I Saw Hope In 4DX And Almost Died

I think I might fall out of my seat. That’s not hyperbole — my seat is literally shaking so hard that I wonder if I should be wearing a seatbelt; an odd thought to have when I’m sitting in a movie theater watching Na Hong-jin’s unhinged new sci-fi thriller Hope. But the reason that my seat is shaking so hard is that I’m watching Hope in 4DX, the immersive cinematic technology that basically marries the movie theater experience with a theme park ride. And Hope might be the best, and worst, movie to make my first 4DX experience.

4DX employs a few simple but effective techniques to deliver the “maximum immersion” promised by theaters. The seats are built a little differently than a normal movie theater seat. They’re bulkier and mounted on heavy mechanical motion platforms that move based on the action onscreen. The armrests and seatbacks are wider, since they house internal motors, rumblers, air bladders, and pneumatic pokers. There are also tiny, near-invisible jets and nozzles in the seats in front, which spray water, puffs of air, or even smells (thankfully, the latter was not used to communicate the various rotting flesh scents the characters of Hope frequently deal with).

Hope may be the strangest blockbuster to hit theaters in a while, and there’s no shortage of pieces detailing just how deranged it is (including a few from yours truly), but the film takes on a whole other degree of insanity when seen in 4DX. If its first half played like a nonstop thrill ride in a normal theater, in 4DX, it felt like my brain was rattling inside my skull. That’s because most of the first half of the movie is largely a chase scene through the devastated streets and surrounding forest of Hope Harbor. As the village police chief, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), tracks the trail of devastation left by a ruthless monster attacking their small South Korean town on the border of the DMZ, I found my seat bucking and jerking with every tight turn he made or his every sudden flinch. It was only a few minutes into the film that I found myself hoping that I wouldn’t develop motion sickness — it would certainly make the rest of the film absolutely miserable.

But if I thought the seat movements were a little aggressive before, they became positively violent once Hoyeon’s rookie cop Sung-ae entered the picture. Arriving in a speeding cop car that comes to a screeching halt, Sung-ae steps out bearing a bazooka that she aims at the monster as it comes barreling after a screaming Bum-seok. Cursing at the monster, she fires in a handful of booming explosions that I can feel in my bones. Then, when Bum-seok gets into the car and Sung-ae takes the wheel to chase after the injured monster, we get the full extent of what these motion-powered seats are truly capable of.

Sung-ae is, to put it mildly, a reckless driver. And my 4DX seat seemed hellbent on me knowing that as much as possible — as she careened down the destroyed streets of Hope, my seat threw me to the side for every sharp turn, and even made me feel every sudden bump of Sung-ae driving over the rubble (and maybe a few bodies). This was the part where I wondered whether I should be wearing a seatbelt, though these thoughts were immediately drowned out by the blaring rat-at-at of the constant gunfire.

One effect that I learned was utilized especially for screenings of Hope were lights outfitted on the walls of the theater, timed to whenever gunfire were to go off. So whenever a character shot a gun, a light would blink, timed to the near-deafening bang provided by my Regal 4DX’s highly tuned sound system. And let’s not forget the little jets that sprayed water and air — something that was also near-constant thanks to the frequent blood splatter and jump scares. An hour in, and I was exhausted from being battered with sounds, lights, and tiny splashes of water. And this was a 2 and a half hour movie.

One thing I’m thankful for is that my Hope 4DX screening didn’t engage the olfactory senses. The movie kicks off with its characters finding the rotting corpse of a mauled bull, and one extended, squelchy scene shows a doctor performing an autopsy on the dead monster that emanates a smell the characters describe as worse than rotting fish. The scent of blueberry pie is one thing, rotting meat is another (and probably where Regal draws the line too).

By the time Hope picks up again for a climactic full-throttle chase scene after a mid-movie breather, I had already given up on trying to hold onto my seat. If I got flung out of my seat, fine, it’s in the spirit of Hope! (I never did.) But as the exhausted group fled the shockwaves of the crashed alien spaceship after a number of near-death experiences, I never felt as close to a group of movie characters. I, too, felt like I had almost died a number of times, like my clothes were damp with blood (it was water), and like my brain was floating in my skull. Maybe when I left the theater I would return to a real world that was not forever altered by the arrival of aliens, but, like the characters of Hope, I felt forever changed.

Hope is now playing in theaters.