P.D. James is a figure of fun in my household. She used to be a regular pundit on Newsnight Review, the old BBC arts programme, and her film criticism was guided by her hearing. Every new film, she complained, was ‘terribly loud’. Why didn’t projectionists reduce the volume? We wondered if it had ever been thus with James. We replaced the baroness’s soft tones with the austere squawk of Dame Edith Evans and declared that Buster Keaton was ‘terribly loud’.
But the great lady is on to something: an overbearing sound system can harm a film. Star Trek Into Darkness began and it was as if a choir of Hell’s Angels, on their way to the seaside to biff some unsuspecting day-trippers, had taken a detour via the Leicester Square Empire. I reached immediately for the nonexistent remote.
The second film in this Star Trek franchise is a blockbuster aimed at families with teenage children.
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