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Rating: 
Summary: It's not the same as seeing it on IMAX, but worth owning.
Review: I first experienced Solar Max at the Omnimax theater at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. I've seen many films in my young twenty years, both large format and regular 35mm, and none compare visually to Solar Max. The filmmakers used images from the SOHO spacecraft to create some of the most amazing images ever put to film. As far as the documentary itself goes, it is informative, intersting, and even displays a droll sense of humor. Patrick Stewart sound-alike Alex Scott does the narration, and he gives it an epic feeling befitting the source material.
The DVD itself loses the scope of the film--nothing compares seeing the blazing sphere of Sol towering over you at four stories--but the visuals are impressive nonetheless. The cinematography uses to great effect many of the IMAX staples: timp-lapse, aerial shots, long crane shots, impressive close- ups and low angle shots.
The soundtrack is absolutely wonderful. The opening and closing theme sends chills down the viewer's spine as the Sun spits waves of magnetic energy at the camera. On a similar note, sound mix is amazing--this is a showoff disk for those with an impressive 5.1 or 6.1 setup.
All in all, worth getting if you enjoy astronomy or a good visual experience--but if the chance ever arises to see Solar Max at a large-format theater, go see it. You'll thank yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Not the same as IMAX, but still worth owning.
Review: I first experienced Solar Max at the Omnimax theater at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. I've seen many films in my young twenty years, both large format and regular 35mm, and none compare visually to Solar Max. The filmmakers used images from the SOHO spacecraft to create some of the most amazing images ever put to film. As far as the documentary itself goes, it is informative, intersting, and even displays a droll sense of humor (listen for the sunspot joke). Patrick Stewart sound-alike Alex Scott does the narration, and he gives it an epic feeling befitting the source material. The DVD itself loses the scope of the film--nothing compares seeing the blazing sphere of Sol towering over you at four stories--but the visuals are impressive nonetheless. The sound mix is amazing--this is a showoff disk for those with an impressive 5.1 or 6.1 setup. All in all, worth getting if you enjoy astronomy or a good visual experience--but if the chance ever arises to see Solar Max at a large-format theater, go see it. You'll thank yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: A picture is worth a million of these words.
Review: The photography of this state-of-the-art portrait of the Sun (and, by reasonable inference, millions of similar stars) is stunning, could only have been done very recently, and left me, an amateur astromer with an expensive solar telescope, absolutely astounded. Worth every penny.
However, the narration most resembles a PBS Brit mouthing drivel from Santa Barbara. The science, to accompany these incredible images, is elementary to the point of trivial; much of it aspires to a new, and I hope short-lived, genre--the PC travelogue.
There is one particularly offensive historical howler: we are told, in the solemn cadences of offended goodthink, that Gallileo was hounded by "the Church" (one of his closest supporters was the Archbishop of Sienna) for suggesting that the Church was not "central" (he got into his deepest trouble for insisting on a theory of tides which was widely doubted and happened to be wrong); that he was tried by the Inquisition (true, but not the same thing as "the Church), was "shown the instruments of torture" (he was not--it is a formal proceeding, always meticulously recorded), and thereupon in terror knowingly signed a lie.
The Gallileo vs. Church is a major story in the popular history of Church and Science. A version as hackneyed as this has no place in a treatment so much of which is wonderful. And after all the heavy-breathing about the Catholic church, we are spared the information that the magnificent Inca and Aztec sun temples were, along with being superb observatories, places for incessant human sacrifice. Science should never confict with PC, one assumes.
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