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No city on earth feels more like the mythical land of Oz than Las Vegas — with its tacky towers and the hordes of dreamers who make the trek, desperately hoping to have their wishes granted — all of which makes it the ideal place to try a wild experience like “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere.
It’s hard not to be blown away — quite literally, at times — by the augmented reality aspects of this first-of-its-kind show, which include drone-powered flying monkeys and an indoor tornado. But the visual cheats used to overhaul what director Victor Fleming and his cast put to film all those years ago (including extensive use of eyesore AI) are another matter.
I love it when someone imagines a new way to heighten the experience of watching movies. When Francis Ford Coppola made “Captain EO” for Disneyland back in the ’80s, I was the kid who reached out his hand to touch the flying Fuzzball as it hovered before our faces.
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I’ve scratched the Odorama cards on cue for John Waters’ “Polyester” and giggled when “The Tingler” got loose in the theater (I’d carefully selected a chair rigged to vibrate, since only a few get the buzz).
I’ve done large-format experiences like Imax and Omni, and even 4DX, where you pay to sit in a chair that throttles and kicks you during the show, spraying water and wind in your face at strategic moments.
So I wasn’t about to miss this fresh way to experience “The Wizard of Oz.” Sphere honcho James L. Dolan — who’s amusingly billed as “chief Muckety-Muck” in the end credits — clearly comes from a place of love for the movie, setting out to immerse audiences within what is arguably the most beloved Hollywood film of all time (Variety named it #2 on our own Greatest Movies list).
But beaming the 1939 classic as it was shot onto the Sphere isn’t an option. The original film is too grainy, and it was conceived to fill a far smaller rectangular screen, not a 16K, 160,000 square-foot field of LEDs that arcs over your head and extends to fill your peripheral vision.
That’s where the controversial decision to use Google-powered AI comes in: Every shot of the film had to be deconstructed, reformatted and upres’d to work within the new format. If Dorothy and friends appear from the waist up in a shot, cutting-edge AI could be used to extrapolate the rest of their bodies by referencing how they look in other footage. And if someone wanders in or out of the frame, AI might imagine what they were doing off-camera.
Objectively speaking, this would be a great test case for the technology, wherein a creative team uses generative AI as a tool to attempt something that would be impossible to achieve with existing visual effects technology. The enhanced visuals would be just one aspect of an augmented viewing experience that transforms the film into a live event, complete with a whooshing indoor tornado.
Purists can argue about whether it’s reasonable to alter existing films in the first place. The “Wizard of Oz” project called for a far more radical overhaul than Ted Turner’s foolhardy efforts to colorize “Casablanca” and other classics back in the mid-1980s. But I’m convinced this treatment will do nothing to taint our collective love for the original film, and my goal was to see it with my own eyes before passing judgment.
Even the drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas feels like part of the experience (it helps to think of the four-hour stretch along Highway 15 as your personal Yellow Brick Road). As you approach Vegas, the Sphere looms on the horizon, much larger than you had likely imagined and glowing like a crystal ball — which cleverly echoes one of the film’s more magical visuals. Just as the Wicked Witch of the West peers into her clear orb to watch Dorothy’s progress toward Oz, we see glimpses of the classic film.
Las Vegas is my least favorite city on earth, and each time I go, I’m confronted by how much more garish and offensive the skyline has gotten, with its ersatz Eiffel Tower, Times Square-shaming jumbo screens and flashy ads for competing burlesque reviews. So imagine my surprise that Sphere marks the rare improvement.
If you look past the Cheetos commercials that cycle across its dynamic surface, the building offers a kaleidoscopic, visually mesmerizing point of focus to draw one’s attention away from the hideosity of the Strip — like the 21st-century equivalent of the Klieg lights tracing the sky outside a red-carpet movie premiere.
I drove in the day before and rented a room at the Flamingo Hotel, from which I could see the Sphere touting the “Wizard of Oz” show all night. At regular intervals, the globe would cycle through different skins, from red sequins (to match Dorothy’s slippers) to lion fur to riveted tin sheets to a straw-filled green shirt and burlap sack — each of which reminded just how iconic the movie has become for American audiences.
By day, you can actually see through the elaborate grid of LED pucks that comprise that shell, looking closely to observe the silhouette of the inner chamber against the sky. Turns out, that arena is not quite spherical, but shaped to fill the field of vision of all those seated inside — so large that you can tilt your head all the way up, or twist it fully left and right, and the screen is there (absent only directly behind the audience).
The massive screen was already on as I found my seat, though the illusion is so complete that I thought the massive amber arches above my head were part of the structure, and that the tiny curtained-off area down toward the stage was where the screen must be. It’s a clever trompe-l’œil trick that fooled this Sphere neophyte, until I looked closer and realized that this vast, 240-foot canopy was where “The Wizard of Oz” would be projected.
The only way to show the film there without radically overhauling it as they have would be to surround the existing frame, the way Cosm recently did “The Matrix” (in its similarly spherical-screen venues), with visuals that complement what the filmmakers so meticulously composed. But Sphere is aiming for a very different experience, one in which the frame disappears completely, and the image extends in every direction.
Following an AI-generated inside joke (where the Cowardly Lion appears inside the MGM logo, where Leo usually roars), the sepia-hued opening credits reveal a crispness “The Wizard of Oz” never had before. That’s the first clue of what’s to come. As Dorothy scampers home with Toto in tow, her surroundings were previously limited to a roughly 4-by-3 frame (what’s known as the Academy Ratio).
Here, it feels like we can see all of Kansas stretching in every direction — although the 16K resolution is a problem, as it’s so sharp, my brain wanted it to match how I perceive the real world. In movies, directors use focus as an artistic tool to direct our attention. By making the foreground or background slightly fuzzy, they cue us to concentrate on the characters in center frame. But at the Sphere (as in Imax), we can decide where to gaze within the frame, requiring every detail to be crisp. But there’s almost no consistency on that front.
The actors’ appearance and expressions are limited by the original footage, and the most troubling change to me was whatever strange AI technique was used to replace Judy Garland’s face with a poreless plastic sheen (where film grain and delicate lighting gave her skin a certain softness before). Dorothy’s once-glistening eyes now look almost cow-like, framed by fine CG eyelashes, while her makeup and freckles vary from shot to shot.
Obviously, AI technology will only get better with time, and we might charitably be impressed by how much it can already do in its infancy. In theory, I’m not opposed to it being used responsibly and was prepared to be wowed by “The Wizard of Oz.” Instead, I found it creepy, applied over existing footage in a way that clearly interferes with the humanity of the underlying performances — that is, if there was an underlying performance to begin with.
These techniques are even more distracting in crowd scenes, where unblinking Munchkin extras stare into space for minutes on end, or the citizens of Oz act in automaton-like loops. When some AI engine starts to make decisions on behalf of a performer, it’s no surprise that lands us smack dab in the uncanny valley (as the disconcerting but still detectable gap between flesh-and-blood humans and computer-generated figures is called).
As far as I can tell, this ambitious experiment required that every frame of “The Wizard of Oz” be separated into its component pieces — actors, sets, matte paintings and so on — and reconfigured. (At Sphere, the whole show runs just 77 minutes, down from the original’s 102, as it’s been tightened for more contemporary-friendly pacing, but also to exclude moments that were too tricky to adapt.)
That means we can often see a frosty silhouette, like the one that often surrounds actors shot on greenscreens, between the characters and the physical backgrounds against which they were originally filmed. In other cases, the backgrounds have been replaced altogether: The Emerald City towers high above our heads, sleek and shiny like a videogame set, and the Yellow Brick Road has been rendered afresh, making it obvious that the Oz-bound foursome have been cut out and composited into this virtual space.
The “camera” hardly ever moves in the Sphere version of the film, as performances are now fixed in the middle of a location — like Dorothy’s living room, where Uncle Henry leans zombie-like against the right-hand wall, where he’d previously stood out of frame. That approach ruins my favorite gag (the Horse of a Different Color no longer changes hues) but brings Dorothy and her three companions closer together, allowing us to see her, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion assembled on screen for most of their voyage.
Human animators would surely have made better choices as to how these off-camera limbs (and entire characters) should appear when made visible again. Still, it’s astonishing that AI is now capable of analyzing and extrapolating this convincingly boggles the mind. When the Scarecrow asked for a brain all these years ago, he couldn’t have imagined anything nearly so convincing would one day come along.
I’m not sure there’s a “right way” to do this just yet, and I cringe somewhat to think what other movies might be subjected to this treatment. I suspect it might have looked better had the producers hired actors to pantomime the scenes and then skinned Garland and the other actors’ faces onto those figures, as it’s strange for the original characters to be the fuzziest things in any scene.
Extremely high resolution is the enemy of this experience, I’ve decided, as it makes random details (the Munchkinland flora waving in the foreground or the glossy floors of the Emerald City) pull our attention away from the characters. Meanwhile, the augmented reality aspects suggest the sky’s the limit in terms of how creative people can get in reimagining classic movies.
In the past, those who watched “The Wizard of Oz” felt their minds expand when a black-and-white Dorothy opens the door to her house and steps into the full-color world of Oz. But here, the greatest thrill comes during the tornado that immediately precedes that scene, as massive fans blow wind and smoke and paper leaves into the air. The indoor cyclone is so powerful, the guy beside me took off his baseball cap, lest it blow away.
When every seat in the house shakes as the Wicked Witch first appears a few moments later, it truly feels like the story is happening to us. Would a showman like Fleming have approved of these stunts? I’m sure he would have loved the way Sphere can make it snow indoors during the poppy scene or how columns of fire burst forth on either side of the Wizard’s floating head (the rare element rendered entirely from scratch).
But I doubt the actors would have been quite so enthused to see the choices they made on camera second-guessed — or else completely fabricated — by AI. As you leave the theater after the show, strategically placed green lamps make the zig-zagging escalators glow like ramps within the Emerald City. And in the lobby on the way out, guests can ask a man hiding behind the curtain to grant their wishes.
A daring woman asked for “a new president,” to which the bald and bulbous head of the Wizard floating above us offered a diplomatic response: “We don’t like to be divisive here at Sphere.” But that couldn’t be farther from the truth, so long as Dolan and company are using controversial technologies to muck around with beloved movies.
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