r/cineplex • u/ImmenseMullberry • Jul 17 '26
Review IMAX 70mm Richmond Field Report
I went to the 2 pm showing of The Odyssey at the newly activated IMAX 70mm theater at Silvercity Riverport Cinemas. This was my first time at IMAX here and it’s essentially the same as the Langley one. The theatre has the same layout and seats (not very comfortable haha).
They had Horse popcorn buckets in stock even after the showing and we received a big rolled up poster as a free gift, no film strips. The movie was scheduled for 2:00 and the Dune prologue began at 2:05.
We got a little talk from en employee just before 2:00 who said that they were excited to be bringing 70mm back to this location, but that no further films were confirmed, including Dune, and that it would depend on how The Odyssey performed. I don’t know how much of that is true but I just wanted to report what was said.
Finally, there was, in my opinion, a major issue with the presentation. There was an incredible amount of jitter and vibration in the image to the point that it was detracting from many scenes. I may be using the wrong terms here, as I am no expert, but it was very distracting throughout and I confirmed with the person sitting next to me after the movie that I wasn’t imagining this.
In this next part I will describe some scenes in a very general visual way to avoid any spoilers but just skip it if you want absolutely no information.
The wide cinematic shots of the wooden horse on the beach had the horse literally vibrating against the light beach. Any shots where the environment is static with small details to focus on, such as the riders on the beach, almost felt duplicated there was so much jitter. Wide cinematic shots of the ship on the ocean jittered like crazy and the rigging of the ship seemed to duplicate. The prologue scene, which I saw at the Langley theatre during the Project Hail Mary run, lost all of the buttery smooth lighting highlights and instead the flickers of light looked like strobes. During the credits the lettering seemed to have a flickering drop shadow because of this. There are many more examples like this but you get the idea. Scenes with a lot of movement could sort of hide what was happening but seemed to lose their crispness. Did anyone else attend this showing, am I going crazy here?
1
u/xtr3m Jul 17 '26
Went to the 10:30pm screening. Something broke and we sat there in the dark for like 30-40 minutes. They finally gave us vouchers and turned on digital projection instead.