SPOILERS AHEAD: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you want to read our spoiler-free review, click here. The rest of you, read on… but know that you have been warned.
The new Star Wars film has been in production for two years. In that time, the news and rumors have been running rampant. Now the movie is finally in theaters so we can all relax since we avoided all the spoilers, right? Not so much. As it turns out even sitting in the theater isn’t a safe place to enjoy a movie spoiler free, as a malfunctioning projector can do the job just fine, as several fans in Hollywood can attest. One of them even got the painful experience on video.
The problem started because the screening was done in 3D. The 3D projection began to malfunction, causing video artifacts on the screen. After this had gone on for too long, the theater stopped the screening and promised to rewind the film back to where the problems had begun. Instead, when the movie resumed, it had jumped forward, showing scenes the crowd hadn't seen yet. Yikes! The movie was stopped, and restarted again, and when it did it had apparently jumped even further forward.
The problems started when Han Solo brought Rey and Finn to the establishment run by Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata. Before the problems were fixed, the audience had seen the Starkiller Base firing its weapon. While that scene isn’t a huge jump forward, out of context it certainly could have been. You can see a brief shot of that scene at about the 51-second mark of the video above. At that point, the audience begins to lose their minds. They could be seeing the climax of the movie, for all they know.
Theaters are full of electronics and electronics break. There’s little that can be done about that but having it happen in this fashion is about the worst sort of luck. Even after the problem has been fixed you’re still frustrated as you’ve seen where the movie is going. Luckily for this audience, that feeling only lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes, until they caught up to the moment they had already witnessed. At that point, they could relax as they still had half a movie left to go. And just imagine how bad it could have been. If the projector had been unable to continue the film at all, there would have been a theater full of angry Star Wars fans. That would not have ended well.
Anybody else have a bad theater experience for The Force Awakens? Let us know below if technical difficulties caused you problems.
