Watching movies with my body

Finally, a 2020 cinematic first that isn't somehow related to COVID.

Thursday night I was planning to go to the local shopping center -- which is only open two nights a week, Thursday and Friday, though it will soon expand those hours for holiday shopping -- and I wanted to top off my trip with a movie. I haven't been going to the Hoyts at Highpoint lately because they don't take my critics card, and I have traditionally wanted to see movies for free -- it was the least payment I thought I deserved for being a film critic.

Now that I'm trying to help prop up movie theaters as a viable ongoing entity, though, I've been mostly paying for movie tickets since the cinemas reopened about a month ago. That put Hoyts back on the table, and it had a nice convenience factor to it -- I'd already be in the actual place the movie was playing, rather than having to drive to a free-standing cinema after I finished my shopping.

As I was perusing the options, I landed on The Witches -- or Roald Dahl's The Witches, if they insist -- which was Thursday's "big release," as far as "big releases" are a thing in COVID times. In fact, it was just the big Australian release, as I learned afterward that an American friend watched it on VOD with his kids months ago. (Actually, on HBOMax less than two months ago, if the poster above is to be believed.) But it made for the most obvious option for something to review, as I had not written anything since my Monday review of The Trouble With Being Born, and I usually like to get at least two up per week.

As I was looking at showtimes and the little graphics that appear next to them -- like if it is a SAVER session, or if it is playing in X-treme Screen -- I noticed a weird yellow icon for the perfectly timed 8:30 session that I had never seen before. Not only had I never seen it, but no other movies at the theater had that same yellow icon.

Clicking into it, I discovered that The Witches was playing in a so-called DBox theater. It's new as of the renovations the cinema was planning to do this year anyway, which I'm sure they did extra fast without any pesky customers to slow them down.

Yep, it's one of those theaters where the chairs move.

Though I have been hearing about this for quite some time now, I haven't yet experienced one myself -- nor, to my recollection, actually been to a multiplex where they even had one. I knew Thursday night would be my opportunity to change that, even if it was $28.50 per ticket -- a significant increase from the normal $21 or $22, and an even more significant increase from the rate I have previously been accustomed to paying ($0). But I wasn't going to turn down this opportunity.

Turns I kind of had to run back to my car to dump the presents I'd bought to ensure I made it to the movie on time, and felt especially glad I had asked them when the actual movie was set to start. Hoyts is the kind of place that barrages you with a good 26 minutes of ads and trailers from the movie's scheduled start time, but my recent experience at Tenet, where I actually missed the opening minute or two despite arriving only four minutes late for the session, taught me I should err on the side of caution here. Glad I asked, because they told me the 8:30 movie would be starting at 8:38.

At about 8:37 I was seated, and confronted with a DBox controller on my right armrest. 

There were four settings on this controller, and I immediately regretted not doing more prep work to figure out what I needed to know about this experience.

I had hoped we'd get an onscreen slide with instructions, but the only such DBox-specific message was related to safety. We were warned not to get up from our seat while DBox was in motion, and be sure to shut it off before we did so.

And then the feature started.

For a moment I was worried that I'd have it set wrong and it wouldn't work, and I'd have to leave the theater (and miss part of the movie) to ask what I was doing wrong. But I quickly realized that the four settings must relate to the three levels of possible intensity, and then zero intensity. The lowest setting had a red light associated with it, which I assume meant it was turned off. Then the other three had green lights, each a little longer than the one before it. I turned it all the way up and hoped for the best.

It took a few minutes before I was subjected to any rumbling, but sure enough, rumble away it did. This was as a car was driving up to a house along a gravel road, and sure enough, the seat did its best to approximate the feeling of a tire going over gravel, if you were sitting in such a car. It wasn't really duplicating an exact human experience -- if you are sitting in a car, you don't actually feel the gravel, do you? You probably hear it more than you feel it, though I must say, it's been a while since I've driven on a gravel road. In any case it was the first DBox-suitable moment in the film, and it did not disappoint.

From there, the chair did things probably every two or three minutes, depending of course on what was happening on screen. It was mostly some kind of variation on that rumbling, though within that, there were a number of things it could do. It could kind of bang to approximate an object falling, or a jump scare -- these must be really interesting during a horror movie. It could sort of buck to resemble something more unsteady going on. I even discovered it could turn slightly from side to side, as in a moment where a character turns his head quickly to see catch something leaving his field of view, and then back again. 

I thought I perceived some slight leaning forward or backward at certain points too, but that may have been my imagination, and it's kind of harder to tell in that situation, as you also have the option of reclining in the seat through a different controller, which I did. But maybe only a slight leaning is enough to create the visceral effect they were trying to create.

Perhaps the most interesting moment came when the camera is tracking a cat dropping down to the ground on the outside of a house, and as it reaches each new ledge on its descent, the chair created the sense of kind of dropping -- a little shift in the weight that felt similar, in a way, to if a cat were to jump into your arms. Except at the same time you are also the cat, and its slight overbalancing as it adjusts to each new level of the descent is part of the experience. Anyway, this particular sensation was highly effective.

In all, the number of things a chair can do is sort of limited, and after half the movie it was kind of "you've felt one, you've felt them all." I wasn't sure if there were going to be other effects in this theater, like a bit of a smoke machine piped in, or flashing lights that didn't have anything to do with the movie. I wasn't sure how much into the gimmicky world that once created the concept "smell-o-vision" we would be traveling. But I quickly determined it was just the chair.

And it was an experience I would do again, for sure. I'd probably next want to select an action movie, something I would consider a more logical fit for this type of thing than The Witches -- which is, to be fair, a more logical fit for this type of thing than many other movies would be. I don't suppose any of the chair's tricks are really "held back" for particular movies, so I would guess I've already seen everything DBox has to offer. But in a movie that was more naturally vertiginous or discombobulating, the tricks could contribute even more to the experience.

I figured that only certain films would have special seat movements customized for them, but I learned that may not be the case. I learned that a friend of mine -- the same friend who saw The Witches months ago with his kids -- had been to DBox-like theaters near his house in Chicago on numerous occasions. As an example of how wrong I was about only certain films being eligible for this format, he told me he'd seen Trey Edward Shults' Waves in such a theater -- and though the chair movements were subdued for that particular film, they were not absent entirely. He told me that he'd spoken to someone at the theater and the chair's movements are a response to the level of bass and other audio inputs in the soundtrack. Obviously that's not 100% the case, given that moment in The Witches when the character looks from side to side and the chair follows suit, but it does suggest it may be easier to do, and does not require hours of someone's time at the studio to program it.

I gave the movie a 7/10 using the rating scale of my site's website. I didn't realize until afterward that Robert Zemeckis had directed it, and some of the always ground-breaking visual approaches he brings to his movies served this film well, and made the witches pretty scary. Overall it started to lose my interest about halfway through, but I liked it enough to give it a solid recommendation.

Would that have been only a 6 if the earth hadn't literally been moving under my feet -- or, I guess, under my ass -- during the movie? It's hard to say.

But at least the moving chair experience didn't knock it down one rating point, which was a distinct possibility.