The reality of VR
One of my favourite films of last year, Jonathan Demme’s glorious live-concert documentary Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids, never opened theatrically, and outside of a handful of screenings in Toronto, New York and Knoxville, it remains impossible to see on the big screen. But as it happens there is a way to see Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids as it was intended. The solution does not require a colossal home-theatre system or floor-to-ceiling projection. The work-around takes advantage of another technological novelty, one not often thought to put to this use. Want to enjoy Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids as though you’re doing so in staggering IMAX? Set it up in virtual reality.
Virtual reality has of course been imagined as the future of moviegoing since its inception. But what I’m writing about has nothing to do with immersive 180-degree video. You don’t slip on your cumbersome headset and whirl around the arena floor gawking in awe of the impression that you’re really there. Virtual-reality headsets aren’t used for virtual-reality programming exclusively. Their secret appeal as cinematic apparatus lies in what they do for an ordinary 2D screen.
When you don the Playstation VR headset, for instance, whatever happens to be on the television at the moment materializes before your eyes on a prodigious scale. It feels as though you’ve entered a pitch-black auditorium and are sitting in front of a three-storey movie screen. Open Netflix, or pop in a Blu-ray, and suddenly a film you’d otherwise be watching stretched across a 50-inch TV seems to be projected in all its theatrical glory.
Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids looks nearly as good in virtual-reality as it did when I saw it at the Scotiabank Theatre during TIFF last September. It looks good enough, anyway, to persuade me that maybe virtual-reality really is the future of home moviegoing – just not in the sense the virtual-reality manufacturers believe. True 180-degree video, with its dizzying gyrations and comprehensive see-it-all views, still strikes me as a fleeting gimmick, either so primitive in its evolution that it won’t seem serious for years to come or so basically unsophisticated that it will never be more than a flash in the pan. But perhaps we ought to embrace VR for what it does to the experience of watching movies rather than how it might change how we make them. That’s a future I can believe for real.