Has Secret Cinema dumbed down over the years, as it’s moved from atmospheric screenings of arthouse classics to lavishly expensive bolt-ons to recent blockbusters? Or has it merely finally succeeded in reaching people like me, who basically have no interest in any developments in contemporary film and TV but will see literally everything that the ongoing Marvel superhero franchise spews out?
A Secret Cinema tie-in with the staggeringly popular Marvel Cinematic Universe has surely been on the cards for a while, and James Gunn’s ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ films make perfect sense for a crossover: they offer rich, expansive, wilfully silly sci-fi vistas that are ripe for exploration in an immersive style.
Situated on a building site in Wembley Park, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy: The Live Immersive Experience’ doesn’t exactly make you feel you’re roaming through space, but its dense warren of retro-futuristic bars, shops and public spaces is detailed and interesting, with plenty of little subplots to throw yourself into as we’re divided into six ‘Ravager clans’ and made to compete against each other on what’s basically an intergalactic fundraising drive.
It’s good fun: if it doesn’t have anything like the scope or depth of Punchdrunk’s ‘The Burnt City’ (which it passingly resembles aesthetically), it has a palpably higher budget and attention to detail than most other London immersive shows. The slavish combined GotG/Secret Cinema fanbases give it a genuine party atmosphere: more than one member of the audience had elected to paint themselves blue for their trip. And I was taken with the ‘ah, fuck it’ gutsiness of simply hiring local actors to play iconic characters like Peter Quill, Ganora and Yondu, though the less said about the cheapo CGI Rocket Racoon the better (NB if none of this means anything to you, they’re space people).
I was less taken with the late-developing plot, which was essentially a humourless rehash of moments from the first film, with the Guardians battling the creepy Collector for something called the Embers of Genesis. There’s some solid live stunt work involved, but it’s hardly a gripping new adventure, and it’s almost painfully unamusing next to the films. I guess if this is a ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’-themed party then this is the party entertainment, but I struggled not to find it incredibly lame
A real sign of how far Secret Cinema has diverged from merely showing films is that the title of this night refers to the intellectual property being tackled, not the film being shown. As an aggressive avoider of all small print I’d totally failed to clock the fact that the film being screened is in fact ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2’: I’m a fan of both, but I couldn’t help but suspect the better-regarded first film may have been passed over purely because the flimsy plot of the live show comes after it chronologically, if not particularly meaningfully.
As ever, the prices are absolutely preposterous, but I think people know the odds with Secret Cinema by now. You pay ten times what you would in a cinema in order to feel feelings about your favourite film again, and if you’re happy to do that then you do you.
Ultimately the reason big movie franchises are happy to allow Secret Cinema to do its thing is that they know exactly what they’re getting: a little themed world with some shops and some games, that fans of a film can play around in for a few hours. An inoffensive skit or two. But it’s not exactly a gamble with your IP: nobody is going to come out of this feeling they saw a brand new Guardians of the Galaxy adventure, just some nice themed entertainment.
With Ivo van Hove supposedly adapting ‘The Shining’ and a bona fide ‘Stranger Things’ stage play in the offing, it feels like we’re coming up to a moment of genuinely daring dialogue between stage and screen. But for all its grandeur, Secret Cinema feels like it’s basically stuck in a comfort zone: good, but also about as good as it’s ever going to get.
