3D Movies

3D isn’t new. Back in my youth I remember having plenty of pairs of those crappy card glasses with one red and one blue ‘lens’ (that’s code for coloured piece of transparent plastic). Comics looked like a weird distortion of colours without the glasses and not much better with them. The same was true of cinema. 3D films have existed for a century although it never really took off and was avoided by mainstream (one exception which sticks in my mind is the poor Jaws 3D from 1983). Admittedly I haven’t seen groundbreaking 1903 film, L'arrivée Du Train but I bet the locomotive in question looks resplendent in various chunks of red and blue.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock you’ll be familiar, in name at least, with the film that kick-started the current 3D frenzy; Avatar. As I said, films were released in 3D for many years prior to Avatar’s 2009 release but it was the first movie to really capture the public’s imagination due, in part, to technology advancements and the vision of James Cameron. Oh, and the fact that the movie studios realised people would stomach an additional premium to see 3D movies.

Avatar went on to take $2.7bn at the box office, eclipsing the previous recorder of twelve years, Titanic, by an eyebrow-raising $940m. Not a bad hit rate for Cameron, since Titanic was the previous movie he’d directed. Anyway, many people have criticised the $2.7bn figure, pointing out that (even with inflation considered) 3D ticket prices are more expensive and so the success is skewed. Either way, studio bosses who can sniff money from half a mile away quickly jumped on the bandwagon. In the year pre-Avatar twenty 3D films were released. In the year that followed that number had almost doubled, with thirty eight. The following year saw fifty six released. You get the picture.

A number of these later releases have been retro-fitted, meaning that they were shot in conventional 2D and then converted afterwards during post-processing. Cameron, in particular, is especially disparaging of this method. Why? Because the effect is not as realistic (and by ‘not as realistic’ I mean, ‘it looks crap’). The Clash Of The Titans remake is one film that had the 3D conversion treatment, and I can vouch that it adds nothing to the film and, in fact, makes it look laughably bad in places. Who did they give the job to? Did someone download a shareware copy of ‘My First 3D Movie v1.0’ from the web and use that on an old 486 PC? Piranha 3D was also manipulated this way but I was too caught up in Kelly Brook being motorboated by a porn star to pay attention to the quality of the conversion (it’s got piranhas in it though and they fly out of the screen!).

Avatar was filmed with dedicated 3D cameras but it’s a very expensive way to shoot. Studios have, therefore, started pumping out these 3D conversions, but why didn’t they do it sooner? Because it’s still a bloody expensive process. You’re looking at a cost of up to $100,000 per minute of film. The decision to convert Clash Of The Titans was apparently made late in the day and yet still took ten weeks, at a cost of $4.5m. However, on the flip side they’re now in the position where they can charge an additional $5 a ticket to see the movie, which pushes the income beyond the additional expenditure. It’s the very definition of the phrase ‘cash cow’. Who cares about the quality?

So what do I think? Not that you should really care, but I’d echo Cameron’s sentiment that, essentially, bad 3D is worse than no 3D. I haven’t even mentioned that the 3D process darkens films markedly (a criticism which plagued The Last Airbender). Do it properly, or not at all.

Personally, I don’t really care which way movies go as long as they’re good. I don’t want to see crap 3D any more than I want to see bad CGI. I look back on some of my favourite films over the last few years and I’m grateful that 3D wasn’t around to ruin them. Make good movies first and foremost and don’t attempt visual spectacles at the expense of everything else. And this applies to you too Cameron, so don’t sit back all smug. Yes, Avatar looked fantastic but as a film it’s only passable and very clichéd. I watched it once and enjoyed it, but I’m not tempted to make repeated viewings. And you’re responsible for a million parodies and endless ‘giant Smurf’ jokes we’re bombarded with every time it’s mentioned.