Mountain biking across slickrock, which is not allowed in national parks, was a head-scratching segment in "National Parks Adventure"

Local TV stations have been carrying ads for the new IMAX movie, National Parks Adventure for several weeks now. So when it opened in Salt Lake on Saturday, I was right there in line for tickets.

It was Saturday of Presidents’ Day weekend, and Hansen Planetarium was jammed. The big theater was nearly full. Good turnout. As I waited in line, I told a few people that I planned to write a review for a website devoted to national parks and asked if they had come specifically for the movie or if they had just happened by. Of nearly a dozen or so, all had come especially for the movie. All of them admitted they were frequent national park visitors, and none of them was what you might call a "millennial."

My first impression of the movie was a disappointment. It features a well-known climber, Conrad Anker, his stepson, and a young lady friend. Together they travel from one park adventure to another. I found myself feeling that a line in a blurb from the movie’s website about “America’s Playgrounds” was too true, and that the film failed to view our parks with the reverence I really believe they deserve.

Much of it seemed loud and full of action, far beyond what most people seated around me would likely be seeking even if they had been some of those millennials. Climbing vertiginous spires in what was either Canyonlands or Arches (they don’t tell), a jaunt partway up Devils Tower, and a hell-bent-for-leather series of mountain biking wildness had me shaking my head. (They really like the supercharged sound systems in the theater, too. It was deafening at times.)

When the movie ended, I asked a few people around me what they thought. All were from Utah or Idaho. One man had worked for the National Park Service in Glacier National Park beginning in 1959 in construction of Mission 66 projects. His comment was, “The scenery was pretty, but I felt they were abusing the parks with some of the things they were doing.”

A young woman was upset with a series of scenes inside an ice cave at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in which stars of the film were destroying some beautiful but delicate feathery crystalline icicles.

“That was terrible,” she said.

I headed for home feeling somewhat dejected. But before dozing off on the train, I heard a couple of younger people with a few small children among them talking about how great the film had been and how they really need to go visit Yellowstone this summer. When I woke from my nap, they were gone so I didn’t talk to them.

After thinking it over on Sunday, I climbed back on the train and headed back again on Presidents’ Day. This time, the theater was jammed full. The line waiting for 3-D glasses was long and filled with families. Again, everyone with whom I spoke had come just to see the movie. It seems those TV ads are doing a good job.

All of them said they were frequent park visitors. Perhaps I had mellowed some over the weekend and this time I found myself watching with less critical eyes. Even so, as I sit here now, it’s still a little hard to overlook some things that seemed to bother not only me, but also some people I spoke to afterwards.

To me, the most glaring omission is a complete failure to mention much of anything about the National Park Service and NOTHING at all about 2016 being the agency's centennial year. There is only one very brief shot that includes a park ranger – and she’s off in the distance.

Narrator Robert Redford tells us a little about how fire plays a role in nature, but accompanying footage is a roaring raging inferno with a roaring raging inferno soundtrack. He tells us, “Redwoods are as vulnerable as a field of wildflowers.” But there’s no explanation, although they do provide some old photos and tell us that redwoods had been logged to near extinction.

Then there are those bike riding scenes again. Redford does mention, almost in passing, that “they traveled a short distance outside the park (Canyonlands, apparently).”

We’re then treated to displays of the same kind of wild riding that makes hiking some forest trails in our mountains worthy of hazardous duty pay. I regret now that I didn’t think to ask any of my fellow movie goers what they thought about that part.

The camera flits from one park scene to another – much of the film features Utah – but there’s little explanation of just where these scenes were shot. I heard people around me whispering guesses as they tried to match what they were seeing with places they had visited.

Probably the most glaring botheration of the whole thing is that the movie almost completely misses the entire Eastern half of the continent. We see only a brief mention of Acadia National Park with a picture of a lighthouse, a segment showing an airboat blasting through the Everglades, and some random shots around Washington, D.C. Aside from that, Pictured Rocks is the only park area mentioned east of the Rockies.

There is absolutely nothing about any historic sites or the myriad of other jewels that make up our collection of parks and monuments. When it was over, I started asking questions again. Comments were interesting and varied. Several folks talked about extreme crowding they had experienced in the parks last season. One especially singled out Zion National Park. “I’ve never seen it like that,” he said. “It was so crowded you couldn’t find a place to park. They really need more parking lots.”

I cringed, and then he added, “But for God’s sake not inside the park. There’s plenty of room out toward Hurricane and let people ride a bus from there.”

I darned near hugged him right then.

Another had caught an error in Redford’s narrative. “Monument Valley isn’t a national park, is it?" they asked.

One family is planning their first visit to Yosemite National Park and are about three days away from the day when they can try to reserve a valley campsite. I asked what they thought of recreation.gov.

“Wonderful,” was their reply. Another woman chimed in, “It’s great to know we’ll have a place to sleep.”

An eight-year old Junior Ranger said the movie's footage of bears catching salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve were “Cool. I want to go there!” His sister loved Devils Tower’s prairie dogs because they were cute and really curious about the camera. But their father remarked that the film seemed to be filled with things a family could never do.

As I left the theater, I found another couple, who turned out to be seasonal rangers at Yellowstone National Park’s Fishing Bridge. “It’s obviously aimed at recruiting young people to come and visit," one said. He mentioned those concerns that only old people are visiting parks now. His partner also lamented two things that had bothered me, too: “That one scene of people only about ten feet from a bison and old home movies of bears climbing over cars should never have been in there.”

Another chimed in with dismay about that icicle destruction at Pictured Rocks.

A father of a young family added, “I wish they’d told us where all those places are so we could try to go see them.”

I asked some if they knew of the maintenance backlog. Most of them were not aware of it. At the light-rail Trax stop outside the Planetarium, I talked a little with some folks about challenges parks face and then someone remarked, “It looks like we’re preaching to the choir here.” I urged everyone to “Keep your eyes open and write letters to your Congressmen.”

(Three of them, by the way, had visited Traveler and had good things to say. One of them even tried to accuse me of being Kurt.)

I did enjoy the movie quite a bit more the second time around, but still feel it missed a flock of great opportunities to educate and simultaneously entertain. The two are not mutually exclusive. The second time, though, I did notice that there were a few places where they at least mention preservation.

The classic story of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir camping in Yosemite is told and we learn that T.R. turned to wild places to heal after his wife and mother died on the same day. The movie does begin with a short shot of a hand picking up a pop can and crumpled snack wrapper and it ends with a Subaru commercial urging us to log on to Subaru’s Zero Landfill Initiative to learn how we can join Subaru in turning our parks into zero landfill sites.

All in all, it’s not a really bad movie. I enjoyed it, but with lots of reservations. I can’t shake my conviction that it misses countless wonderful opportunities to engage a wide range of Americans and interest them in not only enjoying, but protecting our park heritage.

And it really bothered me is that this is an almost completely Caucasian movie. Yes, there’s mention of Native Americans and a shot of prayer flags and medicine bags in trees at Devils Tower. There’s a shot of Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial with no explanation at all, and a couple of still photos of an African American family right at the end mixed in with the credits. Other than that, minorities are definitely a minority. And nowhere do we see a family of any color in action in a park.

Go see it and draw your own conclusions. I think you’ll agree that it could have been a whole lot better.