Avatar and the British Movie Experience

I went to watch Avatar at the O2 yesterday and experienced a bizarre, but not atypical of British cinemas, sequence of events.

The movie was advertised to start at 1.40pm. I got there with 25 minutes to spare and bought a ticket with Screen 7 written on it. I found a sign pointing to Screens 6-10 hidden behind one of those big cardboard ads for an upcoming film. There was an escalator running downwards towards the main foyer next to this. On the other side of the foyer was a sign pointing towards Screens 1-5. It turned out that this was where you were supposed to go (and you were supposed to know this). Everyone was milling around the foyer not sure what to do.

I finally found my way into Screen 7 at 1.40, at which point in Aussie cinemas, ads would be showing. Nothing. Black screen. Almost 10 minutes later, the ads start rolling.

Another 5 minutes pass by and they start with the trailers. 5 minutes after that, a movie starts. But, it's the wrong movie! They started playing Toy Story 2 3D! Hysterical!

90% of the audience got up and headed for the door. I stayed put. What were the chances that 150 people had got the screen wrong vs them putting the wrong reel on? Anyway, another 5 minutes passes and the movie stops, people sit down (with a girl coming and sitting right beside me) and the movie starts for real.

Midway through the film, the girl next to me starts to snore! What the...? Anyway, she wakes up after a while and then starts to text on her phone. At about the same time, the girl a couple of seats on my other side starts to look at her phone. Maybe they were texting each other... :) A little while later, a girl somewhere behind me starts talking on her phone! What is wrong with people?! What can possibly be so important that you can't have your phone off for a few hours?

Halfway through the credits, they turned the film off! I couldn't believe it. The couple of extra minutes was surely not going to affect their schedule, particularly as the cleaning crew was already in and working.

Finally, there was a sign saying 'Way Out' but it wasn't the Way Out, it was the Way In. The real Way Out had no signage.

This is the 4th or so British cinema I've been in and they are all pretty bad, this one being a particularly poor outlier. It was not that I, being a foreigner, was not understanding the intricacies of the British cinema experience, the Brits themselves were all confused too. How difficult can it be to start on time, get the right movie on, put the right signage in the right place and play the film right through to the end?

Anyway, to the film itself.
It was visually spectacular, the computer graphics were beautiful, the storyline pathetic. When I think of the phenomenal movies James Cameron directed early in his career, e.g. Alien and Terminator, on limited budgets, his later films just don't cut the mustard. His career is almost exactly like Zhang Ye Mou's, in that they had incredibly powerful films early on, with strong female leads (Gong Li for Zhang and Linda Hamilton & Sigourney Weaver for Cameron) and have both degenerated to all style and no substance. Titanic was one of the worst movies ever made for massive amounts of money and here, Cameron was saved by the technology. I learnt, from the credits before they were cut short, that the special effects were done by Weta, the NZ company responsible for LOTR. 10 years on, they are still run by the same people and are going from strength to strength.

Avatar still has the strong female characters, 3 of them, in fact, but also has a cardboard cut-out baddie and plot 'twists' that were telegraphed several scenes before they happened. Overall, though, a good piece of entertainment if you switch your brain off and let the stunning visual effects take you along for the ride.