<\/p>\n
At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, there has always been something about the Sphere that\u2019s rubbed me the wrong way. The orbicular theater, uncanny and monolithic, is parked like a spaceship on the northern reaches of the Las Vegas Strip with technical specifications that boggle the mind. The Sphere, fashioned by MSG Entertainment, contains a 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED screen, equivalent to about three football fields, that pumps out crystalline images so bright, clear, and rich with detail that they threaten to melt the skin off your bones.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a genuinely remarkable work of technology\u2014I am not trying to be a Luddite here. Instead, my gripes are more philosophical. When the Sphere opened to the public in 2023 with a U2 residency, I watched as clips circulated through social media of Bono\u2014a man who has thought longer and harder about the subtleties of being a compelling rock musician than almost anyone who has ever lived\u2014dwarfed by a hypersaturated vista of mountains, and deserts, and sunlight, glowing on the monstrous Titantron behind him. Bono was performing \u201cWhere the Streets Have No Name,\u201d a song about the resilience of the human spirit, and I just found something depressing about all 20,000 people in the Sphere contemplating those ideas\u2014singing along, hands in the air\u2014while nevertheless staring at the largest television anyone has ever built. Is the point of live music to be humbled by the overwhelming forces of machinery? Or, perhaps, is it more rewarding to connect with the people playing the instruments? It seems like an easy answer to me.<\/p>\n
But whatever\u2014I\u2019m clearly in the minority, because the Sphere has been a runaway success. Artists turn to the theater to inject some much-needed juice into ailing concert tours: The Backstreet Boys wielded every ounce of the Sphere\u2019s indomitable stature to distract from the fact that the principal members are all in their 40s and 50s. The Eagles seem to be at the Sphere all the time now, perhaps because a high-fidelity light show is required to stay awake for the entirety of \u201cHotel California.\u201d Phish will be making landfall in the structure next year, which is a match made in heaven, and the same goes for the reunited\u2014and increasingly depressing\u2014No Doubt. (Kenny Chesney will also be taking his talents to the Sphere in 2026, but the less said about that, the better.)<\/p>\n
However, on the vacant dates, when a legacy act isn\u2019t occupying center stage, the venue has managed to squeeze out tourist dollars by morphing into a prohibitively expensive movie theater. More specifically, starting in August, anyone in Las Vegas could purchase tickets to twice-daily screenings of a version of The Wizard of Oz <\/em>that had been retrofitted to meet the Sphere\u2019s gargantuan dimensions. The pitch is simple: With the automating power of A.I., the Sphere could expand the cloistered horizons of Oz\u2014allowing the Yellow Brick Road to serpentine farther into the distance, providing more open sky for the silhouettes of flying monkeys to soar across, and so on. Combined with a juiced soundscape, some CGI flourishes, and a couple of haptic, 4D gimmicks, perhaps you could convince ambling day-trippers to spend $180 on a movie that might as well be in the public domain. It felt like a pretty hard bargain to me, but I was already in town reporting on Las Vegas\u2019 precipitous decline<\/a>. A trip to the Sphere\u2014which the city appears to be banking on to salvage its flagging tourism numbers\u2014was compulsory.<\/p>\n And so, after traversing the maze of corridors from the gilded Venetian into the Sphere\u2019s foyer, I ascended several steep escalators that make up the structure\u2019s interior\u2014nervously eyeing the vertigo-inducing chasm of the concave interior that slowly spread out below my feet. After arriving at the summit, I found myself perched at a harsh corner in the upper balcony\u2014the cheap seats\u2014with the entirety of my peripheral vision swallowed up by the vast LED canvas. There is no escape in the Sphere. The walls are screens. The ceilings are screens. The floor, swooping underneath you at an impossible angle, is a screen, too. The theater was surprisingly busy for a Thursday afternoon screening, but legends of the Sphere\u2019s indomitability have clearly spread far and wide. (One woman, from California, had taken it upon herself to cosplay in Dorothy\u2019s gingham dress for the occasion. I spied a couple of Elphabas as well.) Once everyone got settled in with their $18 Stellas, the digital curtains peeled apart, and the show rumbled to life. Every inch of the Sphere transformed into an arid, black-and-white Midwestern sky, with the film\u2019s daintily scripted logo hanging in the center, piercing our faces with electric light. There was no doubt about it, we weren\u2019t in Kansas anymore.<\/p>\n The Wizard of Oz, <\/em>it must be said, was released in the summer of 1939, about a month before World War II splintered across Europe. The most transcendent moment in the film is when Dorothy wakes up in her parallel dimension, and the sepia imagery of the dust bowl drains away to reveal glorious Technicolor. It\u2019s a blockbuster moment that feels absolutely quaint when compared to the roiling horsepower of the Sphere, and\u2014if you are being charitable\u2014you could argue that by presenting a nouveau rendition of that paradigm-shifting splendor for a modern audience, the Sphere honors the original\u2019s legacy. But personally speaking, after settling into this highly digitized interpretation of an all-time classic, my qualms were right in place. If you are a certain type of film nerd, I don\u2019t know how you could come to any other conclusion than that the Sphere\u2019s version of The Wizard of Oz <\/em>is, in a word, a defilement. The goal is to bring an all-time classic up to zippy, TikTok speed, and that means its producers have allowed themselves some significant liberties.<\/p>\n The run time here has been curtailed significantly, and the gaps left behind have been crammed with gratuitous Marvel-toned gaudiness. You know those opening scenes of Dorothy gallivanting around Kansas, meeting all of the characters who will soon become facsimiles in her dreamworld\u2014providing the thematic underpinning that girds the film together? Articulating a thesis that Dorothy is a resident of a cruel world full of scammers and charlatans who can only be thwarted by the pure of heart? Yeah, a bunch of that has been cut out. In its place is a ridiculous upscaling of the tornado sequence, where the Sphere literally takes us inside <\/em>the vortex. Thunder booms. Gusts of artificial wind pound the audience. Paper leaves flutter down from the rafters. It is legitimately terrifying, immediately memorable, and, undeniably, a component part of a much different movie than the whimsy and high camp of Oz<\/em>. (I half-expected Glen Powell to turn up<\/a>.)<\/p>\n