Like many people I love going to the cinema to watch a good movie, to enjoy splashing special effects on the big screen, to get sucked into a gripping story and feel an emotional connection to the characters due to magnificent acting. Yet for some reason I found myself at a movie theatre watching “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” a few years back; a movie that is not exactly known to be the best in the series, but rather Disney’s third squeeze of money out of a wobbly boat attraction – just like the people in Stø; frickin Stø.
Continue reading for a story about raving sound effects, an intermission folded in the fourth dimension, a scientifically correct complaint and two atoning movie tickets.
The day this story takes place was one of the first days that the third Pirates movie was available on the big screen. By the time my best friend and I arrived, the theatre was already packed to the top. As a result we ended up in a back corner of the theatre; not the best seats, but we weren’t really expecting a front row worthy piece of movie history.
The movie had been playing for a couple of minutes when we noticed that the sound started leading a life of its own. Unfortunately that life was one of hard drugs, underground raves and violence. The music kept switching from “muffled train station intercom” quiet to “eardrum piercing AC/DC concert” loud. The sound effects snapped, crackled and squeaked like “Mice Krispies” being eaten.
[shameless wordplay pun, check]
Even Johnny Depp sounded more drunk than he usually does during his gay pirate impression better known as Captain Jack Sparrow.
My friend and I were not really bothered though and were having fun, quietly making jokes about the quality of the movie, sipping sugary drinks and munching even – I can’t believe this is a valid word – sugarier snacks. As is so often the case with hanging out, it’s not very important what you are doing, but who you are doing it with. And we were doing that unimportant thing with the conviction and laughter expected of besties.
In Belgium it’s customary to have a short intermission halfway through movies with a long play time. This intermission has three main goals:
- Inviting people to buy more flagrantly over-priced drinks and snacks – for the price they charge I expect those gold-coloured flecks on my popcorn to be actual gold.
- Allowing a flagrantly over-priced and unanticipated pee break; the kind you didn’t realize you needed before the movie started, until drinking the gallon of lemonade that the bladder control room unexpectedly had to process. We’ve all been there.
- Stirring up conversation about how the person handling the projector managed to stop the movie halfway through a scene on an ugly freeze-frame of Orlando Bloom; a feat that had been deemed impossible by the International Board of Projectors, until that point in time – didn’t google it, but IBoP is probably not a real thing.
During such a break, the theatre displays a message on the screen: “Intermission: the movie starts again in 10 minutes”.
About 200 people jumped up as soon as the message appeared, either restocking on sugar rush products or making a sprint towards the toilets. My friend and I were still sufficiently stocked on provisions and hadn’t reached eye-watering bladder pressure yet, so we decided to sit out the movie. That turned out to be a great decision, because one minute into the intermission the movie started playing again. In that one minute about 100 people had left the cinema, and another 100 were either getting up or were on their way out. Imagine the look on those 200 faces when time folded in on itself – prepare to be physicked, hard!
The fold created an Einstein-Rosen bridge (a.k.a. a wormhole) in the fourth dimension (a.k.a. time) and linked the first minute of the intermission to the tenth minute through the fabric of the Minkowski space manifold (a.k.a. spacetime). Either that select group of moviegoers was slapped in the face by theoretical physics – like you just were – or the short intermission was a human error – which this physics stuff might have been on my part.
Pandemonium broke out. People cringed in doubt, emotionally and physically torn between taking that necessary pee break, now that the bladder control room started making preparations for evacuation, and staying to watch if Orlando Bloom’s face would recover from the unfortunate freeze-frame. The people moved one leg towards the toilets, the other towards their seats. Their eyes, however, were fixedly glued to the screen. This caused confused moviegoers to crawl over people blocking their way, bump into one another and stumble back to their seats. But they did it in an orderly fashion; us Belgians are not known to descend into chaos easily. For example, when Belgium broke the world record of being without a government following elections for 249 days, we had a nationwide party and ate French fries as protest. Why pelt the government with sticks and stones when you can use irony and fried food?
Back in the movie theatre, my friend and I were laughing our asses off. The look on the puzzled faces when the movie started was priceless. I’m usually not one for taking sadistic pleasure in other people’s torment, but this time it seemed rather harmless since no one was getting hurt – except perhaps a dozen toes getting stepped on in the dark.
For the next 9 minutes one confused person after another trickled back into the dark theatre, hurrying to their seats and asking others what on earth just happened to the Minkowski space manifold while they were away, and wondering why an Einstein-Rosen bridge was blocking part of the screen.
By the time the movie ended, people in the theatre were really grumpy. The sound kept raving throughout the movie, a quarter of the people had missed a portion of the movie and another quarter didn’t get the break they badly needed. Except for the sound permanently damaging our eardrums, none of this really applied to my friend and I, and we even got a good laugh out of it. Nonetheless it seemed like the perfect opportunity to scientifically test the movie theatre’s customer satisfaction system.
We ended up writing an extensive experimental complaint to the cinema, mentioning the bad sound quality and the intermission folding in time. That last thing seemed like something management should probably get fixed, because I’ve watched enough Doctor Who to know that Daleks – an alien race hell-bent on exterminating all life – always show up when spacetime is acting funny.
[shameless geek reference, check]
Nothing happened for a few weeks. We managed to get our blood sugar levels back to normal, our eardrums healed up quite nicely and the fourth dimension decided to remove its bridge after a formal warning by the cinema’s management. Then one day I found an envelope in my mailbox with the theatre’s logo on the front. Inside was a letter explaining the problems with the audio that specific night and two movie tickets. Science clearly pays!
On the tickets was printed: Offered by “Sorry”. I’m still waiting for the first politician with the same level of concession and atonement as those two incredibly apologetic tickets. Nice job, <anonymous theatre name>’s customer satisfaction system!
To this day I’m not exactly sure what caused the sound problems and the shortened intermission, but I suspect gravitational waves – ripples in the curvature of spacetime – had something to do with it. They are fairly exotic, have only been recently discovered and scare people. Like any discovery in human history, that makes them ideal targets for pointing fingers. But let’s not repeat those past mistakes. Just follow my motto:
“Make oscillations, not war!”
[shameless science joke, check]
The cinema is a wonderful invention, but a theatre is hard to physics-proof. It’s like the popular saying goes:
“Nothing produces violent sound effects, impossible Orlando Bloom freeze-frames and one minute intermissions like two merging quasars millions of light-years away creating gravitational waves”
I admit the saying might not be that popular yet, but I swear it’s going to be a thing soon! Just you wait.