight' and 'The Dark Knight Rises' felt very well suited to IMAX’s larger canvas. So it’s different depending on what film you want to do... We didn’t shoot IMAX for 'Inception' because we were trying to portray the reality of dreams rather than their extraordinary nature, so we used a handheld camera and shot it in a more spontaneous way.
For 'The Dark Knight Rises' we were on Wall Street with a thousand extras, and you can see everybody’s face in the frame. In some ways, I feel it takes me back almost to the silent film era, when they had those huge cameras. Trying to do things in more of a tableau fashion, it changes the way I direct a film, it changes the way I block the camera movement because of the size of the thing. The resulting image has so much power that you don’t need to cut in the same way, you can frame the shot slightly differently, you wind up with a slightly different feel.
What's your preference? 3D or IMAX? Why?