No city on earth feels more like the mythical land of Oz than Las Vegas — with its tacky towers and the hordes of dreamers who make the trek, desperately hoping to have their wishes granted — all of which makes it the ideal place to try a wild experience like “The Wizard of Oz” at Sphere.

It’s hard not to be blown away — quite literally, at times — by the augmented reality aspects of this first-of-its-kind show, which include drone-powered flying monkeys and an indoor tornado. But the visual cheats used to overhaul what director Victor Fleming and his cast put to film all those years ago (including extensive use of eyesore AI) are another matter.

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I love it when someone imagines a new way to heighten the experience of watching movies. When Francis Ford Coppola made “Captain EO” for Disneyland back in the ’80s, I was the kid who reached out his hand to touch the flying Fuzzball as it hovered before our faces.

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I’ve scratched the Odorama cards on cue for John Waters’ “Polyester” and giggled when “The Tingler” got loose in the theater (I’d carefully selected a chair rigged to vibrate, since only a few get the buzz). I’ve done large-format experiences like Imax and Omni, and even 4DX, where you pay to sit in a chair that throttles and kicks you during the show, spraying water and wind in your face at strategic moments.

So I wasn’t about to miss this fresh way to experience “The Wizard of Oz.” Sphere honcho James L. Dolan — who’s amusingly billed as “chief Muckety-Muck” in the end credits — clearly comes from a place of love for the movie, setting out to immerse audiences within what is arguably the most beloved Hollywood film of all time (Variety named it #2 on our own Greatest Movies list).

But beaming the 1939 classic as it was shot onto the Sphere isn’t an option. The original film is too grainy, and it was conceived to fill a far smaller rectangular screen, not a 16K, 160,000 square-foot field of LEDs that arcs over your head and extends to fill your peripheral vision.

That’s where the controversial decision to use Google-powered AI comes in: Every shot of the film had to be deconstructed, reformatted and upres’d to work within the new format. If Dorothy and friends appear from the waist up in a shot, cutting-edge AI could be used to extrapolate the rest of their bodies by referencing how they look in other footage. And if someone wanders in or out of the frame, AI might imagine what they were doing off-camera.

Objectively speaking, this would be a great test case for the technology, wherein a creative team uses generative AI as a tool to attempt something that would be impossible to achieve with existing visual effects technology. The enhanced visuals would be just one aspect of an augmented viewing experience that transforms the film into a live event, complete with a whooshing indoor tornado.

Purists can argue about whether it’s reasonable........

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