The Vomit Express
It's raining buckets here, so we went to a showing of The Polar Express. It was playing at the Tech Museum's IMAX theater. I haven't seen an IMAX movie in about ten years, but it was rated G and involves a train, so it had to be good, right?
Wrong! This theater was like a large sphere. Before it started we thought maybe it was used for planetarium shows and the picture would be on the curved wall facing us. No, it was above our heads and you had to sit back and awkwardly crane your neck to see anything. The chairs didn't tip back one whit.
Maybe a regular IMAX movie (those nature specials) wouldn't be so bad, but a CG kids movie is filled with swooping shots of runaway trains and crazy elf antics. Anytime anything scary happened (a kid chasing his ticket on the top of the train, a crusty ghost hobo cackling at the boy, the train skidding across a frozen lake with no tracks nor brakes) the soundtrack was so loud Wini would plug her ears and hide her head. You could hear lots of kids crying and screaming over the mega-loud music.
Luckily for Wini, the movie gets happier when the train reaches the North Pole. I had a different problem, though. The swooping camera was so realistic I had serious motion sickness from about five minutes into the film. Even when there was a quiet, still moment that I could watch, the picture was so ginormous (imagine a 20-foot high nose on the face of the main character in a typical close-up) that it made my eyes water just trying to focus. And those shots were wedged between nausea-inducing scenes of wild slides and careening trains. I had to cover my eyes with my scarf and just listen to the story, all the while squeezing Wini's hand and telling her it would work out all right in the end.
If there hadn't been a whole row of folks on either side of us blocking us in - and the seats were so steep it gave me vertigo to look down - I'm sure we would have crawled out before the end. As it was, I was scared that if I tried to step over someone's feet and I'd topple down the precipice.
And couldn't they hire even one more actor? Why did Tom Hanks have to voice every character over the age of 12?
The movie showing after ours? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. They ought to put barf bags on every seat.
3 comments:
What a miserable experience! (Sounds familiar - sorry you inherited this problem.) I hope Wini withstood it better.
You should send the Tech Museum a link to 'The Vomit Express.' Maybe they would at least fix the sound.
On the topic of movies ... we went to the open captioned showing (on Christmas Day) of "The Chronicles of Narnia". The remake is good although parts may be a bit upsetting for very young kids. (My kids grew up on the older version that was periodically shown on PBS.)
Rachel and friends had planned to see the IMAX version of "The Polar Express" at the Smithsonian (I think) but it didn't work out. I'm sure that would have been a more pleasant experience than yours.
CP
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who felt this way. You basically typed out the same thing I was telling people about my experience. I've seen other movies in the IMAX with no problem, but the unrealistic CGI CONSTANT CAMERA SWOOPING made me so sick that I had to leave the theatre.
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