SM Mall of Asia — Cinema 5

TL;DR — Poorly maintained, smelly, and dirty theater makes for a very unpleasant experience.

It was Friday and traffic was terrible as usual. I decided to wait it out and watch a movie after Waze informed me it would take three hours to get home.

So off I went to get a ticket. The ticket booth was round and had one queue; it’s a strange design, but was probably a space-saving design decision. There wasn’t any place to check out the screening times of movies, save for one monitor on the side that changes its display every few seconds. If you missed any detail, you had to wait for it to cycle through the whole slideshow to get your information.

Selecting your seats and purchasing a ticket was easy. The employee looked sad and bored.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the cinema was a peculiar, unpleasant smell: it smelled like wet carpet in a musky old room. Needless to say, this was an old theater. It was really big and seats don’t cascade as much as the newer cinemas. Brushing that aside, I went to look for my seat and sat down.

After watching a few trailers, I felt something brushing upon my left arm. I paid it no mind, thinking it was just my hair touching the armrest or something. After a few seconds, there it was again. I took a glance, and to my shock, discovered it was a small cockroach! I was like “what the f…?!” Lucky for me, there were lots of empty seats so I transferred myself to one far from the cockroach infested row.

How do you enjoy your movie after all of that? Answer: you can’t.