I wanted to write about The Dark Knight Rises as soon as I left the theater after the midnight showing I saw part of the Marathon I went to, all 3 films in a row however I was very tired and went to bed intending on writing about it when I awoke. That was not the case. When I awoke the next day the first thing my mother told me was if I had heard about the shooting in Aurora Colorado. She explained to me that someone had dressed up all in black armor of some sort and shot up a movie theater killing and injuring many people. My first thoughts were, no that’s not right, it must be some sort of joke. I mean who would do that? Who would go to the one place that I feel at ease at the most, the one place I enjoy going to over anywhere else? That pondered in my head as I went back to bed (I had only been a sleep a couple of hours and needed more rest).
When I woke up again and for the day I turned on the news as the shooting was on some channel at least every hour of the day, at least it seemed that way. I began to hear reports, stories from people in the theater who got out alive and ok (as ok as one could be after being in that position). I felt so bad for those people, for the people who died, for those hurt, and for the families of everyone suffering through this tragedy. After my feelings of sadness however I became angry. Angry someone would do this, someone would kill so many innocent people and hurt so many others at a movie theater of all places. Your not suppose to be scared or wonder “will I get shot today if I go to the movies?” I adore going to the movies, to see the films, to be introduced to characters and other worlds for 90+ minutes. How dare someone make midnight showings something you have to second guess now because of fear, because of unknowing-ness. Unknowing if you will be safe.
After that I then felt as a fan disappointed in the way that the film was being negatively affected. Don’t get me wrong, now this is far below my feelings of sadness and sorrow for what happened but I also could not ignore what it would mean for the film. The last Batman film, The Dark Knight came out in 2008 and that was impacted by the death of a great actor; Heath Ledger. His death left a dark cloud over the film and it was hard to watch knowing he was gone. Now 4-5 years later we were going to have another Batman film, another turn to blow everyone out of the water and it would have done that had it not been for this piece of trash James Holmes. This man took away the innocence that we all have in each of us, the child inside when we go see a movie we are thrilled to go watch. When you step into a theater you can be that 12 year old kid again, believing in magic, in fantasy, in anything… now this man has tarnished that. He’s made people want to even go as far as suing the studio Warner Bros. for producing a film that was “to violent.” Let me point out one crucial hard but true fact here; no one was forced to go see this film, people chose to see this film because they too were thrilled and excited to see this. You can’t blame a studio for producing a movie, a movie that you wanted to go see yourself and had been anticipating because of some piece of garbage did what he did. Go after him, and I believe the theater itself. Why the theater? It should have had alarms on those exit doors, plain and simple. Had they been set with an alarm the shooter Holmes would not have been able to leave it propped open. In the Harkins theater I visit, the theater that is my movie home has workers come in and count the people, check the doors to make sure they are closed, and such. Did the theater in Aurora not have these policies in place?
I hope the victims some day can recover from this and return to the theater without fear, without second guessing, I hope anyone in the world affected by this can allow themselves to not be yet another victim of this murderer.
