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If started as a fairground or arcade attraction in the late 19th century, it has become common currency to suggest that it has returned to something close to that status today. Hollywood blockbusters are commonly described by both critics and publicists as thrill or rollercoasters. Some commentators have implied that the period of dominance of classical narrative structure has come to an end, shown to be merely an interlude between the carnival-style attraction of early and its contemporary equivalent. Narrative concerns are said, more or less explicitly, to have been surrendered to an emphasis on purely visceral thrills. This paper will question some of these assumptions, starting with an analysis of what might be expected to be the most extreme end of the continuum between narrative and spectacular attraction: not just the metaphor of film as ride, but actual film-based rides or experiences at theme parks such as Disneyland and Universal Studios. Attractions such as Terminator 2: 3D, Jurassic Park: The Ride and Back to the Future: The Ride (all at Universal) are in many respects contemporary equivalents of the early cinema of described in Tom Gunning's influential accounts: a blend of the fairground ride and forms of that seek to engage directly with the viewer.(1) The appeal of these attractions is based on confrontation and direct stimulation of the rider/viewer rather than seeking to absorb the audience into sustained narratives. The rider/viewer is subjected to a series of physical and emotional shocks of the kind described by Sergei Eisenstein, on whose work Gunning draws.(2) Eisenstein's prescription for a that works as an aggressive assault on the audience is realized literally, if shorn of his ideological intention to wake the audience into an active engagement that can bring to the surface the contradictions of capitalism. Back to the Future: The Ride and Disneyland's Star Tours are based on motion-simulator platforms that buck and yaw alarmingly to synchronize quite effectively with the apparent movements suggested on screen. Star Tours, one of the first of these kinds of attractions, projects images onto a relatively small screen that stands for the window of a spacecraft on a runaway flight through various scenes of the film; Back to the Future offers more encompassing imagery projected onto a seven-story high Omnimax dome, a chase through time and space that includes plunging into a volcano and down the throat of a T-Rex. Another version of the film-based theme park attraction offers something that appears closer to a conventional cinematic experience. Terminator 2: 3D and Disney's Honey, I Shrunk the Audience are 3D films staged in large theatrical auditoria. Various objects are propelled into the audience, in typical 3D style: a selection of weapons and fragments of exploding objects in T23D, in addition to the probing limbs of the T-1000 terminator from Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and its hyperbolic extension in the multi-limbed T-1000,000 invented for the theme park event; a similar repertoire is offered in Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. This is nothing new in the history of 3D movies, which have always tended to spend much of their time thrusting objects out at the audience, but these attractions go further in offering a direct impact on the viewer. Both resort to one way of touching the audience physically, without any threat of injury, by spraying liquid in their faces: in Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, the result is a climactic gross-out effect as a giant dog sneezes into the auditorium; in T2:3D the T-1000,000 is frozen solid and then shattered outwards into a shower of liquid metal fragments. Physical movement is also used in these two attractions, although the larger theatrical context reduces its scale and impact. In T2:3D, the seat of the viewer pushes upwards at the start of the final sequence, in which the screen widens to almost 180 degrees and the audience is given the illusion of joining the fictional protagonists in a descending lift; in the final conflagration, as 3D flames explode out from the screen and smoke effects engulf the theatre, the seat drops back abruptly to jolt the viewer with the impact of destruction. …
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