theulcollective: Post-Avatar 3D Blues

It would be a fair assumption to say that almost everyone has seen Avatar and for the most part saw it in 3D.I did, on its release day and I was snared in its trap, marvelling in the depth of field and striking realism the three dimensions delivered. I wasn’t blown away by the films story or acting which could merely be described as solid but by the sheer technical excellence of how James Cameron had put his fantasy world together.

Consequently I became a convert to the 3D cause and began to tell anyone who would listen just how much 3D added to the experience of seeing a movie in the cinema. I eagerly looked up the next films that would be presented in this marvellous new way and looked forward to a day when this would be the standard.

It was I felt, a win-win scenario for both the audiences who were being served up something they truly couldn’t get in their own home and for the studios who had found a way of making that illegal torrent file look a lot less attractive. After all to see Avatar with poor quality picture and sound, on a small screen and not in 3D, well, what’s the point?

Unfortunately this cinematic bliss couldn’t last and in fact lasted only as long as it took to see my second film under stereoscopic glasses.

A week ago I went with my family to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in the Galway Eye Cinema, the very same screen in which we saw Cameron’s effort last December. We had planned the trip a few weeks ago and had put the extra money aside for a rare treat and 3D aside we were excited to see a new Burton film especially one that looked to be so well suited to his sensibilities.

To say we were disappointed is an understatement because Alice is a humourless studio product assembled with stale imagination and with nothing of the source material shining through the CGI gloop of animated creations.

Worse still, the 3D was atrociously bad.

Blurry and dim, the extra dimension did nothing to enhance the experience and with no real depth the different elements of the picture just seemed to float around and I found myself taking the glasses off to see if there was something wrong. There wasn’t and a dawning realisation hit me, I’ve been conned.

For the record, we spent extra on travel, extra on the price of admission and extra time driving to Galway to see this film, but to have an experience made worse by the very thing we went out of our way for was just crushing.

Now don’t get me wrong, 3D is a technique and I would in no way expect it to save a bad movie and to reiterate Alice in Wonderland is a bad movie but for the 3D to be done so poorly and by the biggest studio in the world was for me unforgivable.

I was only after I got home that I discovered that Alice had not be shot in 3D, as was the case with Avatar but that it had been retrofitted to play in 3D screens and after seeing the terrible results I feel that audiences could, like me, be completely turned off by a slew of shoddy film with shoddy 3D that are bound to come as the astronomical amounts of money that Avatar and Alice are making are duly counted.

The whole debacle serves as a reminder that bad films cannot be improved just by repackaging them in 3D and that the goodwill of people to pay extra for such things will be short lived if the films and the presentation do not live up to the dazzle of Avatar.

Given that not one film that has been shot in 3D will see the inside of cinemas his year, the situation does not look good and with the news that the upcoming Harry Potter and Clash of the Titans have been retrofitted for 3D, the party for the studios and audiences could be over before its even had a chance to get started.

I might give the glasses another go when a real 3D movie arrives but for now I think I’ll stick with the traditional screens and keep my money because on recent evidence it’s just not worth it.

I nearly have my own blog up and running and ill post the details soon