The Human Body

The latest IMAX film to play Sacramento (though it actually was produced in 2001) takes a whole new approach. Instead of swooping us off to Mount Everest or the grave of the Titanic, this one takes us—wait for it—inside our own bodies. Director Peter Georgi employs a variety of photographic techniques—endoscopy, X-rays, scanning electron microscopes and computer simulations. We see everything on that thousand-acre IMAX screen, where blood corpuscles look like helicopter landing pads and a human egg is about the size of one of the moons of Saturn. Georgi demonstrates the process of digestion by showing food coursing down the esophagus and plopping into the stomach and then becoming mulched and blended and moving on to the intestines (mercifully, we follow it no further). It’s all fascinating stuff.