When Cinemas Go Wrong | The Empire Blog

When Cinemas Go Wrong

Posted on Monday September 10, 2007, 11:03 by Kat Brown in Empire States

As a rule I don’t scare easily. No, wait that’s a complete lie, I scare extremely easily, but ordinarily this tends to be stuff like spiders, bananas or Helen when Hugh Jackman’s name is mentioned. Let me tell you now that there is nothing – nothing – scarier than an opening night Atonement audience confronted by technical failure.

While people chucking food and talking are generally annoying, they're not scary unless the knives come out. It's the sheer unexpectedness of polite old Middle England rearing up and showing its teeth that's weird, like that story about the cat treeing a bear. Coming back from a popcorn trip after the usual arse-breaking half hour of adverts, the place was laughing in that patronising way generally used to indicate someone else’s failings, in this case the lack of sound accompanying the opening scenes.

People who’d read the book took to shouting out warnings like, "Don’t watch this bit, it’s pivotal" while everyone else tried to look away, and failed. In the same anti-social manner of televisions in pubs, it’s utterly impossible not to look at a screen when it’s in your eyeline, and that gets even trickier when that screen is taking up the whole wall. When the sound kicked back in, a chorus of "Honestly"s and "Oh-but-this-is-ridiculous"es announced the twin circles of hell of not looking and having to keep your ears shut.

As it became clear that the film was not going to stop, we escaped outside to find the manager surrounded by Decent Sorts pelting him with irate questions about stopping the film, rewinding and – because some Britishness is just too deeply rooted – refunds and appropriate compensation. As more and more cinemagoers added their two cents, it was as though 28 Weeks Later had collided with the Telegraph letters page. When the apocalypse comes, the zombies will say, not "Aeeeuurrgh" but "Really, this is just absurd."

The manager explained that it was impossible to rewind or even stop the film due to that age-old problem, "the bobbin is caught in the window", before sacrificing his get-out-of-here-alive card by suggesting that he continue the film and play the opening scenes at the end.

"Rubbish," said a pony tailed intellectual. "If I go to an art exhibition I want to see the whole thing at once, not just bits of it."

By now the manager had backed up the stairs and fled, leaving behind the sounds of, "Well, aren’t you going to tell the cinema?" and "Honestly, could I have a go at fixing it, it can’t be that hard". Of course, there’s one cure-all fix for British zombies, and that’s queues. By the time everyone was lined up waiting for their refunds, the crowd had quietened to a mutinous rumble. Some stereotypes are more enduring than others.

Quite apart from the enjoyable rarity of seeing Middle England losing its cherished sang-froid, it struck me how strange that, with an audience of £10 a pop, Odeon hadn’t checked their opening night stock beforehand. I mean seriously, if you’re using film reels instead of digital, it makes sense to have a projectionist who's awake, or at least there to stop it if things go wrong. The majority of us don't know a film canister from our elbow and when we're forking out upwards of a tenner, should we really have to?