One evening in February this year, after the snow had all melted away, my house mate and I were sat in our house watching TV when we saw an advertisement for Avatar. “God I’d love to see something in 3D” was my housemate’s reaction. So me, being the good housemate that I am, stood in front of the TV, did a twirl and said “I am in 3D!” He seemed a bit underwhelmed by my revelation, so we decided to take a trip to the cinema.
I had heard a lot of things about Avatar before going to see it. Mostly to do with how amazing the graphics were. Some of my friends were telling me that I would be swatting away flies and the like. Others told me that the story lacked originality; it was basically Pocahontas, but in the future. These are the ones that I tended to agree with. While the 3D effect was amazing and like nothing I had ever seen before, I didn’t leave the cinema thinking that Avatar was an amazing film, or that I would want to see it again.
So move forward a few months, and I am offered the chance to get back some of my childhood with the release of Toy Story 3, and again I went to see it in 3D. I left the cinema so full of emotion that day, that I could barely talk, which for me is really saying something, and I mean really! But I wasn’t emotional because the 3D effects were so good; I was emotional because I had watched the final instalment of a story. It was a story that I could connect to, for whatever reason, possibly because I still have a lot of my childhood toys, but it provoked a reaction in me, and almost every other person in the cinema who has ever loved a toy. The fact that it was shown in 3D made absolutely no difference, the reaction would still have been the same.
So why did the producers of these films decide to release them in 3D? Well I have my theories. With the Toy Story franchise, they were one if not the first to release films in CGI; perhaps they wanted to continue with that theme of being innovative and cutting edge. Or maybe they thought, 3D is all the rage these days, let’s do that. For Avatar, I suspect it was either a plot for James Cameron to bag himself a few more Academy Awards, or else using 3D was a really elaborate way to try and distract from the fact that they were plagiarising.
But 3D isn’t just a cinematic development, Sky are now providing coverage of matches in 3D in pubs. Well that’s a no brainer as to why that’s happening; get people into the pubs to make money. I have to say that this doesn’t really appeal to me. If I wanted to see footballers playing in 3D, I’d go and watch them at an actual match! Sure I’d miss the commentary and some replays, but I would have a shared experience with other people. Saying that you saw Spain win the World Cup in South Africa is a story for the grandkids, I doubt that they would be as impressed if you said that you went to the pub and watched it in 3D.
Cinematic and Sporting experiences should not just be optical ones, for them to have any lasting effect; they have to have some emotional responses. I will concede that sometimes the optical side of things does play a part, like in Psycho; it is way scarier in black and white than it is in colour. However the colouring compliments other aspects like the musical score, the acting, and of course the setting and stage direction. It’s hard to try and think about these things when you’re getting a headache from the overuse of the colour blue in Avatar.
So where does that leave 3D cinema, well I doubt it’s going to go anywhere, but I know that from now on, when I want to see something in 3D, I’ll just go outside.
