I would have gone to complain about all these problems, except it hardly ever makes any difference. Usually you can’t find a managerial person of any kind, and the projectionists seem to resent any intrusion into their sanctum of rest and relaxation. I don’t know why ordinary members of the public don’t complain about this kind of thing more often; perhaps, in this case, they were too busy keeping their children under control.
Having said all that, and making allowances for the atrocious viewing conditions, Sinbad is a lot of fun. The figure of the piratical rogue travelling the globe and encountering all sorts of supernatural figures is at least as old as the Odyssey, and DreamWorks here have magimixed the basic orientalist story with some bits and bobs from Graeco-Roman mythology. One character, for instance, is named Proteus, though he’s not the shape-shifter of legend (someone should look up the origin of the word “protean”). Then there’s Tartarus, which was the Greeks’ name for the hellish part of the afterlife; here’s it’s the domain of an evil goddess. No wraiths in sight. Such narrative promiscuity is, it would seem, a post-modern tendency: any piece of story will do, regardless of its origins, if it can be made to fit with another story. Salman Rushdie, however, it is not.
Sinbad (voiced by Brad Pitt, though in what seemed to me a very George Clooney role) is set on stealing the Book of Peace, which, naturally, keeps the whole world in equilibrium and happiness. He wants to hold it for ransom. And he just about gets away with it, but he’s thwarted by his childhood friend Proteus (voiced by Ralph Fiennes) and a sea monster dispatched by Eris, the aforementioned goddess (voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer). Eris, however, has other plans — she still wants to get her hands on the Book of Peace, the idea being to reduce the world to chaos. When she does grab it, it’s up to Sinbad and Proteus’s betrothed, Marina (voice of Catherine Zeta-Jones), to get it back. Sinbad is largely amoral, so Marina has to be his conscience. Behind every successful man…
The movie verily zips along, as it should, with plenty of swashbuckling, bloodless kiddie-violence, as well as a drooling dog that, mercifully, does not speak. The relationship between Sinbad and Marina, as they dodge various hazards, alternates between bristling and coyly sentimental. That’s okay; one doesn’t expect more than recycled clichés tarted up with some state-of-the-art animation.
What is bizarre, though, it seems to me, is the underlying gynaephobia embodied in the seductively evil goddess Eris. This comes to a head, as it were, with Sinbad’s arrival at her realm, the opening to which is a shining vertical slit in the fabric of the universe. On the other side of the slit, as Sinbad and Marina find when they’ve been sucked in, all is hallucinatory chaos. I hope the parents in the audience aren’t going to find that too hard to explain to the kids.