Roger Ebert, a long-time opponent of 3D and a skeptic of most 3D movies, has an essay in Newsweek explaining why. His opening salvo is typical both of his views on the subject and of his lucid, vigorous writing style:
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood’s current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.
Judging from the box-office success of Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and now How to Train Your Dragon (which bounced back on amazing word of mouth from initially tepid performance and regained the #1 spot last weekend), Ebert might be preaching to a pretty deserted choir loft. Still, he clearly has a point—several in fact, some more telling than others.
3D is dim, true (I noticed this especially on Clash of the Titans). In fact, each eye gets only half the usual amount of light. Still, that’s a tech problem that can be corrected.
More enduring are Ebert’s objections that 3D is unsuitable for grown-up films—Crazy Heart in 3D, anyone?—and that it limits the freedom of directors to make movies as they choose. How does it do this? Partly because, in one very important way, traditional 2D movies are more like real-world 3D vision than 3D movies.
When you look at the real world with two eyes, your eyes have to choose where to focus: on objects close at hand, far away or somewhere in between. Regular 2D movies can mimic this effect, cueing the viewer where to pay attention, and sometimes redirecting the viewer from one part of the image to another by shifting (or “racking”) the focus. 2D movies can also use “deep focus” to bring the entire field of vision into focus at once.
A 3D movie uses two different points of view to create a fairly convincing illusion of 3D—but there are catches. In reality the entire image is the same distance from your eyes: the distance of the screen. Superficially it seems to your brain as if certain objects are closer and others farther away; in principle, this ought to mean that you could refocus your eyes on closer objects or farther objects—but you can’t. Try to focus on a blurry far-away object, and it remains just as blurry as before.
This wrecks the illusion of 3D, so 3D directors are basically obliged to rely on deep focus, to minimize the problem of seemingly 3D objects you can’t focus on. This, though, isn’t what real depth is like either; in the real world, everything isn’t in focus all at once.
What’s more, by relying on deep focus, the director loses the use of shallow focus and racking focus to guide the viewer’s attention. This is a bigger deal than casual movie watchers may realize, precisely because of the effectiveness of these tools at guiding the viewer experience, often without the viewer even noticing. You might think that Jurassic Park would be even cooler in 3D, but consider, for example, the shot in which Tim becomes aware of the velociraptor behind him: the focus rack from Tim’s face to the alarming silhouette behind the screen, and back to Tim’s terrified face. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t work well in 3D.
And that brings me to one of the least appealing aspects of the 3D craze: the push to retrofit older films for 3D. Converting 2D images to 3D is and will always be a flawed process, since you have to invent information that isn’t there about what objects look like from different points of view. Does anyone really need to see Titanic in dodgy 3D? Raiders? Star Wars? The Wizard of Oz?
Judging from the comments at Newsweek, Ebert’s readers are divided on the subject. How about Register readers? What have you seen in 3D? How much of a difference did 3D make? What you would you like to see in 3D? What would you not?
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I have no interest in 3D. It’s a major distraction and often it seems cheesy and unconvincing.
In my review of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I mentioned that some of the landscape shots there were so good they made me wonder what, say, Lawrence of Arabia might be like in 3D—and I still stand by that. Yes, it’s a serious drama and all that, but even grown-up movies can have a bit of spectacle from time to time. And Lawrence of Arabia is nothing if not spectacular! (Interestingly, my second-favorite movie of all time is a Woody Allen flick, and when I ask myself what that movie might be like in 3D, I am reminded that the *audio* there is in mono rather than stereo. Never mind taking advantage of our second eye; Woody can’t be bothered to take advantage of our second ear!)
Re: deep focus, one of the complaints that some people made about Avatar, interestingly enough, was that James Cameron *didn’t* use it as much as he could have, that he continually insisted on forcing the viewer to look over here or over there instead of allowing them to look wherever they wanted, by racking focus the way he did. Some went so far as to call his directorial style “fascist” or “dictatorial”. (See, e.g., here: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2009/12/avatar_3d_headaches_look_at_th.html)
Personally, I like 3D, but I also like the ingenious way that directors have used 2D images over the years. Will directors be able to play with “forced perspective” in 3D movies? (One of the “tests” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comes to mind here; yes, it is and always was a “cheat”, but it’s a “cheat” that could never have worked in 3D. Think also of the scene in Temple of Doom where a man “hides” by standing in front of a life-sized painting of a crowd; if that scene had been shot in 3D, could the man have blended in so easily?) Will they be able to hint at menaces lurking in the out-of-focus shadows, or in the out-of-focus foregrounds? (A shot from Die Hard comes to mind here, where the cop is standing in the lobby of the building, somewhat distant from the camera, while a villain is standing around the corner, right in front of the camera, with a machine gun, waiting… If memory serves, someone told the director he should rack focus there, and the director declined, saying it would be more fun if the viewer noticed the villain out of the corner of his eye, as it were. Wouldn’t the mystique of noticing something in the blurry part of the frame have been lost there, if the villain had been presented in his full dimensionality?)
One of the stranger 3D experiences for me so far has been G-Force. I really, really liked the way that that film used the letterboxed frame, so that on certain rare occasions—like when something blows up, or a rodent jumps at the camera—the elements in question would stray into the black bars and, in 3D, it looked like they were jumping right off the screen. On the other hand, I wondered why the video monitors within the film were all showing 3D images too. Wouldn’t those images have looked flat to the characters living within the story itself?
I prefer regular 2D films. In fact, for nearly every movie I’ve enjoyed over the last decade I can safely say that I wouldn’t want to see it in 3D ever. I can also definitely say I don’t ever, ever, ever want to see classics like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, etc, in 3D conversions. Finally, I don’t necessarily like the idea of “some” films being OK for 3D while others are best in 2D; kids films and action/adventure films may be less serious in an artistic sense than other types of films, but I still think that the best movies of those genres would significantly diminished in quality by 3D tech (I’m thinking of films like Star Wars, Babe, most of Pixar’s movies, Nolan’s Batman films, etc).
Peter, thanks for the great thoughts. It’s interesting that you pick Lawrence of Arabia since that’s one of the films Ebert specifically cites against the value of 3D! (I like my Crazy Heart example better.)
I have to say, watching Avatar I wasn’t thinking specifically about the problem of focus, but if he does rack focus as much as the critics allege, then that calls out the other problem with 3D—the fact that your brain feels that you should be able to refocus on objects when in fact you can’t.
The “forced perspective” cheats you mention remind me of how silent films relied on gags that would never work in a world of sound, and how many films, especially cartoons, rely on the frame of the picture to pretend that characters just out of view can’t see what’s happening onscreen until they step in front of the camera.
FWIW, Ebert’s real view on 3D is a little more nuanced than his front-line rhetoric lets on: He’s “not against 3D as an option,” only as “a way of life.” I think that’s about right. 3D can be an asset to the right picture, but I don’t especially want a world in which the “right” pictures get made because 3D serves them, especially not if it means not making the “wrong” pictures.
Tyler: Great thoughts, I agree with you on all counts, except Pixar. I think computer animation is eminently suited to 3D—and my objections to 3D conversion don’t apply here, since you can go back to the original computer models and re-render the film in true 3D, as Pixar proved with Toy Story and Toy Story 2.
Do HD films also suffer from perpetual “deep focus”? I find it very jarring to see the wrinkles in one actors face with the same detail as the veins in the leaves of the tree on the far end of the set.
And though I can appreciate the swirling cigarette smoke of the black and white Marx Bros. movies now, having everything, Everything in crisp, stark detail makes things seem stiff and plastic-y.
I enjoyed Christmas Carol, and thought Avatar was pretty neet, but 3 D in general hurts my eyes.
I want to see ‘how to train your dragon’, I’m just not sure I want to were the freaky glasses all the way through.
I’m also not sure the gimmick is really necessary. I remember watching the rescuers down under years ago in the theaters and in the scene where the character named Cody is riding on the back of the giant Golden Eagle, I remember getting a distinct ‘weeee!I’m on a rollar coaster’ feeling WITHOUT 3-D glasses.
m~
I also wonder how ‘Avatar’ will translate to DVD sales…with out the glitz of 3d there just isn’t anything there, certainly not a plot or story worth keeping around.
Dillon, no, HD permits the same variations of focus as any other 2D approach. Deep focus isn’t a bad thing—on the contrary, it’s a great asset in a filmmaker’s bag of tricks. But so is shallow focus and racking focus.
m~, FWIW, DVD and Blu-ray sales for Avatar are through the roof, setting all kinds of records. BTW, you do have the option of seeing How to Train Your Dragon in 2D! It’s screening both ways.
Steve, thanks for the info about Avatar sales going through the roof.And you know, I actually find that disturbing, just thinking of millions of kids watching ‘Avatar’ over and over and over…..
The IMAX 3D format was developed by the National Film Board of Canada, and its creators took it out of the house and formed IMAX Corp.. One would have to look at how the larger 3D image impacts on the brain, and the level of sensorial engagement with the image, which is much greater than for 35mm. This is something the creators of the medium were keenly aware.
High definition TV on a big screen television also changes the way in which the brain engages with the image. The picture is extremely detailed, more comparable to film than to television, and the size influences its impact in a physically tangible way.
There is much more going on here than meets the eye.
I am not a fan - I am tend to get an upset stomach and am so distracted by having to wear the glasses that I never ‘fall’ into the movie and escape as I want to. I am okay with 3D movies being out there for those who like them but really never expect a truly wonderful, unforgettable film ever being made in 3D. I’ll happily be found wrong but feel that dialogue, amazing acting and a superb plot does not need 3D.
A few quick extra thoughts:
One of the drawbacks of the current 3D process, for me, is that movies made with this process are shot on video rather than on film. This gives the resulting movies a rather different look and feel than conventional films—and indeed, I found the live-action scenes in Avatar rather distracting because they *looked* like they had been shot with a video camera (which, indeed, they had).
And for what it’s worth, I know I’m not alone in this, because Chris Nolan (director of The Dark Knight, etc.) has said that one of the reasons *he* doesn’t want to work in 3D is because he doesn’t like the look and feel of video either. However, Warner Brothers is pretty committed to 3D these days (witness their last-minute 3D conversion of Clash of the Titans and their not-so-last-minute 3D conversion of the next Harry Potter movie, etc.), so it will be interesting to see whether they can persuade Nolan to work in 3D on the *next* Batman film.
Re: “forced perspective”, I am also curious to see what will happen on the upcoming Hobbit movies (which, again, are being produced by Warner Brothers). In The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was able to show Gandalf and Bilbo sitting at the table together without using any digital effects whatsoever, simply by building one half of the table at one scale and the other half of the table at another scale and positioning them in such a way that, from the camera’s point of view, it *looked* like there was just one table there, with a human sitting at one end and a Hobbit sitting at the other end. Obviously, if Jackson had used 3D cameras, the effect would have been completely ruined—so he would have had to use a completely different set of techniques to produce the same sort of images.
We saw “Up” in 3-D (basically a retrofitted title) and regretted it. The colors were dim and washed out, and there really weren’t any (thank goodness!) “Whoa!” 3-D moments.
“Coraline”, on the other hand, I felt worked very well as a 3-D movie, due to the fact that they could use stereoscopic cameras and the actors were all tiny puppets… it really made it feel like you were looking at a living diorama. And the scene where the paper mice come streaming out of the wall directly at you? Amazing. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever see a more amazing 3-D moment than that.
So I doubt I’ll see too many more 3-D movies.
I appreciate the author’s article on a subject that is not the usual NCR fare. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments from other readers; I now have the opinion that the average NCR reader is intelligent and thoughtful. From reading comments to other articles, one might gather that half the NCR readers hate the church and the Pope.
I am, if anything, even more anti-3D than Ebert (no doubt partially because I’m just not a fan of the kinds of movies I can intellectually see might work better in 3-D—scifi and spectacle films). I have never seen, and probably never will see (get off my lawn!!!) a 3-D film for the first time. All the recent 3-D releases I saw at all—DRAGON, CORALINE, etc.—I watched as nature intended..
I have seen 3-D films twice in my life, both rereleases of films I’d already seen multiple times —DIAL M FOR MURDER in the early 90s and the TOY STORY films double feature last summer. In all three cases, the movie was both too good (and familiar to me) to be ruined. 3-D neither added nor subtracted. With the Hitchcock, I went largely for the notch in the belt and see what I thought if it (I’d obviously then never seen a film this way). With the Pixars, I went because the films themselves are beyond awesome and I had ... ahem ... never seen the first in a theater.
Hey there, Other Victor. I’m pretty sure “Coraline” was meant to be seen (as nature intended) in 3-D. The fact that they used stereoscopic cameras and the bit after the credits where they show you the set-up for the mouse-streamers-coming-out-of-the-wall shot I think proves that. Since it was stop-motion, too, it’s probably one of the rare 3-D films that actually WAS shot to film and not video (to Peter Chattaway’s point above).
I saw it in 3-D and then in just two of the Ds, and it was much better in 3-D (unlike “Up”).
Anyway, 2-D, 3-D it’s not that important. What I want to know is why these mega-multiplexes can’t manage a decent sound system? Every theater I go to it’s either muffled mid-range (and no high-end at all), noisy speakers, truly awful bass (and I don’t mean loud.. I like loud if it’s clear… I DON’T like loud and floppy). Maybe it’s just because I’m a sound guy, but I can get better sound out of my $300 Sony home theater speakers and Onkyo receiver than I’ve ever heard in a movie theater. A noisy, to the point of being almost dead, center channel speaker almost ruined “Coraline” for me.
Better sound, I think, is the real issue. Someone needs to go back and re- or de-certify all these THX-certified theaters.
Steven: I can see your point about computer animation being particularly
suited to 3D. I was rushing my thinking a bit in my last post. Instead of
citing Pixar’s work as an example of a style of filmmaking I didn’t think
would work in 3D, I should have said something like: “I don’t want to
see industry pressure to work in 3D resulting in rushed,
poorly conceived films from studios such as Pixar. If studios are going to
work in 3D, I at least hope that they do it with the same care and thought
that they would put into any films.”
Rachel: I agree that 3D isn’t a necessary thing for a good movie. Well,
after so many years of 2D films, who could disagree?
Jeff, you write:
“I appreciate the author’s article on a subject that is not the usual NCR fare. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the comments from other readers; I now have the opinion that the average NCR reader is intelligent and thoughtful. From reading comments to other articles, one might gather that half the NCR readers hate the church and the Pope.”
FWIW, I suspect that your impression of Register readers based on other comboxes may be somewhat distorted by comments from non-Register folks brought to the Register website via Google alerts and such. It’s part of the nature of the Web 2.0 world we live in that certain topics such as the scandal or same-sex marriage in any forum attract a host of partisans who are not part of the “local community,” but are interested in advancing their own agenda in any available forum.
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