![]() Its staging is awkward, making the mundane machinery of a theater a fresh distraction as its supplemental screening material draws your eye. But what I saw was an atmospheric horror movie whose scares were hardly enhanced and moodiness was spoiled by being woefully overlit. I wonder what The Meg might have looked like, with underwater stretches becoming submersive, perhaps with the shadow of a shark glinting in the distance. The woods offered possibilities, as any movement could snatch one’s peripheral vision and set off fear. Stone hallways stretching out did little to add to the atmosphere as they offer no new visual information or tension. ![]() And my fruitless searching means I may have missed the scares put forth in the center screen. I noticed no additional scares or nuns hiding in the side screens. I marvel that The Nun is how ScreenX is making its New York debut.* In it, this format is used for little but expanding the frame. Looking over the press kit, I see a slew of action movies have gotten the ScreenX treatment worldwide, including Kingsman: The Golden Circle, The Meg and Black Panther. Otherwise, the walls sat grey and empty…save for the projectors and exit lights. So ScreenX’s use was mostly for adding atmosphere to scare setpieces. But, there’s not much in the way of action in The Nun. This was the highlight of the experience, adding a dizzying verve to the sequence. And as he spins in search of the nasty nun who hunts him, the whole room seems to spin with him. When a frightened villager (Jonas Bloquet) runs through the woods, dark trees lined the walls. When the young novitiate played by Taissa Farmiga travels down a dank and dark stone hallway, the side screens stretch its walls out into the audience. In the film itself, ScreenX only came to life during select scenes. ScreenX does not mimic human vision, but offers something clunkier that takes some getting used to. The experience is further marred by the slightly jarred angle on either side, as if you glued two photos of the same setting together, but one is slightly crooked. Instead, the seams at the wall sever that sensation. So, the image is not seamless like the “panoramic” sales pitch implies. The movie’s atmospheric shadows never felt all that dark because of all this light spilling across the theater.Īnother snag, you’re still in a standard box theater. Which is a first, but bad news for The Nun. One projector was angled in such a way that its light spilled so completely onto me that I was able to read my critic’s notebook with ease. In addition to the one behind the back wall, there were two on each side wall, making the theater far brighter than any I’d been in before. To get this ScreenX effect of 270-degrees of cinema, at least five projectors were used. Now, they were a recurring distraction, and not the only one. But that’s when the theater is dark, and you’re only looking dead ahead, absorbed in the movie. Now, years of going to the movies may have trained us to block out these neon distractions. ![]() Which means, they still must contain lit-up exit signs. First off, these side screens are still walls in a movie theater. It was interesting, but already I was noticing flaws. In another, the side walls expanded the scene of an animated short-say a sprawling office packed with cubicles-then switched to more abstract imagery, some paperwork or a throbbing heart, to accentuate the meaning of the scene playing out in the center screen. The side walls became the left and right of the car, with buildings, vehicles, and vicious robots zipping past. In one short, the audience was put in the driver’s seat during a car chase. They were light-colored and smooth, perfect for the projectors to flash images upon them that extended the aspect ratio out beyond the ends of the front screen and back into the theater. Unlike a standard theater, the walls were not covered with dark paint or sound-muffling carpet. That is until the lights went down.Īhead of the movie, a five-minute demonstration played, which was made up of three shorts intended to show how ScreenX displays differently. And it didn’t look discernibly different from any other theater. The theater at the Regal Union Square Stadium 14 was small with stadium seating. After taking off in South Korea, this curious gimmick is coming to the US, branching out with Regal theaters in New York and San Francisco with the release of Warner Bros.’s The Nun.Īt a special screening in Manhattan, I sat down to watch the latest film in the Conjuring series in ScreenX. ![]() But the latest amped up cinema experience is ScreenX, a “panoramic 270-degree cinematic format” that aims to immerse audiences into the world of the movie like never before.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |