Greece: Secrets of the Past

Director Greg MacGillivray and writers Stephen Judson and Jon Boorstin take the IMAX camera to the Aegean Sea for a 40-minute survey of ancient Greece’s incalculable contributions to world culture—so incalculable, actually, that they hardly bother to mention any. We listen in vain for names like Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Euclid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Herodotus, Thucydides—well, it’s easier to list the names we do hear: Plato, Pericles and Aristophanes come in for a few seconds each. Of course, IMAX is better with scenery than with ideas, and that’s the focus here, with long segments on the cataclysmic eruption of Thera in 1646 B.C. (some stock volcano shots) and the building of the Parthenon (pretty cool digital reconstructions laid over the ruins). Nia Vardalos narrates.