Running less than half the length of standard features, Imax science documentaries have been fairly reliable, family-friendly attractions for decades. But these films may never have been more valuable to a moviegoer than now, when so much of what we see from Hollywood is virtually animated and patently fake.

At its best, "Galapagos 3D: Nature's Wonderland" is spectacular simply for being real. Near the start of the film, there's an enchanting shot of a yawning seal that effortlessly accomplishes the movie's basic mission: to remind us of the otherworldly beauty on Planet Earth, and to provide images of the Galapagos archipelago that most of us could never afford to see for ourselves.

The film is technically accomplished and even transporting at times, making the remote Pacific islands on the equator, with their yearlong warmth and sunshine, look suitably like paradise.

The glaring problem with "Galapagos 3D" is that it's a movie about the wonders of evolution that never once mentions natural selection or even Charles Darwin, whose work was largely based on his study of the islands. From the unscientific evidence here, the film's target audience of young kids would think the animals collectively decided on their adaptations themselves.

Neither does the film give even the slightest sense of modern man's effect on nature, or of how endangered are the creatures, climates and vegetation of the Galapagos. Supplanting the British film's original voice-overs by writer David Attenborough, the pro-forma narration by Jeff Corwin is dutifully breathy and condescending, while the narrative is nearly random in its rambling.

That said, there are pleasures to be taken. The major movie stars under contract here include a cave-dwelling spider/scorpion with little need for light; a 40-foot-long whale shark that migrates yearly to the Galapagos for reasons unknown; an ancient and wise-looking tortoise that dwells in a volcano crater, weighs half a ton and lives 150 years, and, with its cute, stubby hands, a portly cormorant that, in the absence of predators, doesn't even need to fly, only to swim and eat.

So, too, the movie is racy, at least by the standards of Imax docs. The beak-rubbing flirtations of waved albatross are, in a word, hot, while the mating rituals of blue-footed boobies, whose male specimens endeavor to convince females of their excellent appendages, make as fascinating a study of heterosexual gamesmanship as anything in "Gone Girl."

Alas, the voice-overs regularly reveal the movie's dangerously shallow view of nature in the 21st century, as when Corwin concludes that the Galapagos island animals have "taken on the conditions and won," as if we at the top of the food chain have nothing to do with the ultimate fates of those below.

Rob Nelson writes about movies.