Chris Schulz: entertainment commentator reviews the new Darkfield experience in Auckland

If you've been to Auckland's Aotea Square recently, you may have noticed the large shipping containers that recently appeared.

They're part of Darkfield, an immersive audio experience that has travelled the world, including to major international festivals like the Venice Film Festival, BFI London, Tribeca and SXSW.

The containers are pitch-black and visitors step inside either the Victorian seance room or the replica economy class cabin to listen to a 20-25 minute 360-degree audio experience.

Entertainment commentator Chris Schulz reveals whether or not this is an experience worth checking out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Mission Impossible Scene There Chris Shaltz joins me now to
talk entertainment. Good morning, Good morning, the Final Reckoning. This
was released. There was a preview of it on Friday night.
Took most of our Friday night, two hours and fifty
minutes of it. I didn't wait for the burgers and
the chips. I just went straight to the there and
got my fantastic seat. This is the final last film

(00:47):
in the Mission Impossible series, and I'm going to be
honest with you, Chris. As far as thrillers and action
flex go, I do appreciate and really enjoy the silliness,
the escapism, and the incredible kind of stunts and the
thrill that's presented to us in a cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
This does the job right the action set pieces a
way you're going to these things, You're not going there
to try and understand what's going on because the backs,
oh my god, there's there are hard drives and USB
flash drives that need to be combined with a poison pill.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
That is ai that someone I'm not entirely can't really
remember who created which is going to take over the
world and we're all going to be like control. They've
got the nukes. What we know, Chris is the world's
going to explore. So this is part two. This finale
has been done in two parts, hasn't it? So part
one Dead Reckoning was that last year or the year
before twenty three? Yeah, so this is this is final

(01:42):
and they do take quite a lot of time to
set it up. So if you can't quite remember the
end of reading, there's a lot of reminiscing about where
we're at, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
An entire hour of backstory, I want to say, but
not just backstory for the seventh film, the last film,
this backstory for the whole series. They're going back to
some of the first films.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Nostalgia, isn't it.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's almost like a greatest it. So I felt too
like some of those first set pieces they were almost
HARKing back, like when Tom Cruise ethan hunt the spy
is tied up in a chair and he can't find
his lock packs and he's about to be tortured, Like
I've seen that scene before, right, like several times, Like
this felt like a greatest sets But then they get

(02:25):
to the set pieces, the action set pieces. In the
middle of the film, they put Ethan Hunt on a
sunken submarine, and that is one of the most spectacular
cinematic sequences. I think I'll see all yet. For twenty minutes,
I just sat back in my seat and went, Wow,
he's he's trying to make his way through a submerged
submarine abandoned, right, But there's missiles going around like pickup sticks.

(02:49):
So he's got this face helmet diving suit thing on,
so you can't really see him properly, but it's spectacular.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Five hundred meters you know, on the ocean, will sort
of on an ocean floor.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
The whole thing is ridiculous, but as you say, absolutely thrilling.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Why you're going yeah, and do you know what?

Speaker 2 (03:06):
It was long and it was probably too long, but
these days the price of a movie ticket is twenty
five bucks, and he is going to give you bang
for your back totally.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Also, I've got a hot tape. If you get bored,
just watch Tom Cruise's hair. It changes scene to scene,
and I think that's because they shot this over two
years in different countries. He must have changed hair dresses
multiple times because it's wafty and breezy in some scenes
and it's longer, and then it's like cut back to
like it's shorter like the Tom Cruise we know, and

(03:35):
other scenes, and then he's on the flight and it's
like helmet here right, like it's all down over his
face and the.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Way you usually make comments about it, Oh, I like
your hair longer, And I did wonder if that was
a bit of a joke, like hang on in the
scene before, wasn't it shorter?

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Look?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
I love watching him do his own stunts as well.
There is something old fashioned about it. You know that
what you were seeing is being shot in camera on
a location, and he's not afraid that he looks so
funny because his hair has been blown into, you know,
into strange sort of shapes, and his face and his
cheeks are all sort of wabbler around.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Gives it a spectacle, right. Shit, it's exhausting, it's exhausted.
I did love this, this whole hunt to bring down AI,
which is like kind of what Tom Cruiser's mission impossible
in film is. You know, we saw Harrison Ford get
deaged in the last Indiana Jones movie. I really hope
Tom Cruise just sticks to his guns here and he
doesn't go down that roade. I don't know, he's sixty three.

(04:29):
I don't know how long he can keep doing this.
Probably not that long. But you know, I'd hate to
see him pop up like daged with AI, I know.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Because he's really stuck to his guns. I mean, he
is single handedly trying to save Cinema Cinema's theaters. You know,
he's trying to keep us going.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
That really is a mission impossible.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah, sure enough. Hey tell me about something a little
bit different. This is dark Field. It's a live theater experience.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
Yeah, if you've been down to Artier Square in Auckland,
or if you're coming up soon, you'll see these two
huge shipping containers that bright white, you can't miss them,
and one's got flight written on a side of it
and the other one's got seance. These are I want
to call them immersive experiences that they're sensory deprivation experiences.
So you buy a ticket q up and you go

(05:18):
in and so I did the flight one last week,
and it's set up like a plane. You go in
and you go through the normal routine of going on
a flight, and then they turn the lights off and
you put headphones on and things get weird. So it's
sensory deprivation. Your ears start hearing more, okay, And so

(05:39):
they're playing with audio. There's things that you hear, people whispering,
and the flight itself is quite messed up and it
gets trippier and tripier.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
Yeah, so if you're afraid of flying, would this be triggering? Okay,
we don't go anywhere near and if you're afraid, well.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
If you're afraid of fright flying, if you don't like
being in enclosed, dark spaces as well. Yeah, Like so
I went with my wife. She hated it, like the
worst thing ever for her. For me, I was grinning
the entire time. I actually loved it. I don't think
it's a complete experience that you hear. In the UK
they have these like immersive theater experiences. They set up

(06:14):
a whole house, like you know Georgian Times with you
know old you know you're in a murder mystery or something.
This isn't that. This is about twenty five minutes, but
it is trippy. It does change your reality you come
out of it. I did feel like i'd been on
a bit of a journey and it had had changed
things for me, so yeah, no, it's definitely worth checking
out interesting.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Thank you so much, Chris.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
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