Immersive movie experiences

I read an article today about a swimming hall that had screened Jaws on a big screen while the audience floated around in the water. Because apparently simply watching a film about a gigantic man-eating shark wasn’t sufficiently unsettling. You needed to be half-naked in dark water while doing it.

Then it was proudly announced their next screening is Piranha. Excellent. Somewhere, a liability lawyer just ordered champagne.

It got me thinking about the increasingly desperate attempts to make movies more “immersive”. At Universal Studios in Los Angeles, I saw a Terminator 3D show that combined the film with live actors, including an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike charging around the stage, while strategically placed machinery sprayed water at the audience during the liquid-metal sequences.

Disneyland pulled similar tricks with Shrek 3D. When Donkey sneezed, you got sprayed with water. When mice ran across the screen, little blasts of air shot along the floor around your ankles. Cinema, apparently, was no longer content with showing you things. Now it wanted to spit on you and blow up your trouser legs.

Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

But the finest immersive movie experience I’ve encountered was entirely accidental. A few years ago, on a 14-hour flight to Sydney, I browsed the available films and discovered two particularly inspired selections: World Trade Center, about the September 11 airplane attacks, and Snakes on a Plane, about venomous snakes terrorizing passengers trapped aboard an aircraft. I sat there giggling at the menu, wondering what magnificent psychopath had programmed the in-flight entertainment. That was immersion I could have lived without.

Cinema producers are of course constantly looking for new ways to lure people away from their downloaded movies, comfortable sofas and refrigerators full of cheap beverages. They try bigger screens, 3D glasses, moving seats, water sprays, artificial wind. So what comes next?

Smells seem inevitable (count me out for zombie movies). Temperature changes (lets not rewatch Dune). Perhaps someone kicking the back of your seat during fight scenes. For police stakeouts, they could turn off the heating and serve terrible coffee.

At some point, someone will realize that the ultimate immersive movie experience is simply going outside and having things happen to you. But where’s the fun in that?