Note: This is a review of how the ScreenX immersive cinema technology impacted the experience of seeing The Nun, not a review focused primarily on the film. For that, have a look at Norm’s review. For a quick summary, I tend to agree with his thoughts. It’s a very nice-looking but predictable big budget horror flick with some decent jump scares. If you want to bring in the Halloween season a little early, this is a perfectly acceptable way to start things off.
There is at least one good thing that can be said about ScreenX—It’s a very modest up-charge. I was provided a ticket for review purposes, but looking at the website of my local theater, it only costs $1 more than a standard ticket. Whether it provides a marginally better experience for that marginally higher price is harder to pin down.
ScreenX is touted as a 270° film projection standard/conversion process. The first thing that might come to mind when you see “270° film projection” is a cylindrical curved screen, but what we have here is 270° in the sense that the angles that form the sides of a box add up to 360°. This results in a very different experience depending upon where you’re seated with the front seats only being able to see a small fraction of these side panels without contorting in their seats and those in the back being able to see practically the entire projection. I was seated around the middle, but for maximum effect, a seat closer to the back might be advisable. The advantages of this box projection are obvious, with theaters being much more easily retrofitted to accommodate this form of projection without the expense of installing custom curved screens, but with this concession comes a host of problems.
Chief among these issues is I’m not sure it’s physically possible to project a flat or cylindrical image on the inside of a box in such a way that the image will appear uniform and not stretched or distorted when viewed from any possible angle. Any experts in topology or projection mapping, feel free to correct me on this in the comments, but regardless of whether this is possible or not, ScreenX doesn’t appear to have dialed in the necessary transformations. The visuals often seemed heavily stretched on the side walls with a slight skew to conform to the geometry of the room, which also results in jagged letterboxing with visual elements not quite matching up at the seam between the front and side screens. This wasn’t too distracting during the majority of the film given that the side panels are typically relegated to empty landscapes and masonry, things they don’t care if you miss, but in the few instances where a character’s arm passed between screens, things got very wonky, very fast.
Given that this is the case, I guess it’s for the best that these screens aren’t used for very much outside of a couple of scenes where they’re used to show entirely different angles than what is shown on the main screen, which can be kind of disorienting. I had hoped that a jump scare or two might come out from out of the periphery, which would be one way of leveraging this technology to amplify the scares in jump scare heavy films like The Nun, but given that the footage on the side panels is produced specifically for and only shows during ScreenX screenings, it makes sense that directors won’t be putting anything essential in this space.
The side screens are apparently coated in a fabric designed to replicate the color and brightness of the main screen. This does not work, or at least not at the theater I went to at the Irvine Spectrum. The image was quite muddy with poor contrast along with reduced brightness and notably cooler tones than the main screen, which combined with the distortion made it look like an amateur snuff film projected on a bathroom wall compared to the crisp and vibrant cinematography of The Nun. On top of that, the surface of these walls was constructed in roughly 9 sq. ft. patches which didn’t show up a huge amount when they were being projected upon, but there were some visible seams and you have to remember, these are basically still theater walls, which need all sorts of odds and ends for electricity, air conditioning, fire alarms, etc. I was lucky at this theater that the speakers are up and out of the way, but depending on where you go, those might get in the way as well.
My final source of contention with ScreenX doesn’t have so much to do with the technology used, but it’s implementation in this film and presumably in the slew of other upcoming films set to receive ScreenX conversions: it’s not used throughout the whole film. I wouldn’t necessarily call this their dirty little secret, as I was able to find mention of it only being in select scenes when I searched for it specifically at my local theater’s website, but this fact is not mentioned when you go to get tickets for a ScreenX screening, even if you click on the link to get a description of what ScreenX is. I’m not sure if this is entirely up to the individual theater’s discretion or if this comes directly from ScreenX, but it holds true for at least at least for Regal Cinemas and doesn’t seem to be anywhere to be found in their marketing. While this might not technically fall under the umbrella of unethical business practices, it does feel like a bit of a bait-and-switch in spirit, as I don’t buy a ticket to a 3D movie to have it flip between 2D and 3D or spend the extra money on IMAX to have it switch between IMAX and standard theater screen resolution. When you buy a ticket for a film presented in a certain fashion, there is an expectation that the whole thing will be that way and they could take more care to make it clear that is not the case. In the case of The Nun, I would say only around 20 minutes is shown in ScreenX mode, with the rest just being the same film you would see in any theater with some slightly bizarre curved letterboxing. Most of the climax ends up receiving the ScreenX treatment, but otherwise it seems quite random, with it showing up during a number of pivotal scenes, but not in others and also during some somewhat random scenes, with the screens turning on sometimes for as little as 30 seconds before going dark and even more curiously, sometimes going for several minutes, only to be interrupted with a short period of darkness followed by another scene where the projection is turned back on. It’s all somewhat distracting and can have the adverse effect of telegraphing when a scare is about to happen, though The Nun doesn’t need a lot of help in that department.
So, what does it get right? Well, when you don’t look right at it, it can have the effect of adding more breadth to the experience. Kind of like side windows in a car, you may not always be looking out of them (at least if you’re the one driving) but the fact that you’re aware of things occurring to your left and right makes the whole thing feel more open than if you could only see what was directly in front of you. They seem to like to turn the projectors on during scenes with lots of rotational camera movement and this can have the effect of being in a motion simulator, which is fun if a little gimmicky.
If I was to sum up my thoughts on ScreenX, I would say ignore it. I don’t mean that you shouldn’t ever go to a ScreenX screening. It’s an extra dollar so I would say give it a shot and come to your own conclusions, though I would suggest not devoting your first viewing of a highly-anticipated new release to it, as you may find the projectors turning on and off distracting. What I mean is that you should devote as little time looking at the side screens as possible and focus in on the film itself. Like a cute dog you see out of the corner of your eye that turns out to be a ball of trash or a classic B-movie that looked alright in standard definition but doesn’t quite hold up to HD, some things aren’t meant to be looked at too closely. I’m not sure that there will ever be a film where the ScreenX version is the definitive, must-see experience, but if you treat it like one of those ambient light televisions, it might provide some added appeal to certain films.
