Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Coming home to the theater
For most people, safely returning to a movie theater can be a big deal. For me, there were additional challenges in going back to a place I have loved since I was a child.
Though I’ve been watching movies in theaters for 50 years, the rush I feel whenever the auditorium lights go down has never left me. It was soul-crushing to think that the last movie I’d see in a theater was the tediously and derivative “I Still Believe,” which managed to make such elemental aspects of being human as faith, love and grief seem so uneventful. They handed me Kleenexes at the screening, which was held in
early March, when a stiff double espresso would have served me better.
While the specter of dying from a virus that has hurt some of my friends has kept me at home, I faced an additional obstacle to cleansing my palate from that insomnia cure. At the end of May, I fractured my femur trying to deliver some ice cream to an injured friend. For two and a half months, I couldn’t even leave my home without assistance, much less climb to the stairs to the reserved seats at my local theater.
It’s common knowledge exhibitors have placed a lot of their future on Christopher Nolan’s latest offering “Tenet.” After catching the movie Aug. 26 at the AMC Studio 28 in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe, I’ll say while home theater systems have improved exponentially over the last several years, “Tenet” still belongs on the IMAX screen.
The exotic locales, car chases, fisticuffs and gunplay would not have looked as impressive on my 17-inch monitor or iPad. Nolan has been downright obnoxious about his love for the big screen experience. His statements before the film’s release almost sounded as if he were begging the audience to risk their lives to see his movie.
With a crowd of six masked fellow viewers (all critics) sitting several yards from one another in a room designed to hold hundreds, I faced no danger except for the stairs.
If Nolan came off as needlessly cavalier about viewer safety, his sense of how to make his movies worthy of an auditorium shows up in every frame. As John David Washington and Robert Pattinson pursue bad guys across highways and time, Nolan practically puts viewers in the car with them.
On a screen larger than my apartment, Nolan’s images clearly got the proper treatment. Sound was another matter. When the house lights faded, the speakers blasted so loudly that my peer sitting 20 yards away looked like the fellow in the old Maxell cassette tape commercials being practically knocked out of his seat by the force of the speakers. While it’s nice of the company to welcome back its customers, it would be nice to still have our hearing intact after the show is over.
As the film progressed, the movie remained loud, and some of the dialogue got lost in the mix. It was tempting to blame AMC for the fact that expositional banter was being lost, but critics in other cities have made similar observations.
Both Washington and Pattinson have crisp speaking voices so they shouldn’t be as muffled as Tom Hardy’s Bane was in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” In “The Lighthouse,” I could follow every word Pattinson said despite the fact he was speaking an obscure antiquated dialect that’s guaranteed to send viewers running toward dictionaries. Here he wasn’t doing anything special, but I had to adjust my ears to separate his voice from the din.
The performers lean into each other as if they are relaying vital information, but it’s tricky to tell the exact wording when it counts. As a fan of Kansas City’s Robert Altman (“M*A*S*H,” “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” “Gosford Park”), I know how overlapping or obscured dialogue can be used to heighten drama or tell the story. I’m not sure that’s the case here.
I’ve recently acquired a soundbar for my TV, and it provides me sound that I used to only hear in a theater. I’m curious to know if a Blu-ray of “Tenet” will sound better at home. While I got through all of the 2 ½ hours of “Tenet” without squirming in my seat, I was struck by how much I miss being able to turn on captions when I watch British movies where the dialects are unfamiliar to American crowds and the ability to rewind when I might have blinked. Nolan doesn’t let viewers stop for anything.
It’s hard to say how regular screenings will go. Several theaters are using advanced ticketing and are dividing up the auditoriums to keep viewers from infecting one another. At our preview screening, only courtesy and maybe dislike of each other kept my Kansas City critical peers apart from each other.
In the lavatories, only a sign advising viewers to stay six feet away from each other keeps patrons from standing next to each other at the urinals. It seemed a poor defense against a virus that thrives on close contact.
Similarly, the chain allows viewers to remove their masks as they’re eating concessions. The stands were closed when I saw the film, so we didn’t have that option. Theaters make their money off popcorn and drinks, so I’d be curious to know how they can keep spittle from getting onto other customers.
If theater owners really want us to return, they might also want to address concerns that aren’t about avoiding biohazards. The YouTube channel It’s a Southern Thing has a hilarious mock commercial for “AMC-at-Home,” which allows home viewers to experience overpriced concessions, dirty auditoriums and obnoxious patrons. Hearing fellow viewers cheering and gasping does add to experience, but it would be nice if, in order to keep theaters in the black, we didn’t have to put up with unwanted audio commentary tracks or going broke ourselves.