Movie Seat Review

April 23, 2014

That’s right: We’re reviewing the seat, not the movie.

There’s a movie seat that rocks and rolls according to what’s on the screen, supposedly to give the viewer a more complete experience of what the characters are going through. One of the local movie theaters has a couple of chairs in the lobby that you can check out while you watch some movie trailers.

Here’s the thing: The chair does move, but it’s mostly a side-to-side action, and it generally seems to be tied more to when the soundtrack gets loud than to what’s actually happening on the screen. So it seemed like even if the ocean was heaving or an earthquake was happening, you wouldn’t actually feel anything unless the sound was going great guns. (Dear Mr. Hitchcock: Since you made “Lifeboat” with no soundtrack, you’re out of luck on getting us to feel the boat move on the ocean.)

So at this time I’m giving the chair a thumbs-down. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try it again in a couple of months, just to see if I didn’t give it a fair shake (pun not intended, but it wasn’t bad, either).