On 'Ice Age 4' And The Magic Of The Movies

Why one writer enjoyed a movie he might not have otherwise liked thanks to the Silver Screen

You wouldn’t have been able to tell this when I took my daughter to the movie this past Saturday.

The audience was pretty much giddy with laughter for the duration of the film. My five-year-old was giggling with the best of them.

Even I was laughing, despite my cynical self, and walked away from the movie feeling…good. It was a fun time, made the more so by my daughter’s own enjoyment.

Perhaps more importantly, the audience was really into it. This is what makes going to the movies so special. You can suspend your disbelief just a tiny bit more. You can forgive small details you might otherwise find irksome or eye-roll inducing.

I remember seeing Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at a theatre in Florida when I was ten. After Morgan Freeman’s not-quite inspiring speech toward the climax of the film, the audience literally broke into cheers and clapping. How is this possible? I loved that movie as a ten-year-old. Looking back on it now, 21 years later, and I’m not sure I could find it in me to actually clap at any point in the film.

I’m sure if we’d watched Ice Age 4 at home I wouldn’t really have paid attention to it. But as part of a captive and rather easy-to-please gathering of families, I was stuck and I enjoyed myself.

When people talk about needing new technology to keep audiences coming to the movies, I think they miss an important point about what makes the movies – or, rather, The Movies – special. It’s not the 3D or the super-duper-high-definition or the special effects. Before all these things, people still loved to go. We love to go in spite of the expensive popcorn and soda and we won’t stop going because of the recent horrifying shootings in Aurora, CO.

The movies have a communal magic – an almost contagious magic – that isn’t really something you can define. It’s not even consistent. We just as easily could have seen Ice Age 4 another night, with another audience with fewer happy people guffawing loudly at every joke. If that had been the case, maybe all the little annoying things about the movie would have been more apparent.

But I was bewitched, I suppose. And I had a good time.

P.S. Non-critic scores for the film were nearly twice as high as critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I wonder if others tapped (perhaps unwittingly) into a similar experience as we did.