5/22/2014

wednesday may 21

today i went to the yonge-dundas cineplex to see godzilla in imax 3d. when showtime rolled around, only one trailer played before the movie, for a tom cruise action thriller called edge of tomorrow. i had to look up that title just now because when the trailer itself was playing, all that my fellow movie-goers and i could focus on was the fact that the images on the screen looked blurry and awful with or without our 3d glasses on, prompting many worried murmurs from around the theatre about the glasses not working. fortunately, after the preview ended, the "put on your glasses now" instruction popped up, and things were fine from that point on. the experience did raise two questions, however:

  1. why show that trailer at all if it's going to look terrible?
  2. what would we have done if it had been a problem with the glasses? for instance, what if they'd handed out the wrong ones (say, non-imax 3d glasses)? would everyone start frantically yelling at the theatre workers to stop the movie? would there be a lengthy delay while they sorted things out? would the theatre's normally rigid schedule of showtimes be thrown into disarray by such a delay? it was enough to make me wish the glasses hadn't worked, just so i could've seen how the situation played out.

2 comments:

Cosmostologist said...

The same thing happened at X-Men tonight... PANDEMONIUM for real

JDK said...

I could bore you with a technical explanation, but usually it's just ill-trained projectionists who don't know how to project non-3D trailers before a 3D movie. It has to do with, like, parallax correction.