Speaking of The Wizard of Oz, the classic movie offered the perfect opportunity to return to the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Because after dozens of times seeing it on television and home video (and most recently catching it on the big screen in 3D at Gardena Cinema), why not also experience it on the world's largest spherical structure with the world's largest screen?
It seemed like the perfect thing to do on Thanksgiving night—though not a holiday movie per se, but associated with the holidays after decades of TV broadcasts around the end of the year.
I was spending the night at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, right across the street from the Venetian (which is connected to the Sphere by a bridge walkway), so I walked there (and had quite an adventure trying to cross Las Vegas Boulevard).
I'd chosen an early showtime so I could see the outside lightshow on the "Exosphere" with some daylight left, and it didn't disappoint...
...with video skins devoted to the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion...
...and Dorothy's blue and white gingham dress. 
Red sequins provided the perfect backdrop for the Wicked Witch of the East's 50-foot-long legs and 22-foot-tall ruby slippers, sticking out from under the Sphere.
That was just the beginning of the immersive experience of attending The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere—because in the atrium, the preshow begins with the gift shop and Professor Marvel's wagon.
A "mini" Sphere screens scenes from the movie (like Miss Gulch riding her bicycle) on a loop...
...while the scenery from Kansas also takes over the intimidatingly steep escalators (which seem as though they're tall enough to take you right over the rainbow).
I chose my seat carefully to be as centered as possible, not too high and not too low. I really wanted to feel like I was "in" the film.
And when the opening credits started, and expanded from the rectangular screen at center stage to the entire 160,000-square-foot, 240-foot-tall interior of the dome, the whole crowd gasped.
One of the draws to seeing The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere is the use of 4D effects. During the tornado scene—which was truly thrilling—fans blew gusts of wind and tissue paper leaves into the audience. And the on-screen visuals were both dizzying and dazzling.
The movie itself is different, too. Not only is it about a half hour shorter than the original—with entire musical numbers like "If I Were King of the Forest" cut out—but it's also a little more than enhanced by AI.
Sure, it makes sense that artificial intelligence (or CGI, or whatever) would help expand the scenery to fill the dome's curved shape and massive size. But some scenes featured backgrounds entirely re-rendered—without the original hand-painted scenic backdrops and practical effects.
New characters appear in Munchkinland and the Emerald City, too—and their sharpness and crispness doesn't exactly match the filmic look of the characters cropped out of the original print.
Other changes help the audience really get inside the film, like being able to see the poppy field from below and having Glinda the Good Witch's glitter bubble wash over the entire screen.
But the technical limitations of the original film—like the flat optical effect of the Wizard's projected head—led the team behind this version of the film to digitally recreate a new wizard with a new face.
No human actor has been credited with the role in this version, which raises suspicion of AI, although the voice is still of original Wizard/Professor Marvel actor Frank Morgan. And to be honest, as someone who knows The Wizard of Oz very well, I found it incredibly distracting.
I welcome the multi-sensory experience of flying monkeys and apples and snow falling from the ceiling.
And I loved that the show continued in the atrium as we were exiting.
But I didn't expect so much to be changed beyond simple remastering (and rerecording of the orchestral scores). Instead, Judy Garland's 16-year-old skin lost all texture in her close-ups—but the "facetuning" was inconsistent with the other characters, especially the Wicked Witch of the West.
In certain scenes, the shot scale shifted toward extreme close-ups, putting faces front and center rather than lingering on the long, beautiful tableaus of the original. Some "camera movements" were awkward and unnatural, as they were digitally created as part of reframing the scenes.
The end product was a puzzling mixture of doing too much tinkering ($80 million worth), and not doing it well enough. It's not perfect—some of it is so undeniably AI, it looks like a bad TikTok video.
And the shortcomings are noticeable, even to a general audience member like myself—not a film critic, not a technical expert, and not even a purist.
There must be some more modern film that would've made a good candidate for a Sphere debut—like The Matrix, or Avatar, or even Titanic. Why futz with a 1939 film that would supposedly need so many changes?
Well, maybe because the people behind the Sphere want to show what could be done. They wanted a big change from the original. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Remember when Ted Turner moved to colorize hundreds of black-and-white films in the mid-1980s?)
Part of me can't help but think this has something to do—perhaps subconsciously—with the history of The Wizard of Oz specifically in Vegas, with the MGM Grand hotel and casino's long-done theming of Dorothy and the Emerald City and all the rest.
So I guess if this means that new, younger audiences are getting introduced to an 86-year-old film and falling in love with it, that's a good thing. But what they won't understand is that this isn't the real film, it's just some weird dream state version of it.
And if The Wizard of Oz teaches us anything, it's that what really matters is what's real—the real people in our lives, real family, real experiences, real love, and real memories.
While the Sphere offers an exciting adventure—The Wizard of Oz like you've never seen—it's Oz, not Kansas.
Further Reading:
Is ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at Sphere the Future of Cinema? Or the End of It? - The New York Times
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