When was the last time you were genuinely excited about going to see a movie?
I saw Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa the other day. It was good. Not perhaps as good as it could have been, but good enough to have me laughing heartily throughout, albeit intermittently. It’s worth it for the first 15 minutes alone.
Anticipation ahead of a film can be a dangerous thing. Go in with hopes that are too high and there can only be one result – those hopes get quashed. Go in with low expectations and you will generally be rewarded with something that is at least slightly better than you thought it would be. Unless that film is Spider-Man 3.
The Spider-Man that followed, Marc Webb’s The ‘Amazing’ Spider-Man (sorry, I refuse to put the word ‘amazing’ in anything other than quotation marks when it refers to such a lacklustre experience), falls into the first category: I thought it might be decent but it turned out to be an incoherent mess. But to say I was really excited for it would be pushing things a bit. I haven’t been genuinely excited ahead of a cinema-going experience since…. well, since the other night when I went to see the new Alan Partridge film. And even if the best thing to come out of Norwich since Dale Gordon didn’t quite hit the back of the net, at least he gave me the feeling of excitement in the first place.
Those sentiments are few and far between these days, perhaps because there just aren’t as many films I look forward to, or perhaps because I’m just a miserable old git. I remember how I was ready to burst in the foyer of my local cinema in the minutes before my mum took me to see Batman in 1989. Unfortunately, I had similar high hopes three years later in the same cinema foyer ahead of Batman Returns. Bizarrely, a reel mix-up made the film ‘start’ about half an hour in, and after ten minutes of nobody noticing, they finally put it on in its proper order. They needn’t have bothered.
I would love to be to recreate the giddiness I felt going into Jurassic Park today when going to see something like Pacific Rim, but come on, that’s just not going to happen. There have been movies in recent years which have managed to get my juices going – it was hard not to be excited before seeing The Dark Knight, and even harder to not maintain that feeling once the blistering opening sequence kicked in.
I’m also a big fan of the Mission: Impossible movies, apart from the ones directed by John Woo and JJ Abrams. So, uh, yeah… half of them. But I had a huge grin on my face going into Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol a few years ago, as I do love a bit of Cruise control, and that grin stayed there throughout the film.
So when was the last time you were genuinely – and I mean, genuinely – excited about going to the cinema to see a new movie? Tell us below…
Ross v Ross 
August 6, 2013 at 7:23 pm
For me it was X2, the second X-Men film. Though I walked out of that experience deflated, but I couldn’t figure out why. I later put it down to my prospect for the film not being able to match the reality.
August 6, 2013 at 7:32 pm
Being a giant history nerd, I was really excited to see Lincoln. It didn’t disappoint. I’m not excited to see Alpha Papa. Chuffed to buggery, even.
August 7, 2013 at 3:13 am
Most movies I’m pretty excited about the first time, maybe I’m easily swayed
August 7, 2013 at 5:47 pm
The Dark Knight Rises was the last one to get me excited. Though it wasn’t nearly as good as The Dark Knight.