Anyone who didn’t like Glinda recently discovered what cars with wings are Bad: good can follow the yellow brick road in Las Vegas and its magic bubble. James Dolan’s Sphere, best known for hosting live concerts, is currently the home of Abstly Adgeved, a full-fledged and remastered version of the 1939 film. The Wizard of Oz.
All the action takes place on a 160,000-square-meter led screen with a resolution of 16K, holding its viewers with a picture more than 300 meters high. (IMAX, eat your heart out
Not a redefinition of cinema – Ms Films offer, this curio that has just been put to bed officially known as The Wizard of OZ in the field And presented in 4D-its own way, in its own way, just as distinguished, if not dockright corny. THE PERFECT FIRST BRACE FOR THE TRADO PERONADO PERONADO WITH ITS FUNCTIONS AFTER READING EVERYTHING while your HOPTIC seat shakes and shines! Dodge the styrofoam apple falling from the ceiling when the festive trees throw their fruit at Dorothy! Hear the beautiful and powerful roar of oz his announcements while the flames are bursting and the flames are coming from around the place! And are those Drones with mannequins more than double as flying monkeys?
The butchery is undeniable: this sphere is imagined Oz 75 minutes long, about 30 minutes shorter than the beloved classic. I hope you’re not too fond of the cowardly lion, because his song about being king of the jungle is completely gone. Other nips and tucks include a little time with villiraious zmeli gulch, visiting Professor Marvel, Ding-dong the witch is dead, “ting-dong the witch is dead, tin son and the cowardly lion.
But there is enough of a show to impress. The film is truly expansive in every direction, providing a truly immersive dimension to the Hollywood adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s Fairy Tale. Do you think the tin man is caught and lit in the Emerald City? This one Oz it’s digitally zhuzhed and ai-advanced beyond belief, with beautifully crisp surfaces and textures that feel truly immersive.
SAPIA-toned Kansas looks great, with razor-sharp hay bales, barnyard-like chickens and bronze cows and expansive bronze skies. When Dorothy sings to the happy little Bluebirds “over the rainbow,” one of those sharp chirping now rises above to match her gaze.
And when that dagger uses its gale-force winds to raise Dorothy’s house, we are no longer inside looking inside; Now in the eye of the storm, we are not only looking at the flying house but also the fierce bovines, the men flying in the boat of the iconic sequence – Ms. (Look directly up at the roof of the Seflet, by the way, and you can see right into the cylindro skin form and notice the perfectly silent circle.)
One set piece after another is surprising. The yellow brick road looks newly widened in its bright Canary Hue; The old world of OZ has great rolling hills and picture perfect mountains; Candy-colored MunchKinkinland is a fully functional village; The invading forest is very dark; And the Emerald City, with its sprawling towers and elaborately raised walls, shimmers in all its artistic glory. The Wizard’s big, dark room now has a sky; A witch’s castle with evil genius and more evil. And the ruby slippers shone with a stirring power. The brilliant production design is absolutely stunning.
There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one: No amount of digital wizardry can (yet) recreate the original 1939-era actors in the 2025 production. You can only increase the visual resolution of the grain of the film, so completely erasing the grain of the film eliminates the pores, leaving the surface smooth and plastic.
Dorothy and her Trio look like they’ve reviewed the restoration of the yellow brick road and been put back, like sticker-book pictures. There is a loss of gravity in its movement. At times, they seem to float. Toto, too, with his shock of fur in sneakers, seems to be digitally adorable. And some people have Garish enhancements: The Wicked Witch suddenly has prominent black hair that grows in a mole with a green chin.
The worst is the background characters. The main reason why so many scenes were shortened and cut from the original film was not in order to tighten up the running time; It has also been cancnibalize more and integrate with the left and right sides of the newly expanded, digitally enhanced space.
So MunchKinland now has hordes of people standing behind Dorothy, in the sugar pool where they start back, endlessly moving their arms in computer-generated backup. Some of the extra faces’ look oddly decorated and deformed, thanks to those same AI enhancements. More than a few times, they even stare, with a dead smile, directly into the camera. It’s very cute and more than a little distracting.
Fortunately, most of the scenes have a bit of editing in them: instead of cutting between the tin man’s solo dance and Dorothy’s gun and for example, all three, all three, all three share the same frame – the tin man in the middle, with Dorothy and the ScareCrow on the right. Thanks again to Ai, all of the tin man’s dancing efforts are seamless. But now Dorothy and the ScareCrow’s Lines Book are incompatible. Dorothy actually looks bored, and it looks like she’s coming back from class.
Worst of all is how the AI has compromised the film’s emotionally powerful arc. In the original film, when Dorothy says goodbye to her friends, the camera fills the frame simultaneously with each goodbye. At the SPHERE, the three of them stand in a row, waiting for Dorothy to speak to them. Strangely, each is a little out of focus – and each only focuses when Dorothy starts talking to them. When he stopped talking to them, they stopped complaining and went back. Then, as an addition, each goes into a powerful Powered-Down mode, shifting back and forth as if on a table.
As an example of cutting-odd technology used to transform a national cultural treasure into a glorious kinetic thrill ride, The Wizard of OZ in the field he is certainly beautiful and powerful. As a tool to enhance the power of human connection through storytelling, it needs to continue to use its magic wands. We’re not in Kansas yet, but we still have a long way to go before we get to OZ.