The sun has been shining this week in London. That’s not a metaphor. It really is baking hot. “Hot, damn hot” as the great Robin Williams once said about the Vietnamese jungle.

After the usual annual failure to avoid sunburn — there always seems to some part of the neck or shoulders that Factor 50 seems not to work on — I decided to seek some shade at the air-conditioned cinema. We are very lucky in London. Despite a few closures in recent years, there is still an abundance of big screens to choose from. And as F1 opened this weekend, I thought I would go luxury and see it at the main screen at Odeon Leicester Square in London’s West End.

I have not visited this cinema for a little while. Mainly because the ticket prices at peak times can make a serious dent in the wallet! My local cinemas are much more affordable! But for certain films, it is really worth the splurge.

The Odeon on Leicester Square is one of London’s oldest cinemas. It opened in 1937 and its history is associated with the BIG screen experience — movie premieres and red carpet glamour. It was the UK’s first widescreen cinema and offered UK audiences its first experience of Dolby Sound. The original capacity was over 2,000 seats! It may be smaller today, but at 800 seats it is still a big cinema by modern standards.

And stepping inside such a splendid looking cinema, is a nice reminder that I do absolutely adore the BIG screen experience. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a cinema to watch a movie over the years. 700 or 800 times maybe to hazard a guess. And it never grows old.

This isn’t a F1 film review. But a couple of things popped into my head whilst watching Brad Pitt tear it up in a racing car. The sound design for this film is exquisite. The advancement in audio technology that enables filmic sound to reverberate around an audience does not get enough attention. The availability of such wonderful technology adds an extra dimension for the creation of atmosphere in story telling. You can really feel the cars behind or in front of you. For moments it is exhilarating.

I remember seeing Maestro at another Dolby cinema when it received a brief cinematic release in 2023. The soundscape in that film is extra delightful — a perfect marriage of art and technology. The sound work is exceptional. It is worth a few minutes of your time to read about how carefully the sound design for this film was approached. During the screening I actually turned round at one point as my brain half-thought that the cinema audience had started to clap! It is wonderful to see/hear modern digital machinery used with such sophistication and subtlety.

The other aspect of the BIG film experience is that when the screen is that LARGE, screenwriters can or indeed should construct things differently. The images can be structured in a specific manner when creating visuals designed to be experienced on a 48 foot widescreen rather than a 50 inch screen at home. And that does not mean the need to fill the page with space for hundred of extras or gorgeous looking background scenery. It is about an awareness of the space your characters occupy: what is going on around the action.

At one point in F1, Brad Pitt, stands travel-bag in hand on the race-track. He has returned to save the day — again. It is a fun moment. But the image works because Pitt is given such stature by the amount of empty space around him. The scape he occupies is vast, and yet your eyes are drawn to him. It’s an image that tells the story so efficiently — no need for additional exposition or dialogue. A larger than life character stands centre of a vast concrete space as his team mates look upon him. That’s enough to convey the narrative. But undoubtedly this picture has an elevated impact when seen on a BIG screen: because the space around him is important to the meaning in the image. I imagine that this filmic moment watched at home would not work half as well — as the surrounding space around Brad would not wear as much meaning.

One of my favourite movies is Lawrence of Arabia — a film I have seen many times on screens both big and small. This is a famous example, so I’m not saying anything novel here. But sometimes it is worthwhile to revisit cinema’s greatest moments. But the long, slow appearance of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) is 2 minutes of film that never fails to create shivers. And it is a scene that is worth the extra effort to see on a BIG screen — at least once in your life: as that tiny shimmering figure that rides slowly towards the screen gains extra suspense, extra curiosity, just so much intrigue when you get to see and experience the vastness of the desert around him on a BIG, vast huge screen at a cinema.

Short is better. But sometimes Big is better too.