Preface
I watch a lot of movies. However, I very rarely watch movies on airplanes because I feel that I’d be doing a disservice to those that made them by not giving it a fair shake in a proper environment. That’s not a knock against people that do choose to watch movies on a plane, it’s just a mental block of mine that prevents me from perceiving movies as just a means to pass time before landing.
Moreover, the selection of movies is typically comprised of the latest really popular blockbuster movies like your Marvel movies or Transformers or Fast and Furious and what have you. I’ve usually either already seen these in theaters or had no intention of watching them. Those type of movies especially are meant to be really bombastic spectacles that are now relegated to being output on these dinky glossy screens and garbage earbuds. It’s just not a good way to watch any movie, however artsy or purely turn-your-brain-off it may be.
I’m now going to contradict all that load of pretentious nonsense with something dumb I do to pass the time instead: I like to watch people who are watching movies on planes. There’s something extremely funny to me about experiencing movies I wasn’t otherwise planning on seeing while squinting at subtitles from a distance on a tiny screen, at an awkward angle, with no audio.
I can somewhat piece together the gist of the movie and as a bonus, I can also watch how the direct viewer feels about the material. Their reaction to what the movie can say a lot about them. In a way, learning about someone I likely will never see again makes for more interesting and entertaining experience than if I were to watch a movie I never expected to like on my own accord.
I’d also like to think my people-watching makes for a funny (or slightly unnerving) visual for someone else: they’d see me staring intently, ever so slightly not-quite-straight-ahead, while the screen directly in front of me is completely shut off. In the back of my mind I yearn for someone to reveal to me that they enjoy watching people watching people watch movies.
An Anecdote
I once watched a man, let’s call them Chris Pratt (randomly generated anonymized name), watch but not quite finish Jurassic World: Dominion. From what I can gather, the primary antagonist of this movie (which as a reminder, is an entry in a billion dollar franchise about dinosaurs) is a deadly swarm of locusts. Don’t try and wrap your head around that, just enjoy your slop and consume. Now if you’ve not seen Jurassic Park 6: Jurassic World 3, you might be scratching your head thinking "that is not a good enough premise to convince me to watch this movie", but Chris Pratt was really into it. The only reason it was left unfinished was because the plane started to land and the screens had to be shut off. So how did I know they were really itching to finish the movie?
As the plane was landing, Chris tapped the screen to see how much time he had left in the movie. When you pull up the video player interface on Air Canada, it shows you a timeline of the movie as usual, but there’s also a timeline that visualizes the progress of the flight. As baffling as the swarm of locusts was, the movie did not feel as absurd as what I witnessed: I watched Chris Pratt attempt to turn back time, dragging the plane icon backwards along the flight timeline to try to buy him more time to watch Jurassic World: Dominion. As it turns out, the plane icon and its place on the timeline was immutable.
To this day I have not watched Jurassic World: Dominion in its entirety. I’d like to think Chris Pratt has since finished it and is at peace. To be honest, having watched half of it from a distance, at an awkward angle, with tiny subtitles and no audio, I couldn’t tell you what compelled Chris Pratt to want to keep going. They wanted to finish the movie so badly that for a brief moment, they either completely forgot about the unwavering march of time or became so confident in themselves that they believed they could bend reality to their will.
Alas, we can’t time travel so casually- We aren’t living in a twilight world just yet.