Every so often I get the urge to take in a short film at the good old “Omnimax” theater at OMSI. Yes, even with my chronic motion-perception dizziness, I still want to see what it’s like to be completely surrounded by a projected film.

Amazon takes you to South America and introduces the viewer to a huge, diverse region. More specifically, it chronicles the journeys of “medicine men,” one from the ancient traditions and one from the halls of Western science, into the Amazon to learn about the properties of its plant life from the native tribes. Along the way we’re shown some wildlife and trees and flowers and trees and fish and trees and naked natives and, er, trees. Did I mention the trees? The Amazon has lots of ‘em, and we get to fly over them very often. It’s clear, of course, that the rainforest fly-by is all from one particular flight and cuts from it are just being interspersed through the 45-minute film. There must be something about having an IMAX rig at your disposal that makes you want to strap it to an aircraft.

Lest you think I mock this movie, I’d like to point out that it does its job fairly well. What is the job this movie sets out to do? Oddly enough, it’s to show us that both ancient peoples and modern medicine view the Amazon rainforest as a bounty of incalculable value. The movie does this part of its task with surprising grace and style, never once condescending to the viewer or the native peoples it films. Even our high-country medicine man, a prime candidate for inadvertent comedy if ever there was one, is portrayed carefully and casually. He’s just a man on a quest for knowledge, trading what he has for knowledge and medicines that may be of value back home.

The “Discovery Channel” element comes mostly from the Western scientist who is on a rather similar visit, except this questor gives frequent lectures along the way. This guy didn’t bother me too much, but his film time did feel like being in a leafy green lecture hall somehow.

When the film gets bored with the human element, it shows us some wildlife. Pink dolphins, jaguars, lots of monkeys, and various fish appear on our screen. This is one of the major problems with Amazon, unfortunately. Note to IMAX filmmakers: I’m sitting in a domed room staring upward at a 70-some-odd-foot screen that fills my field of vision. DO NOT show me extremely close-up footage, blurry even, of animals that I then must crane my neck around awkwardly to see the whole of! In addition, hold the camera extremely still if you’re going to do extreme close-up shots, since while I’m craning my neck around I’d rather not become intensely nauseous because of your inept filmwork! Oh yes, and the next person who feels it necessary to pan across a hanging bridge and then SPIN THE CAMERA for the purpose of showing me the other end of the bridge WILL BE FLOGGED MERCILESSLY.

Amazon gets full marks for a solid treatment of the major subjects it tries to tackle, those being the medicinal value of the Amazon basin and the odd history of the more-or-less indigenous peoples therein. It doesn’t even waste film time showing us the depredations of modern “progress” as so many other such programs do. They know that if we paid the bucks to see this film then we’ve probably already seen the slash-and-burn footage, thank you.

Sadly, the film loses a number of score points for needless nausea, silly wildlife vignettes and the neverending flight over green trees. (We’ve seen THAT footage too, guys. Several times. In better films.) How many monkeys-in-trees shots did the movie really need? Why was that jaguar growling so much? Why oh why did they have to spin the damned camera while showing us the canopy bridge?

If you have a strong stomach, or you’re really compelled to learn some interesting things about the area that you may not have picked up from years of watching PBS, TLC and The Discovery Channel, head down to OMSI or your local equivalent and catch a showing of Amazon. Otherwise, save your wallet and your tummy some grief.

I enjoy a fair number of what might be called “guilty pleasures” by those of higher brow than myself. Among these are anime, sword-and-sorcery programming, music by aging rock and roll bands, and swashbuckling period pieces. Monte Cristo is, of course, an example of that last category. The good news is that it actually is a pleasure and not merely guilty.

The best way I can describe this film is that it’s a straightforward tale of good guy, bad guy and lady fair. Betrayal, hardship, revenge, true love and even some light humor are all well-balanced elements in this film. There aren’t many surprises, not even for someone who hasn’t read the novels, since most of the elements that may or may not have been original in Alexandre Dumas’ original work have been used and abused in countless books and films since.

You know what? It doesn’t matter. This movie is fun, it’s good to look at, it’s pleasant to hear, and the funniest parts are the sly parts where the audience is let in on the joke that nobody else is meant to see or hear.

There’s nothing outstanding in the acting, the swordplay, the cinematography, the music or any of it, really. It’s not really meant to be a groundbreaking film, after all. It’s a throwback to the good old days of swashbuckling epics, and that is a blessing for the most part.

One thing about this movie, however, is so offensive to me that I docked an entire mark from the score on account of only a few seconds of film. When the final climactic swordfight begins, the movie suddenly rips you back into reality by pointedly reminding you that it was made during the Computer Age. Yes, that’s right, suddenly we get about 30 seconds of hyper-speed jump-cut digital editing! What the hell? The rest of the movie behaves so well, so gracefully, so like a movie that could have been made at any other time in the history of film… only to squander that grace with a lame, offensive, poorly-done attempt at heightening the intensity of the action at the last.

Nearly two hours I spent drawn cheerfully into the world of the film, only to be reminded, unpleasantly so, that I was in fact sitting in a modern movie theater. Grr. It’s a good thing that the rest of the movie is so damned good that I can almost… almost… forgive the filmmakers for that one major gaffe.

Overall, if you like period-piece swashbuckling melodrama, see Monte Cristo. If you’re into Matrix-style cyberpunk wire-fu, see something else.