Kraven The Hunter? In 4DX? What could be more exciting? It turns out that ‘extreme sensory cinema’ and anxiety don’t mix…
Readers, my chair is rumbling. In the corner of the room, smoke rises from the darkness. In a few seconds, I shall be blasted in the face with a spray of water. Puffs of icy air will be injected into my ears. An unknown object, possibly metallic, will jab me in the spine, like an angry football fan’s finger.
It’s a cold morning in December, and I’ve come to a 4DX screening by mistake. Well, not by mistake exactly; more by happenstance. For reasons that later became obvious, Sony’s Spider-Man adjacent superhero flick Kraven The Hunter was barely screened for critics in the UK, and so, keen to get a review on the site you’re currently reading, I decided to find the earliest public screening at my nearest cinema.
Browsing Cineworld’s website, I noticed that the earliest screening was at 10:20am that Friday, and that the room it was showing in happened to house one of its 4DX ‘extreme sensory cinema’ experiences. If you’re unfamiliar, 4DX is a surprisingly complicated entertainment system which includes moving seats and special effects that involve squirting each viewer in the face with water and air, smoke, bubbles, curious smells and so forth. The idea being that the normally passive experience of watching a film becomes more akin to a rollercoaster ride.
I’d read a bit about 4DX in the past, but hadn’t stopped to consider the frequency and volume of the whole thing. A vibrating seat and the odd wisp of a breeze floating past now and again? I could deal with that, I thought – especially if it meant getting the screening out of the way so I could file my Kraven review by lunchtime.
Read more: Kraven The Hunter review | A comic book movie that should have been a crime thriller
In retrospect, I should have read the guidelines. On Cineworld’s website, there’s a surprisingly long set of safety notices pertaining to its 4DX screening rooms, listing the sorts of people it isn’t suitable for – the elderly, disabled, those under four years old and those under about a meter tall. The site also mentions that it isn’t suitable for ‘persons who are prone to motion sickness or persons who are physically or mentally sensitive.’
Had I read it in advance, I’d have taken note of that last bit.
I was late getting to the cinema. Hurriedly showing my ticket to the usher, I rushed into the screening room, sat down in my designated seat, and settled down to take in whatever it was that Kraven was about to serve up.
Then the title came up on the screen: ‘Wicked’, and I realised I was in the wrong room.
Grabbing my bag, I rushed into the screening room next door, where thankfully Kraven hadn’t started yet – they were still showing adverts for toilet paper and deodorant and the cinema chain itself. It was as I scanned around looking for my seat that I realised how different 4DX screening rooms are; the seats are about a foot off the ground, with footrests like those on an electric chair; there are also ominous-looking yellow chains strung up like bunting between the seats.
Settling into my seat (again), Kraven began. And so too did the rumbling. As Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s title character began skulking around a Russian prison, carrying out the occasional murder, my chair began to jitter and grumble. An incident involving a set of weights, Taylor-Johnson and two prisoners, caused the seat to suddenly lurch backwards and quake on its chassis. Then came a daring escape sequence, in which our muscular hero runs off into a snowy landscape as guards shoot at him with their rifles. Each gunshot is augmented with a blast of air next to my headrest – it’s a bit like that test you get at opticians where they test you for glaucoma.
With the opening sequence over, my seat began to settle down again, like an angry guard dog returning to its kennel. This isn’t too bad, I thought to myself. I mean, it’s incredibly annoying, but not too bad. If this is what the next two hours are going to be like, it should be fine. I’ve got this.
There are some quite long dramatic stretches in Kraven’s first half, as director JC Chandor’s comic book adaptation explores exactly how a Russian gangster’s young son became an indescribably buff 30-something with leonine superpowers. It was here that I noticed a drawback to 4DX that may or may not be peculiar to this movie.
As Kraven lays out its hero’s backstory, the 4DX effects largely vanish, all except for one or two moments where Russell Crowe’s violent oligarch father strikes his young son across the face. Whatever system 4DX’s managers have in place to time its effects with the events in the movie clearly don’t differentiate between types of violence; it’s one thing to heighten the sensation of a car chase, say – and quite another to augment the (simulated) physical abuse of a child.
At any rate, it was after Kraven’s first act that I began to realise that the 4DX experience escalates as the accompanying film unspools. A car chase through London causes my seat to lurch wildly upwards, before crashing back down again. The punch from a villain triggers some sort of device in my seat that feels like I’ve been prodded in the back; a scene involving the Thames, Taylor-Johnson’s big arms and an escaping helicopter is accompanied by an aquatic haze akin to being shot by a water pistol. After the first couple of action sequences, I began to dread the arrival of the next one to such an extent that I began to tense up each time I sensed one was due. By Kraven’s climax, I actively began to resent my chair.
It should be added here that in the right situation, and with the right people, 4DX could be a lot of fun. I can imagine a bunch of teenagers or 20-somethings going to see an effects-filled blockbuster and having a merry old time as they’re thrown about the place, giggling and trying not to spill their popcorn. Something like Twisters, with its lashings of wind and rain, is a movie tailor-made for something like 4DX. But I’m in my 40s, a sufferer of chronic anxiety, and I was watching Kraven on my own in a cavernous room with – seemingly – not another soul in it. None of this was conducive to a good time.
Cinema owners have long resorted to gimmicks. Filmmaker and impresario William Castle came up with all sorts of wacky ideas to accompany his movies, including plastic skeletons that whizzed down the aisles to vibrating buzzers affixed to the underside of theatre seats. In the 1970s, the company Cerwin-Vega patented a system called Sensurround, which used huge, bass-heavy speakers designed to make entire cinemas rumble; the invention was soon dropped when theatre owners noticed that it caused mild structural damage to their precious buildings.
4DX is therefore the successor to all these gimmicks from cinema’s rich history. And if people enjoy it, and it encourages more people to go to theatres, then that’s by no means a bad thing. Goodness knows audiences need some sort of excuse to watch films on big screens rather than at home.
For some movie-goers, though, the whole experience might be a bit much. If you’re of a nervous disposition or have any doubts at all about whether it’s right for you or not, avoid this writer’s mistake and read Cineworld’s terms and conditions before you pay for a ticket.
After the credits rolled on Kraven The Hunter, I hobbled out of the cinema, aching slightly from having tensed my muscles for so much of its 140 minute duration. Needing to calm down, I headed to the nearest coffee shop and ordered a cup of tea. I sat down and began sipping at my drink, thinking of those weird yellow chains between the seats in the cinema, clinking. The faintly surreal sight of smoke emanating from a corner of the room. How weird it was that I’d paid extra money to be thrown about like a crash test dummy.
As I sat there, my partner wandered into the cafe from a nearby shop, and clearly noticed that I looked even more pale-faced and crumpled than usual.
“Are you alright?” she said. Rather than offer a coherent reply, I simply whispered, “4DX” while staring off into the middle distance.
“4DX.”
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
