The Multiplex Vs The Indie Cinema

Watching a film in a theatre is all about the cinematic ‘experience’; the big screen, the surround sound, the effects of IMAX or 3D (or even both). There is a wide variety of cinemas to choose from in the UK, but does the type of theatre actually make much of a difference? When it comes to the multiplex vs. the independent cinema, is one really better than the other?

Film critic Mark Kermode went through so much trouble while queuing at his local cinema complex that in the introduction to his book, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex’, he was moved to write:

‘I was suddenly filled with a vision of a great gaping void… This was presumably the void of which Nietzsche was thinking when he warned us that “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks right back into you.” Right now, the abyss was indeed looking back into me, apparently eager for me to get out of the way so that it could look long into the person standing behind me in the queue, who probably wanted two tickets and an industrial-sized vat of popcorn.’

Many hardened film-goers will be familiar with these sentiments; sometimes a multiplex cinema can seem a little too much like a fast food restaurant, shovelling films down the throats of the masses in easy to swallow chunks. But what are the real differences between the multiplex and the indie theatre?

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