Generation X’s Boogie-Man

Just got back from seeing the spookiest movie I’ve ever seen for the first time on the big screen.

I can’t remember how old I was the first time I saw Alien, but it was on television. The film infected my subconscious from that moment forward and either full grown xenomorphs or face huggers have been making sporadic appearances in my nightmares ever since. (*I’m sure I’ll have one tonight).

The extra footage is the same you’ll find on the DVD.

Revisiting the film after several years, I still think it’s rock solid. (Aside from some downright silly editing decisions).

I did notice one thing that I’m baffled about that maybe someone with film industry experience or who’s ever worked for a movie theater may be able to help with.

And here’s my question in newly learned.

There’s this phenomena we’ve noticed lately – but don’t know if it’s just us, the medium or the theater.

Two theaters: small independent and big super-mega plex.

Premiss to discussion: Films “should” look better on the big screen than on your television.

We’ve “closely” noted two films now that we’ve watched at home on DVD and recently saw at the mega-plex.. The Matrix 2.0 and Alien….

For both of those – the film in the theater “seemed” muddy and dark. I paid close attention to this tonight while watching Alien on the big screen. As soon as I got home – I popped in Alien on DVD and skipped to the scenes that I paid careful attention to in at the mega-plex..

Unquestionably – the DVD image, on my standard (non-HDTV) has superior image quality, brightness and detail.

Same goes for Matrix 2.0, (shown on a different screen at the mega-plex than Alien)… I remembered leaving the theater thinking – “why did they print the damn film so fucking dark? – it gave me a headache to watch a lot of it”. I re-watched the film on DVD and the image was much brighter, crisper and had more detail.

NOW… That said.

When they re-released 2001: A Space Odyssey – it ran at the small independent theater.

The image fidelity was so breathtaking that I LITERALLY was brought to tears at the theater. I was seeing subtle color hues and details I’d never seen before. (When we returned home, I popped in the DVD to compare… Hands down – what we just saw on the big screen was much better).

I “think” it was the same for One Hour Photo which we also saw at the smaller movie house. I remember it being beautiful to look at – and didn’t notice any difference really when we bought it on DVD. *note – I wasn’t really paying attention to this phenomena at this point.

So… Any ideas on this one?

Does the mega-plex use crappier projectors? Do they need to replace their projector bulbs? Do they have cheeper screens? Did they simply get bad prints of the film?

I thought to ask someone at the mega-plex, but I couldn’t find an employee over the age of 30 so I didn’t bother.

This is a plea for an answer to a question – not a blog entry.