Pause in movie snaps suspension of disbelief
The experience at the Eden Cinemas, near Paceville, Malta, left something to be desired. The screen, seats and setting were fine. Climbing up a few flights of stairs to get to the theater in time was an exercise in, well, exercise. None of the physical aspects detracted from the show itself. Instead, it was the unexpected and unplanned, by the movie at least, intermission.
Spoiler Alert: I was watching Interstellar and the movie had gotten to the part where Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are blasting back into space. The scene shows a white astronaut suit face down in the water, and the screen goes blank. No warning. No transition. Movie off, lights on, people moving around.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes pass, and the lights go down and the movie continues, but it doesn’t start from the same scene that it left. Instead, I am left to wonder if I missed some vitally important intervening scene between the dead astronaut and the return to the space station.
That may be okay, except this intermission made the one unforgivable error when it comes to telling a story, especially a sci-fi story. Never break the suspension of disbelief. An intermission that is so abrupt doesn’t take the viewer out of the film; it rather grabs the view by the underwear, gives him or her a wedgie, and throws the viewer into the dingy alley out back where rabid curs wait to ravage unwary movie goers.
This moment was one of the tensest in the movie, so to have it cut off really tainted the movie for me. I cannot say definitively that I would have enjoyed the movie any more than I did, what I can say was that in the moment, I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. There had to be a better place to put that intermission, and the movie should have comeback at the same point it left, maybe half a second before.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t go see any more (or any fewer) movies while I am in Malta. (There are plenty of things to do without having to go to the theater.) It just means that I will choose my movies with greater care. Yes, I want to see The Imitation Game, Fury and several other films, but I may just save them for when I get back to the United States.
Spoiler Alert: I was watching Interstellar and the movie had gotten to the part where Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are blasting back into space. The scene shows a white astronaut suit face down in the water, and the screen goes blank. No warning. No transition. Movie off, lights on, people moving around.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 minutes pass, and the lights go down and the movie continues, but it doesn’t start from the same scene that it left. Instead, I am left to wonder if I missed some vitally important intervening scene between the dead astronaut and the return to the space station.
That may be okay, except this intermission made the one unforgivable error when it comes to telling a story, especially a sci-fi story. Never break the suspension of disbelief. An intermission that is so abrupt doesn’t take the viewer out of the film; it rather grabs the view by the underwear, gives him or her a wedgie, and throws the viewer into the dingy alley out back where rabid curs wait to ravage unwary movie goers.
This moment was one of the tensest in the movie, so to have it cut off really tainted the movie for me. I cannot say definitively that I would have enjoyed the movie any more than I did, what I can say was that in the moment, I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. There had to be a better place to put that intermission, and the movie should have comeback at the same point it left, maybe half a second before.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t go see any more (or any fewer) movies while I am in Malta. (There are plenty of things to do without having to go to the theater.) It just means that I will choose my movies with greater care. Yes, I want to see The Imitation Game, Fury and several other films, but I may just save them for when I get back to the United States.