Keeping your screen in mind

Canada’s largest chain of movie theatres has announced it will open its first multi-screen cinemas that are intended to offer a panoramic experience this summer.

Star Trek Beyond isn’ t exactly a revolution in filmed entertainment, but for Canadians at least, it might mark the beginning of a change in the way we watch movies.

Concurrent with the Justin Lin-directed entry into the blockbuster sci-fi franchise, Cineplex is debuting a new technology that they hope will encourage people to continue coming out to the theatre for all their movie needs. The Barco Escape theatres — currently available at the Scotiabank Theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton — feature three screens set across the front of the theatre for what Barco, the company who created the setup, calls a panoramic viewing experience. In practice it essentially means that your entire field of view, at least horizontally, is filled.

At a cynical first blush, it’s not hard to dismiss the Escape as just the latest in a series of gimmicks that multiplexes have employed to convince people to continue coming to multiplexes. Cineplex in particular has been quite good at coming up with these, and have enjoyed reasonably solid results for their troubles, at least for their bottom line.

This fall should see them debut Canada’s first commercial-film 4DX theatre — up until now the tech has only been used in theme parks, which is about as apt a description of the water-spraying, feettickling, smell-o-vision experience as I can muster — to go with their lineup of restauranty VIP, bombastic AVX and immersive IMAX screens.

Truth be told, there isn’t much in the (horizontally) expanded version of Star Trek Beyond to convince you that Escape is much more than a cool trick. In the film, maybe a quarter of which actually uses all three screens, the Escape tech isn’t much more than an underline on the big set pieces. As with the much-ballyhooed but largely underwhelming IMAX experience, our view balloons whenever we reach a particularly stirring bit of action or a notably gorgeous CGI landscape.

There are subtler things going on with Escape’s setup, though, that suggest it could be a genuinely unique experience once — maybe if — filmmakers become more comfortable with what it can do. A few promo reels Barco displayed at an event in Toronto showed some hints that Escape is, unlike IMAX, not just a bigger, more consuming version of the standard film shot. (Although, for what it’s worth, the wrap-like effect of the panorama already seems like a more natural way to truly immerse someone in something like a point-of-view shot.)

For starters, the triple screen setup offers a natural opportunity to split the screen, showing simultaneous angles on the same event, or even three separate but related shots. In the short bursts Barco displayed, these had the tendency to get a little overwhelming, and there’s infinite possibility here for more visual noise to drown out the impact of a straight-ahead moment, the same way that staccato edits and whizzing camera shots can be more disorienting than thrilling in the wrong hands.

It’s also not hard to imagine, though, how a director or cinematographer with a suitably organized mind — Michel Gondry jumps out immediately — could use them. You could do something like suggest concordances across time frames, or even just the inherent unreliability of an individual perspective. Picture watching, say, three different breakups play out simultaneously, the sad excuses and selfjustifications ringing in harmony, or even just how cool it might be to watch Tony Jaa kick ass from three angles at once.

If the potential for full-detail split screen is the flashier change, though, the subtler one will come when creators begin treating the triple screen as one large canvas, as opposed to just wings tacked on to the middle one. Star Trek Beyond is lousy with the latter kind of treatment, no doubt because it knows that the vast majority of people are not going to see the ultrawide version. The fact that there’s little more than filler at the edges, though, serves as a reminder of just how much more a skilled director could manipulate with a screen we actually have to shift our view to focus on.

For all the painterly techniques artists can use to make a beautiful shot — you have probably at least heard about the rule of thirds or the golden ratio, but I would highly recommend watching some Every Frame a Painting for a more thorough breakdown — a simple understanding usually dictates that whatever is most important to us pops up in the middle of the screen. Its rare for anything filmed to consistently use extremes: a good notable example of the technique is currently on television in the form of Mr. Robot, which often pushes its focal points to the edges of the screen, which tends to create a disquieting effect.

With this much real estate — the full panoramic effect is about a 7:1 ratio, or almost exactly three times as wide as the forcefully “cinematic” 2.40:1 ratio that we tend to associate with those old-time epics — there is a possibility for visual moods and dramatic effects that we will have properly never seen before. And, for that matter, likely won’t be able to reproduce outside the cinema. That is, of course, a lot of ifs. For Star Trek Beyond, at least, Escape is basically a slightly reconfigured IMAX, a marginally different way to appreciate the effects wizardry of the big Hollywood blockbuster. But there’s potential for a pure cinematic experience that I don’t think any of the other recent innovations, if we can properly call them that, allow. Assuming, of course, it sticks around long enough for someone to find a way to use them.