has anyone watched Shang-Chi?

[ratcreature]

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth the risk (and extra hassle, tbh, what with reservation and name check-in) to watch Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in the cinema.

The mainstream reviews I've seen all sound really positive, otoh I haven't seen anyone squee about it in my DW network, and I'm unfamiliar with the comic character this is based on and have no prior fannish interest in him.

I'm also a bit unsure how risky sitting in a cinema for two hours is. Considering that I'm now fully vaxxed and cinemas are still requiring masks and distancing, and only let you in if you are vaccinated, recovered or recently tested (though depending on the cinema the tested option is being phased out here), it would probably not be that risky, except that people can take masks off for eating and drinking in cinemas, so that makes it more like indoor dining, which is high risk. And if I skip the popcorn myself and keep my mask on throughout (and I now commonly use the FFP2 kind, so that gives some protection for yourself) I probably would have to deal with my glasses fogging up at some point. Even with my best efforts for a tight fit with the wire and taping up the small gaps near my nose, that tape starts to fail at 30-40 minutes, since the moisture of the breath it blocks eventually starts to loosen it. And then the glasses fog up.

Then there is the whole extra hassle of having to reserve and buy your tickets online now and check in with your name for contact tracing, when I just used to buy my cinema tickets in person with money without anyone collecting my data. I mean presumably they aren't allowed to do anything with this personal data, but then nobody is supposed to make unsolicited phone calls to sell me stuff either, yet that happens.

So I'm waffling whether it's really worth it.

Comments

[raine]

It's worth the big-screen treatment; the climatic action sequences are meant for a big screen. I saw it in the theatre and while it's not my favorite MCU movie, it's solid in the way MCU movies tend to be (they have the formula down pat by now). What makes an MCU movie for me is that experience of watching it with an audience of strangers on the first weekend it's open; you get all the collective reactions that become legendary later, like the cheers in Endgame when the Avengers assemble.

That said - if you're worried at all about the risk and data collection, I'd wait. Watching it on a decently-sized TV would suffice.

[ratcreature]

Well, when it opened I wasn't two weeks past my second dose yet, I'm only considered fully vaccinated as of last Wednesday, so had I wanted to watch the opening night I would have had to get covid test on top of everything else.

I don't care that much about the action sequences, and I'm not really into kung-fu movie fights, but I do enjoy the cinema experience in general, mostly because it's distraction free, and it forces you to just watch the whole thing through. So I miss cinema for that.

The data collection is more of an annoyance than a dealbreaker, but the incidence rates here aren't good. Not catastrophic, but the seven day incidence is 90 per 100 000 people.