or: Pacing my popcorn consumption in an empty cinema

On Tuesday nights, my local cinema shows movies in English and subtitles them in French.

I have just seen the latest Terminator.

It’s at the end of its run so it was either now or possibly never.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the beginning is set in Mexico so there is quite a bit of Spanish talk occurring. My Spanish is not awesome however the French subtitles were useful as I can read French better than I can understand Spanish. 

The same thing happened when I was watching the original Terminator when I was in Ecuador. It was dubbed entirely into Spanish and then subtitled in English. Even Arnie’s Spanish tag line was translated into English! 

What was particular unusual to me this time had nothing to do with language though. 

Popcorn in hand, we arrived inside the movie theatre early because I wanted to see the previews of upcoming films. 

It takes a lot of discipline for me not to finish the popcorn before the movie starts.

It’s an addiction and I try to always buy the small size because it doesn’t matter what size I buy, I could easily finish it before the movie starts and I don’t want to be silly about it! 

Better to finish a small one and be able to eat dinner than a large one and roll out of the cinema later.

Anyway, we had the whole place to ourselves.

Naturally we chose to sit in the back row.

Just as the previews started, after about ten minutes of advertising, another person arrived and sat in the middle.

One more person arrived a little after that.

The movie began with four of us in the cinema and ended the same way.

For those that don’t know the Terminator franchise (it is now a classic and worth a watch), it is about machines taking over the world in the future, and how various humans attempt to stop this from happening in the present and Terminators are sent back in time to kill those humans who are likely to be successful at preventing the rise of the machine.

Every movie in the series has some apocalyptic scene where human skulls and bones are shown covered in ash with a metal robot with red eyes embedded into its metal eye sockets, heavily armed, about to crush down on any bones and shoot anything that moves. 

Sitting with so few in the cinema, it felt like we were the last people on the planet and the machines hadn’t found us yet. 

According to Terminator logic, this would be impossible as we were watching a film on a machine so all the Terminators would have been able to plug into it, know where we were and then kill us. This didn’t matter to me at that moment.

We were survivors.

Survivors with popcorn.

 

Thanks to Brad Fiedel for the title to this post. He’s composed for many films including three with James Cameron (Terminator 1, 2 and True Lies – my favourite Arnie movie!).