So...what did you think? Overall I thought it was worth the time, but I found the image quality frustratingly variable. I don't think it was anything the theater did wrong but something in the source material or the digitization or...I just don't know. Parts of it were incredibly sharp while other parts seemed to be a blur (and I'm not talking about deliberate focus/composition things).
The shots that always stand out to me are the closeups of Bowman during the "You're working up your crew psychology report" scene. The color and clarity of those are usually spectacular, but looked absolutely awful at the IMAX showing I went to. It didn't just lack sharpness but the color was way off--had it been on TV I'd have reached for the remote to crank it down.
[Spoilers follow!]
On the other hand, I noticed things I don't remember seeing before, for example, when Floyd calls his daughter, there's a bank of digital clocks to his left with cities ("Bombay", "Sydney", "San Francisco", etc.). Speaking of Floyd, I've known forever that the scene where the stewardess picks up his floating pen was done by attaching the pen to a rotating sheet of glass. You can tell that the stewardess' nails actually make contact with the glass when she picks it up. What I never noticed until last night is that while she's doing that in the lower right of the frame, the actual rotating glass is painfully visible in the upper right. There's a really obvious scratch that the light catches perfectly. I could read some of the menu on the food dispenser in the shuttle (the last item is Apple Juice) and realized there's a General Mills logo on Discovery's food dispenser.
Another thing that surprised me: The scene where the stewardess (from the audience's perspective) walks up the wall and onto the ceiling has always had a brief flicker when she takes her first step up. I've always assumed that's because it was accomplished by having the entire set and the camera rotate in tandem, so once she starts walking and the set's presumably huge motor starts up, the initial power demand is enough to dim the lights. Unless I blinked at exactly the wrong time, that flicker has been "corrected" for the IMAX release.
I think the audio, at least in Bakersfield, is the original Todd-AO mix, that is, five channels behind the screen and mono surround. There were a few times it seemed like there was a difference between right and far right, though it's certainly possible it was an illusion. I also got the impression that no tricks were played to clean up the audio, so there was some hiss, though I'd rather have that than any artifacts that its attempted removal might cause. It was also just a hair too loud (an exhibition problem, not a mastering problem) and was right at the edge of what both my hearing and the theater's equipment could deal with comfortably.
When it was reissued in 2001, I was lucky to see the same 70mm print in both Seattle and San Francisco. There was one major change they made for that mix that I didn't hear in IMAX last night or on the new 70mm print that's making the rounds: After "THE END" and the screen goes black but the music continues to play, the 2001 mix very obviously brings up the rear channels so the music envelops you.
Overall, I'm very glad that I went. I was able to sit absolutely dead center in the middle of the theater and it was very enjoyable. But I just can't shake the feeling that the IMAXification is just not as sharp as good 70mm. There was an email address at the very end to contact their quality control person, I'm kinda tempted...but as you can tell, I'm an obsessed fanboy and possibly easily dismissed.
I may just have to go see it again locally tomorrow...
