So, how good is Canberra’s new IMAX big-screen experience and is it worth spending up to $60 for a ticket? CityNews cinema writer SIMON COBCROFT takes a long, close look…

This week, Dendy’s Cinema 1 put on a growth spurt. I’m not sure what Dendy was feeding it, but it is now the biggest screen in town and has placed Canberra in the exclusive club of being only the third location in Australia to have an IMAX cinema. 

So how good is the IMAX experience and is it worth spending up to $60 for a ticket? Well, I attended the premiere on Tuesday night to find out. 

When I arrived, the champagne was flowing, people were posing against Instagrammable photo-backdrops and a musician was playing movie medleys. The place was a hubbub of excitement. 

Among those in attendance were Canberra Liberals leader Leanne Castley and Federal Labor MP Member for Canberra Alicia Payne. 

I asked them what their favourite movie was and they, unsettlingly and immediately, offered up revenge pics – The Other Woman for Ms Castley and Office Space for Ms Payne. Should I be warning their colleagues? 

We further chatted about the cinema scene in Canberra and Ms Castley expressed her frustration that, after a decade of waiting, the cinema promised for Gungahlin had yet to eventuate. Fair point and one neatly dodged by Ms Payne, who said that it wasn’t in her electorate, so she wasn’t really the person to ask. 

Unfortunately, the person to ask, Andrew Leigh, wasn’t around for comment. Also not in attendance, were local Arts Minister, Michael Pettersson and Chief Minister and ACT Minister for Tourism Andrew Barr. I was surprised not to see Mr Barr standing next to Dendy CEO, Sharon Strickland, as she spoke about the Dendy IMAX putting Canberra on the tourism map, and of the major partnership Dendy has planned with Jamala Lodge to promote zoo and IMAX packages to interstate tourists. When the head of Dendy Australia comes to town and wants to promote Canberra tourism, you might have thought the tourism minister would don a suit to cheer her on. 

After the red-carpet festivities were over, we were ushered into the new cinema, which was modestly elegant with subtle hues of blue, grey and black. 

Once seated, we were shown a showreel of the best IMAX can offer. It opened with the bold IMAX tagline – Watch a movie or be part of one? – and then proceeded to show stunning scenes from Dunkirk, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Greatest Showman and 3D scenes from Avatar: The Way of Water. 

As the kids say – it slapped! Hard! The colours popped, the sounds shook seats and the screen totally immersed our field of vision. The 3D, using the cheaper Real3D glasses (rather than the better active-shutter glasses), was particularly good due to the immense brightness of the screen. This is definitely the place to see 3D in Canberra. 

The feature film that followed, was Mufasa, the realistically-animated prequel to 2019’s The Lion King. It wasn’t the best film to launch the cinema as it didn’t really show off the IMAX in the way the showreel had done. While the character shots and close-ups were clear and rich in detail, the backgrounds were often blurry and fuzzy. 

This wasn’t the fault of the IMAX, it was the fault of the filmmakers who had opted for lower-resolution 2K renders for their backgrounds. Not a problem on a standard screen, but IMAX has a tendency to show warts and all, for good and bad. If you are going to see an IMAX film, I would personally stick to live action films. Unless they star Tommy Lee-Jones or Danny Trejo, that is. Seeing their pock-marked pores on a two-storey screen might leave indelible scars on your retinas. 

But getting back to my opening question, is it worth the dosh? Well, at $40 for a standard ticket and $60 for a VIP lounge-seat, my answer would be, “occasionally”. 

Yes, it is the best place in Canberra to see a film shot in the 1:90:1 IMAX format. So, when Christoper Nolan chucks out his next IMAX blockbuster, fork out the dough, and go and see it at the Dendy IMAX. 

Dendy IMAX is also unique in being the only cinema in Australia to screen art-house movies on an IMAX screen. So, again, if you really love a certain non-mainstream film, treat yourself to seeing it as it should be seen rather than watching it in one of the pokey cinemas upstairs. 

But for everyday movie going, I’d have to give it a pass. For half the price, you can see the same film on a large XD screen at the Limelight in Tuggeranong or on an Xtreme screen at Hoyts Woden (prior to the IMAX, the best cinema screens in Canberra). Both are terrific experiences and better value for money. Plus, you get recliner rockers that the IMAX is lacking. 

And while the IMAX wowed me, I was also disappointed that it wasn’t as good as it should have been. Since July, when I first started liaising with Dendy to cover this cinema, the cinema chain has been very cagey in sharing any technical information. 

At first, it was couched in terms of being a “work in progress”, but now it is finished, Dendy point-blank refuses to tell me the actual screen size and the projector being used. While I understand they may be sensitive about comparisons with other IMAXs, they are doing themselves no favours in being so secretive. 

Due to the absence of this information, the online r/canberra Reddit group is already rife with Canberrans disparaging the theatre as “LIEMAX”. It’s not. The Dendy IMAX is a perfectly respectable IMAX theatre in the modern 1:90:1 tradition, but not letting people know the technical details shows disrespect to Dendy customers and Canberra in general. Especially, given Canberra, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has the nation’s highest number of cinemagoers per head of population. We like our cinema and want to know these things. 

But what is absolutely unforgivable with the new IMAX, is the scratches on the screen, which once seen, are hard to ignore. They don’t kill the experience, but they niggle, especially in scenes where a bright colour highlights them. How does a new screen already have scratches?! 

But let’s further scratch the surface and go deeper into the good and the not-so-good. 

THE GOOD

• The biggest screen in Canberra. Sure, it’s not the original 1:43:1 “Grand Theatre” IMAX ratio but it’s certainly not the LIEMAX some purists might label it. Unfortunately, Dendy refused to divulge the measurements of the screen for this article. 
• Great 4K laser projection. It’s definitely not a Xenon projector but, again, Dendy refused to share information on what projector they are using. If I had to hazard a guess, I think it is probably a single-laser Barco projector in the SP4K range. The Sydney and Melbourne IMAXs both have dual-laser Barco projectors and Melbourne also has its original 70mm IMAX film projector. 
• Fantastic 12-speaker surround sound. Not as good as some IMAXs though or the Reading chain’s Titan cinemas, which really set the standard for sound. 
• Amazing 3D – even with Real3D glasses.
• VIP seats allow restaurant-style food and alcohol to be ordered by scanning a QR code on the armrest. The food menu is similar to Dendy’s Premium Lounge. 

THE NOT-SO-GOOD

• Expensive. It costs $40 (reduced to $36 for Dendy Club members) for a seat compared to $25 for Hoyts’ Xtreme Screen ($23.63 for Hoyts club members) or $20 for Limelight’s XD screen ($17 Limelight member discount). Dendy IMAX VIP lounge-seats cost a whopping $60 per person ($54 Dendy Club member).
• Noticeable scratches on the screen – unacceptable for a new cinema!
• The VIP lounges haven’t been thought through properly and, in my opinion, aren’t worth the money. Firstly, they are permanently flat like sun beds and can’t be adjusted when you are eating, like the recliners in the Dendy Premium Lounge. The people at the premiere were struggling both to eat their popcorn and keep it from spilling everywhere. The floor was a noticeable mess in those rows after the screening. The lounges are also hard to get in and out of. Imagine a sunbed wedged between two walls and you get a sense of the logistics required. Then there is the bright LED seat lamp that people were switching on and off throughout the movie, no doubt to find stray kernels of popcorn. These lights are much too bright and are annoying to other viewers. But finally, the VIP seats strangely occupy the first four rows of the cinema. Apart from Row D, you really need to crane your neck up to see the whole screen; even on your back. Why would you pay $60 for this extra neck strain? Sydney IMAX is worse with its similar lounges, but surely someone learnt from this? The VIP experience really is sub-par in my view, and only worth it if you plump for Row D and don’t mind lying down to eat. 
• No recliner rockers. They were promised but didn’t happen. Hoyts and Limelight all have recliners as standard. 
• Not all seating is good. I sat in 10 random rows of seats to get a sense of different seating experiences. The seats up the back and the seats towards the front are the best to get unhindered views. Some of the seats in the lower middle rows are not raked steeply enough, so you will see the tops of people’s heads obscuring the bottom of the screen (tall people will definitely be a distraction). As the Grail Knight sagely said to Indy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “choose wisely.”
• The screen could have been a bit bigger. Again, hard to be definitive on this without information from Dendy, but I can confidently say that the Melbourne Museum’s IMAX remains the best place in Australia to see an IMAX film. It boasts the second largest screen in the world (32m x 23m – a bit over the height of a three-storey building) and shows both original 70mm film (the 16K resolution, 1570 film format favoured by Christopher Nolan and others) and 4K dual-laser projection. The Melbourne IMAX is definitely a tourist drawcard for cinephiles, which Dendy could have competed with if they had built a better cinema. 

So, it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, Dendy has gone from having some of the crappiest cinemas in Canberra to having one of the best. But on the other hand, they still haven’t got it right. 

But maybe Canberrans don’t care. The young couple sitting next to me spent most of their time looking at the smaller screens of their phones rather than taking in the spectacle in front of them. Every now and then, when the audience let out a cheer, they would look up from their phones to see what the fuss was about, before returning to their doomscrolling. Maybe taking the Instagram pic in the foyer and saying you’ve done the VIP thing is all some Canberrans are looking for? At $60 a pop, are we that wealthy and that shallow? Perhaps. 

For cinephiles though, the Dendy IMAX is a welcome indulgence for those that can afford it. Yes, it should have been better, but you could say that about a lot of things in Canberra and end up totally miserable. As Robert De Niro said about the horrible state of affairs in Goodfellas, “it is what it is”, or as Elsa more constructively sang in Frozen, “Let it go, let it go…” 

But Elsa, the scratches…