03 Aug 08
Letter to the Odeon Comment
Sir or Madame,
Yesterday, (Saturday 2nd August 2008), I attended the 16:15 screening of The Dark Knight at your Guildford Odeon Cinema.
Prior to the film starting, an advert featuring Pixar’s new creation Wall-E which chastised the assembled, (paying), audience about the evils of pirated movies, the poor quality of these so called ‘knock-offs’. I found this rebuke ironically insulting, as the movie I had payed to see contained a veritable cornucopia of problems.
In two places, there were both visual and audio corruption, spanning the full screen. The visual distortion was very noticeable, the effect is something akin to the ‘dirty head’ problem that plagued VCR players. The audio track was also poorly mixed, resulting in not only the vocal track being considerably quieter than the music track but also an occasion of phase-shifting, also known as ‘phasing’.
I work for Sky Movies, and as such one of my tasks is to check the quality of our movies. This is not a legal requirement, but we feel a duty to our paying customers to make sure that for the price they pay, (considerably cheaper then the price of seeing films in your cinema), they should be able to watch movies in as near perfect quality as we are able.
As The Dark Knight, is a brand new film, released a little over two weeks ago I find it hard to believe that your copy of the film has suffered from wear and tear already, and as such I am forced to conclude that checking the quality of your films, and aiming to give the paying audience the best possible movie watching experience is not one of the Odeon’s highest priorities.
The audience in your cinema made a choice, to either pay to see a film or to pirate a copy. The gall you display by first scolding your audience for a crime they have clearly, (simply by showing up at your cinema), chosen not to pursue and then give a performance of a film in an unacceptable level of quality is frankly insulting to all concerned.
I look forward to receiving your thoughts on this matter.
Yours faithfully,
Adam Wilcox
Update
I have never received a reply.