A movie theater on a boat? What'll they think of next!

Because I have yet to experience my personal white whale of a vacation -- a luxury cruise -- I have also yet to go to the movies at sea.

Well, now I can tick that particular item off my bucket list.

On our way back from Tasmania on Sunday, I did what I hadn't done the previous Saturday night on my trip over -- watch The Addams Family aboard the Spirit of Tasmania, one of two ships that does the ten-hour Bass Strait crossing between Victoria and Tasmania for people who want to bring their own cars on holiday in Tassie (or vice versa, I suppose).

It was very hard to skip the 11 p.m. showing last Saturday, because the sheer novelty of it all but propelled me through the door. But because I texted my wife that I was planning to do it, she gently chided me about whether I'd want to watch it again the following weekend when I had my kids in tow.

And I'm glad I waited, for a couple reasons. There was no kid-friendly alternative I hadn't already seen -- in fact, all five other movies on this daytime crossing (Abominable, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Ad Astra, Downton Abbey and Last Christmas) were movies I'd already seen. See, they actually have two movie theaters, if you want to get right down to it.

The second reason? Yeah, I wouldn't have wanted to watch this thing twice.

But first, the theater. The screen was the smallest thing about it, as the actual "auditorium" (if you want to call it that) came equipped with about 30 legitimately theater-style seats. I probably wouldn't have wanted to watch something like Ad Astra in such an environment (though I didn't like that film anyway), but The Addams Family turned out to be just fine.

My only complaint was the timing of the show, as I might have liked the movie to break up the ten hours a bit better. By playing at 9:30, only an hour after we'd set sail (so to speak), and by ending before 11 a.m., it did leave my kids wondering how soon we would be there way too soon after it ended.

But yeah, just doing it at all was really fun, and they liked the movie better than I did, so that was good.

Oh, I guess it was fine in the end. But even though the property it was based on came first, it did remind me rather too much of the Hotel Transylvania series, the first of which I loved, with diminishing returns on each subsequent installment.

Also, I've decided I can make a pretty solid prediction about an animated movie. The more characters appear like caricatures (the rotund really rotund, the tall and skinny really tall and skinny), the less likely the movie is to be any good. And, like, all the tall and skinny characters in this movie had pencil thin legs and arms, which tended to diminish the amount Wednesday Addams was supposed to stand out from them.

Co-director Conrad Vernon is also the veteran of multiple Madagascar movies, so there's that.

The one really unique aspect of the experience was the fact that you could feel the boat rocking from time to time, giving it almost its own natural 4DX experience.

Maybe Ad Astra would have been a good movie to see that way, after all. Don't astronauts sometimes simulate space flight in water?