Journey Into Amazing Caves: IMAX (2001)

I saw Amazing Caves in an IMAX theater and also caught it on my laptop screen over breakfast. It is an excellent IMAX film filled with cliffhanging, rappeling, and underwater diving through exquisite panoramas, aerial vistas, cavernous cathedrals, and subterranean rivers. Nancy Holler Aulenbach from Georgia and Hazel Barton from England are lifelong "cavers" or cave explorers (sometimes with their husbands or local experts) who explore caves in extreme environments. They are dedicated to discovering new bacterial life forms that may in time promise medical benefits, so they're like botanists who catalog the flora in rainforests but they're biologists who catalog the microfauna in caves. We trek them through an Arizona canyon, kayaking down a river (to the Moody Blues' tune Ride My Seesaw) and rappeling their way to caves with exquisitely baroque interior architecture. We go with them to explore ice canyons and caves in Greenland and freshwater cenotes in Yucatan, eventually swimming seaward to the blurry boundary where freshwater and saltwater meet. We see the single-celled organisms they discover through a microscope after each expedition and some of their narrative comes from the Web site where Nancy, a schoolteacher, extemporizes about her discoveries to her student audience. This athletic and scientific duo has discovered 10 branches of bacterial life that were previously unknown in addition to a new treatment for leukemia. Amazing Caves is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientific exploration -- the logistics, adventure, and camaraderie -- and you can't beat Liam Neeson as narrator and Moody Blues for the soundtrack. 5 stars.