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Comment by enobrev | Hacker News Reader

I went to see The Matrix in a theater recently (25th anniversary release I think) and they did the same thing. 10 minute pre-roll of some random person explaining scene by scene why the movie was so great.

I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing after they've already booked the tickets, went to the theater, overpaid for refreshments, and sat to watch it, but I considered it an absurd waste of time.

Also, even though I saw the movie in the theaters on opening week 25 years ago and probably 20+ other times since, it _still_ felt like a spoiler for me. I can't imagine that ever being fun, or interesting, or useful to anyone. I know what I came to see, and why, please just let me watch it.

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That movie in particular I feel like if you didn't see in theaters at the time of release that a big part of the experience is completely lost on you. Literally audiences had never seen anything like it.

I feel tremendously lucky having seen the movie the way that I did. I was given tickets to see a screener of the movie 3 months before they even started the promotional campaign for the movie. Nobody knew anything about it and my screener to see the movie was at a theater in Harlem. The audience was kinda rowdy and honestly that made all of the jaw-dropping moments of the movie that much better.

I've never been at a movie where audiences were that excited for what they were seeing and obviously it made myself and everyone else in that theater a promotional tool telling everyone they knew to go see the movie. This was probably my greatest lifetime cinema-going experience and I've seen thousands of movies.

I honestly don't know why film studios have lost their minds and their mandate since. We should be trying to replicate that experience for every generation of audiences. Not all this remake/sequel/multiverse slop.

I remember going in blind to the film and the first scene with Trinity completely blew everyone in the theater away. One of the greatest openers in action cinema history (if not the greatest)

Likewise. I was deep in grad school at the time, and didn't pay much attention to the rest of the world. My knowledge of The Matrix was that I'd seen some posters, some friends asked if I wanted to go with them, and I did. We didn't even talk about the movie on the way there, it was just "the move that weekend". Absolutely blown away is right. From the opening all the way through to the ending and credit roll.

It was 1999, not easy at all to get deeper information about just released movies apart from some 2-3 paragraphs from critics' on newspapers.

I also went blind to watch it after school with some friends, it was a mind blowing experience compared to the 90s action movies, everything else in the genre before that just felt bland and unpolished. I went 3 times on the same month with different people to re-watch it.

Thirded - the early bullet time sequence with Trinity was mind blowing at the time.

More recently, when I've had the chance to rewatch the movie I've shifted my awe to the helicopter crash scene [1], which contains so many elements that were unprecedented at the time in an incredibly neat way. It's one of those things where they could have just settled for one of the effects and still do something incredible for the time, but they went ahead and pushed the envelope so much further.

The movie is pretty much that - just the plot would have been sufficient for an incredible film but they had so much creativity to spare that they also reinvented the genre's cinematography because why the hell not?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI4UpBjdJ3s

That link, and the releases after the original 35mm release and the DVD, all feature a colour-correction that wasn't there when the movie was first released. The movie had a slight green edge on its original release, but it wasn't THAT green. It's a shame they toyed with it.

I first saw the scene on a tiny airplane seat headrest screen and remember being jolted awake by how mind-blowing it was. I watched the movie twice on that trans-Atlantic flight.

Same with Transformers (2007). Audience was agog and cheering. But if you weren't there on the day, you'd never understand. The level of CGI dominance would come to be normal these days, but at the time it was unprecedented. I was lucky to see it opening weekend because it was a huge release (blew out Titanic's opening weekend). Nowadays it has the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect but at the time it was unbelievable.

I immediately loathed the first Transformers film because of all the wasted talent for a movie with such poor writing and pacing.

I also found the CGI to be too busy to follow anything going on and it didn't improve with subsequent movies. I called it "motion soup" at the time and haven't come up with a better term for it.

I think Robot Chicken called it Baysplosions (Michael Bay + Explosions)

Feels slightly different in that the Matrix is original so literally nobody in the GPs audience knew what to expect whereas Transformers has been a thing (comics, toys, hundreds of TV episodes) since the mid 1980s. I also feel like the early 2000s had a lot of good CGI movies (LOTR, King Kong, etc) so that to me doesn't explain it either

The Matrix ranks third in my list of 'wow' moments in the cinema.

Joint first is the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and brontosaurus (?) in the true-dinosaur scene of Jurassic Park (not the raptor eggs bit).

SPR's opening was just visceral, especially on a huge cinema screen.

And Jurassic Park's use of the subwoofer meant you really felt that first scene.

FWIW Lost in Space, the year before the Matrix had 'bullet time' in it and no-one seems to remember that.

I saw the band Failure live two years ago a few blocks from where I live. The lights went down shortly after we arrived and a video started playing on the projector wall at the back of the stage. It was a series of interview clips with musicians talking about the band we came to see: how transcendentally amazing Failure was, how incredible the sonic textures on "Fantastic Planet" were, how Ken Andrews is an unappreciated genius, etc. I thought that it would be interrupted after maybe 90 seconds by a loud guitar to kick the show off, but nope - we got to hear Hayley Williams and that Zonie vintner guy who sometimes sings for Tool gush about the band that we were waiting to see for _30 minutes straight_.

At one point I checked my receipt to make sure that we didn't accidentally get tickets to some sort of virtual experience or pre-release screening instead of a concert. The video eventually ended, the band came on, and they gave a great performance. I left feeling more confused than anything; the rest of the crowd's reaction ran the gamut from impassioned to dismissive.

If the art you're putting on display already has a cult following I don't see the need to drive the point home via these weird metatextual commentaries. I'm a weirdo that likes watching movies with crew commentary but I like to do that in my living room, not in a theater.

This reminds me of our VHS box set of the Star Wars trilogy, I believe the second release but before the first special edition. Each movie had a several minute interview with George Lucas *before* the movie. I eventually memorized the timestamp of each film but it was such a waste of time in the aggregate to fast forward through. If they had it at the end sure why not, but before??

Very loosely related: This is exactly how I feel about unskippable tutorials in videogames. I feel like it robs me of the fun when a game explains to me what to do and how.

Especially when it's not a persons first play though. Grrrr. :(

A Lord of the Rings Extended Edition replay recently went through the theaters a couple of months ago, so I took my two sons, one of which had seen it already, one for which they were new movies.

To my absolute shock, at the 7pm movie time, the movie... started.

No muss. No fuss. No previews. No ads. Just the New Line Cinema logo and the opening monologue. Be there on the time shown on the ticket or miss the movie.

How amazingly nice that was. Just fantastic. And those movies benefit from nothing else trying to wedge themselves into the mood, but I can say that about a lot of movies.

It was a bit of a trip and I was being causal about getting there on time. I did, but not by much. At least the next two days I knew what I needed to do.

I took my kids to those as well. For Fellowship we took our time getting popcorn etc, not caring about missing previews… boy was I surprised when we walked in and it had already started.

Made sure to be early for The Two Towers so we did not miss the iconic opening scene. And to the point of the linked blog post… they ran several spoiler-filled ads before the movie started (to be clear: before the starting time, while people were filing into their seats).

Hoo-boy, had I gone I'd have missed the first 20 minutes of the movie. Since movies now have preassigned seats I generally aim for 15-20 minutes after the time on the ticket.

> I don't know who on earth needs some stranger to tell them why a movie is amazing

Because the target public of hollywood movies seems to be idiots. They bring the most money and have relatively low requirements on what constitutes a movie.

One could argue that if a movie is spoiled by someone talking about it, it not that great movie. A great movie is great even if you saw it a dozen times

I don't think that's right. Movies use all sorts of devices to engage their audience. And a lot of them rely on surprise. If they tell you what they're about to do just before you see it happen "for real" - the effect is obviously compromised.

For me the problem with spoilers is not about knowing what is going to happen. A spoiler primes me to be on the lookout for when the spoiled thing happens, and THAT is what most ruins the experience for me.

Of course a great movie can't fully rely on a plot-twist as it's central supporting structure, but it can be a nice spice that can get entirely muted by a spoiler.

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