![]() After the chaos of the film's opening sequence - which offers a ground-level view of the climactic battle from 2013's Man of Steel, when Superman and Zod leveled large swaths of Metropolis in a vicious battle that left thousands of bystanders dead. The most effective moment of my experience with 4DX at Batman v Superman came when the technology stopped. If you believe in the idea that a filmmaker should be responsible for the final cut of a film, you'll likely be disturbed to learn that the 4DX version of Batman v Superman was crafted without any input from director Zack Snyder. Like 3D, 4DX is strictly an opt-in/opt-out proposition if you'd rather see the movie in a conventional format, there are literally thousands of other theaters in which you can do so.īut while 4DX has a long, long way to go before it can reach even a thousandth of the theaters that display movies in 3D, there are reasons the technology should give cinephiles pause. The closest cousin is probably 3D - a technology Hollywood played around with for decades, in one form to another, before modern stereoscopic technology made a 3D release a foregone conclusion for any modern blockbuster or animated film. It's to the credit of 4DX, then, that it aims to do something a little different: Enhance a movie that exists with or without the technology. The lesson is simple: Storytelling and technology often lie at cross principles, and it's almost impossible to reverse-engineer a good movie when that movie basically exists to showcase a piece of gimmicky technology. Payback debuted in 44 theaters, but was such a disaster that it has basically disappeared from the public memory, remembered mainly for Roger Ebert's scathing half-star review. Sensurround debuted with Earthquake, successfully using technology to make a dull disaster movie into a hit - but further practical applications for the technology were harder to come up with, and it disappeared shortly after. Smell-O-Vision was attached to Scent of Mystery, a bland thriller notable only for the scenes in which smells like baking bread and pipe tobacco were shoehorned into the narrative. Today, it's obvious why none of those technologies caught on: The movies they were attached to were terrible. ($25.10 if you're a kid or a senior.) But 4DX does deliver something undeniably different than you'd ever be able to experience at home, and for movie theater chains, that novelty is enough to make 4DX fall somewhere between a cash cow and a godsend. In New York, a single ticket costs a whopping $28.10. (For obvious reasons, the technology is largely confined to blockbusters like Batman v Superman, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Jurassic World, though it's also been applied to animated films and a handful of horror films.)Īll this technology isn't cheap. There are, allegedly, odors that match the on-screen action, though either my nose or my odor-blaster wasn't working. The screen is flanked by bursts of smoke and light. Bursts of air and water periodically blast you in the face. The seats bounce and pulse and shift in every direction. ![]() This is the promise of 4DX, an ambitious attempt to use cutting-edge technology to draw sagging audiences back to the movie theater. It’s an important movie, and this collection looks great.But what if you could do more than watch that big fight from the distance of a movie theater seat? What if you could feel the impact of every punch thrown by Batman and Superman? Or - more accurately, as it turns out - an extremely abstract approximation of what it might feel like to be in the middle of a fight between Batman and Superman? It’s spawned five sequels (you can preorder the whole series in a new collection, by the way). It’s spawned memes: shirtless Ian Malcolm, Ian Malcom saying “Well, there it is,” and a priceless melodica version of the theme for starters. Even so, most filmgoers will probably agree this movie has carved out its spot in film history as one of the all-time greats. ![]() I recently re-read the Michael Crichton book for the first time in decades (it’s quite different from the movie in many parts, but it’s still a great read). I’ve watched it scores of times over the years, starting with a beloved VHS copy, which is now lost to time. I’m far from objective when discussing this movie, as Jurassic Park is my favorite movie of all time.
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