Hollywood takes a lot of flack these days for 3D movies. The 3D effect is irrelevant to most viewers at best and actively detrimental to the experience at worst. In exchange, theaters increase ticket prices from the usually ridiculous to the simply outrageous. Admittedly, I’m the first to agree with these complaints. I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in 3D and barely noticed the effects, except for a bit of extra darkness. Most 3D movies today, like Harry Potter, are not actually filmed in 3D, but converted afterwards. That means perspectives were all filmed with 2D in mind. All the lighting was done the same way. We’re not actually getting the kind of 3D that studios’ technology is capable of. Selling those movies as 3D is certainly a pricing gimmick, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled into thinking its representative of the technology’s true ability and future.
Even when it comes to true 3D film, the results we’re seeing today have only begun to scratch the surface of what we can expect in the future. The directors and camera crews of Hollywood today have spent their careers working with traditional 2D film and for the most part, they haven’t trained extensively with the new technology. Old habits die hard, and lighting a movie with the expectation that most viewers will see it at half-brightness is not something that comes naturally to most of them.
We have seen 3D done right. Avatar is the obvious example, and the response from viewers was tremendous. James Cameron was fairly ingenious in realizing that audiences would prefer a window into a 3D world, rather than having elements of the movie randomly explode out of the film, breaking the immersive experience any time a 3D element crosses the edge of the screen. Hollywood has gotten so caught up in the technology because they misunderstood what that response meant, but that doesn’t mean that 3D done right won’t draw an audience.
We’re looking at the beginnings of an era. Go back 70 years or so to the beginnings of three-strip Technicolor. The Wizard of Oz made the technology famous, with its dramatic shift from the sepia world of Kansas, to the dramatically bright colors of Munchkinland. It was so impressive that many people think of Oz as the first color motion picture. In reality, it wasn’t even the first picture using three-strip, which was itself a fourth generation of color technology. It took a long time before filmmakers knew how to take advantage of the options that good color film afforded them, and we all remember this early great example, along with a few others like Gone With The Wind, and forget about the disasters that appeared alongside them.
There is real potential in 3D as the future of the motion picture. I wouldn’t recommend going out and buying a 3D television just yet, at least not until they get a bit more standardized. And I certainly wouldn’t say people should pay the 3D markup in theater. But don’t write 3D off as a bad idea just yet. The day will come for lions and tigers and bears exploding off the screen. Oh my!
I personally don’t think that, as of today, 3D contributes to the movie experience as much as color (or Technicolor) did in its day, the effects are nice enough and they will surely get better, but having seen several films in 3D, including Avatar or Tron, I’ve always left the theather with the sensation of having been ripped off for a pair of cheap glasses and very few (if any) stellar momments in which the 3D version of the movie really was significantly better than the 2D version.
It’s not that I don’t like 3D, I’m kind of a tech geek and I surely want to see this technology evolves and check how much it can contribute to imrproving movies. But as of today I see it more like a lame excuse to ask people to pay more for their movie tickets or their TV sets.