A Night In The Museum With Night At The Museum

A Night At The Museum With Night At The Museum Texas is the kind of state where half the people aren’t even willing to believe dinosaurs ever existed, let alone be willing to open their wallets and put together funding to find them. You learn that fast growing up here. I couldn’t have been more than six when my friend and I got caught playing dinosaurs and were informed that the gigantic bones we’d seen pictures of in our textbooks were nothing but lies made up by men. After that, we kept out Tyrannosaurus battles out of sight and in secret. So it’s something of a minor miracle that the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History has managed to avoid being put to the torch, let alone found a way to actually exist.

But exist it does, just a hop, skip, and a jump from mighty Fort Worth, which to you out-of-towners is in fact not at all the same as Dallas. I know on ‘Walker Texas Ranger’ Chuck Norris just drove around the block when he wanted to transition between the two metropolis’s, but it’s an hour of suburbs and a lot of traffic betwixt the two cities, and aside from that proximity they couldn’t possibly have less in common.

What sets the Forth Worth Museum of Science and History apart from the area’s other history displaying buildings is their IMAX Dome theater. If you’re wondering what that is, it used to be called an Omni-Max. It’s a unique viewing experience. Unlike the IMAX theater with its massive, slightly curved screen, the Omni has a screen which actually wraps above and around you. Movies are displayed in a way that stretches them right to the edges of your field of vision, and when done right, can give you the sometimes stunning sensation of being right in the middle of whatever it is that you’re watching.

Since they have a theater right in the middle of the place, they’re looking at the arrival of Fox’s new movie A Night at the Museum as a golden opportunity. They’ve come up with a killer promotion, which just might be exactly what museums need to wake people up and get them and their kids back in front of the exhibits. Starting December 22 through February 1, they’ll be showing A Night at the Museum in their Omni theater. But they’re not stopping with just that. If you go after dark, after the movie they’ll let you out of the movie theater to roam around the museum with a flashlight in the dark. Sorry, that’s just too cool for the kid in me to resist, so when they invited me to show up and experience it, I grabbed my wife and fought my way through traffic to Fort Worth.

It’s been years since I’ve visited the Omni theater, though my family frequented it regularly on summers out of school as a kid. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything there but nature films designed specifically for the Omni’s wrap around screen. Those I can assure you, are completely awesome. But for this, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve seen Hollywood movies in IMAX, and it’s by far the best way to watch anything. Hands down. Alas, this is completely different. Omni it seems, is not the way to watch anything that wasn’t specifically designed for it. The movie and the setting I was seeing it in were great, but the picture was not. To make it work on the Omni’s oddball screen they stretched it and distorted it. It's like the movie is taffy, and they've stretched it out around the inside of a volleyball. The plain fact of it is, it just doesn’t work. If you’re going to see Night at the Museum, make sure you’ve already seen it once in a regular theater, because you’ll miss half of it trying to watch in Omni.

Still, the idea here is the setting. It’s all about getting in the mood. Even after the neck wrenching experience of attempting to look two directions at once just to see both sides of Ben Stiller’s head, I bounded out of the theater with my wife in tow, ready to collect my complementary flashlight and embark on a shadowy scavenger hunt through dinosaur bones, Egyptian tombs, and scattered ancient artifacts. I met disappointment. The flashlights were only for the kids, adults get a scavenger list but none of the battery-powered accoutrements. Alright, maybe I was being a bit foolish. This is an event for youngsters, they should get the flashlights, not middle-aged film critics with a Peter Pan complex. Besides, it wasn’t that dark anyway. Shadowy and creepy in spots, but bright enough that you could make your way through unaided. Even if you couldn’t, the tiny museum was so packed with people who did have flashlights that you could hardly take a step without tripping over a tyke excitedly waving his electric torch at his foot.

Kids and parents clustered around museum staff members in full costume, lurking in the shadows dressed as Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, Civil War soldiers and even a Storm Trooper advertising for their upcoming Star Wars exhibit. I have to admit, the Trooper freaked me the hell out when I walked past and it moved. You go into a museum assuming statues. His nod of the head made me jump back. What was next? Keep an eye out for Darth Vader. You never know when he might attack.

Ultimately, adults aren’t the point of all this. For the kids there this was a once in a lifetime experience. As an adult, I was disappointed by the museum’s lackluster displays and the bad state the place was in since my last visit. You can’t blame them, they do what they can with their funding and the Fort Worth museum staff was out in force, giving this thing everything they had. They should be damned proud of it. The kids don’t notice any of the things that beat us adults down. To them, this was a blast. They raced through the hallways, parents in tow, shining their lights into dark corners looking for clues. Fathers and sons stood together, pouring over their scavenger hunt list looking for the next item they’d need to get the key to escape and go home. For families, this is an amazing event.

I’m not going to tell you I had a tremendous time with my night at the museum. But the idea behind it all carried it. Even with the event’s problems, there’s just nothing cooler than prowling through exhibits right after watching them come to life and pick on Ben Stiller. It’s a great way to cap off the flick. I think the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History deserves a lot of credit. They’ve come up with a creative idea and put everything they have into it. It’s not their fault they don’t have enough cash to deliver gliz and glam. For families, this is a winner. For the rest of us, show up anyway and support their efforts. Don’t complain about the lack of exhibits. They can’t improve them unless you buy a ticket.

Josh Tyler