I saw Avatar when it first came out. I saw it in 3D. It looked great! James Cameron has been a pioneer in advancing the state of the art in movie effects for many years now. He did the "transparent snake" in "The Abyss" in 1989. He did the famous "mirror" bad guy in the second Terminator movie in 1991. Actually the second effect was built on the first. He just replaced "transparent" with "mirror". This required changes but it was built on the same foundation. Instead of bringing through background elements in the "transparent" effect he had to bring in reflections but a lot of the technology was common.
Anyhow, when Avatar came out I was willing to give it a go. Avatar was developed from the ground up as a 3D effort. The script was constructed to allow for many 3D elements to be used in a seamless manner. Cameron also pioneered new 3D camera technology and came up with some enhancements to mocap (motion capture) technology. The result was a truly "out of this world" experience. And, although I enjoyed Avatar and thought the 3D effects were worth it, I was not sold on the idea in general.
Avatar was not by any means the first 3D movie. Hollywood had trotted out 3D several times before. Most notably the 1953 "House of Wax" used it extensively. But in the '50s it was seen as a gimmick possibly suited for horror movies but not appropriate for a serious mainstream film. Hollywood experimented with a lot of things in the '50s. They were in reaction to the advent of television. Instead of being the "cat's pajamas" movies were seen as just another entertainment alternative. A run of the mill black and white movie seen in a theater was seen as being little different than a run of the mill black and white TV show. Except that the TV show as free (once you had bought the TV). So Hollywood went "all color" and "wide screen" (gimmicks that caught on) and experimented with 3D and "smellovision", gimmicks that did not. The Hollywood movie seen in a theater lost some of its luster but things settled down and Hollywood theater movies ended up with a certain portion of the market and TV ended up with another.
There have since been several assaults on the theater going experience, most notably the advent of rental videos, but Hollywood has soldiered on. 3D needs to be seen in this context. It also needs to be seen in the context of improvements in movie technology. The "movie" was first introduced in the late 1800's. By the 1920's it had evolved into a medium that could (barely) tell a serious story. The fact that there was no dialog that could be heard by audiences required pretty hammy acting and simplistic plots. Then in 1928 "The Jazz Singer" came along. It was pretty clunky and definitely hammy. It barely managed to permit audiences to hear the "sound" parts of the movie. It was still a giant success. And the technology of delivering sound accompaniment to movies advanced rapidly. By 1933, for instance the "all singing - all dancing" musical "42nd Street" was a technical, financial, and popular success. And people had been experimenting with color since the beginning of movies. Initially prints were hand tinted. But film stock improved and by 1939 two color classics, "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" were released along with many less memorable color efforts.
It is important to keep in mind a characteristic shared by the advents of sound and color. Sound required large changes in the way movies were created and in the equipment theaters had to have. Color also required substantial changes on the production side of movies but no change at all in the movie theater. And neither required any change by the customer. You bought your ticket. You sat in a seat. You watched and, with the advent of sound heard, the movie. 3D is the same as sound in that it changes how movies are made and it requires changes to movie theaters. But it is different from the advent of sound in that it requires customers to wear glasses.
3D is supposed to be like sound and color. It is supposed to provide an enhanced experience. The parallels with color are instructive. By the mid '30s Hollywood was producing a very sophisticated product. Most of Hollywood's output was "cheap entertainment". But some movies were very sophisticated. Hollywood was able to deliver black and white films with sophisticated scripts, first class acting and, most of all, subtle and nuanced atmospherics. In fact, most color films were firmly in the "cheap entertainment" category in terms of their artistic aspirations. They were substantially more expensive to produce so they had to deliver a large audience to earn back their production costs.
Since Avatar I have generally shied away from 3D films. I have seen the 2D version of several 3D films and been quite happy. I have also seen lots of "all 2D all the time" films and found them as satisfactory as I would have prior to my Avatar experience. But I have recently seen two 3D films in 3D and the experience has been enlightening.
The first film is "A very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas". This was my first Harold and Kumar experience. Their first film got good reviews. Their second film got bad reviews. This film got good reviews. And the reviewers recommended seeing it in 3D. Why? Because Harold and Kumar are of the opinion that 3D has already exceeded its shelf life and threw in a bunch of jokes that parodied 3D. I liked the movie, agreed with them about 3D and enjoyed all the jokes at the expense of 3D. I figured this might be my last 3D movie.
Then my sister recommended I see "Hugo" in 3D. The impetus behind Hugo is Martin Scorsese. Scorsese knows what he is about and is a keen student of the history of cinema. So I figured "what the heck -- let's see what Marty does with it". Hugo is a family movie. It is told from the point of view of an orphan. It brings in a lot of very early history of cinema in the form of Georges Milies, an early pioneer of the cinema. Milies did most of his best work before World War I. So that was the hook for me. Scorsese, consummate movie pro and history buff, talking about Milies and flexing his 3D chops. Let's see what Scorsese can come up with.
The good news is that it is a very beautiful movie. The production design and set decoration are excellent. The movie takes place mostly in a large French train station. The kid lives behind the walls and is responsible for winding the many clocks to be found. This justifies the use of a large amount of clockwork machinery which the boy climbs over, under, around, and through. In fact, the whole movie is slightly claustrophobic. Partly this is because the boy is living literally in the walls. But mostly it is so that every scene can contain machinery moving in the foreground, midground, background, everywhere. It's in 3D, see!. Even the scenes that involve the boy in the station are claustrophobic. He is always pushing through thick crowds or jumping flower carts, or. well, you get the idea. Every scene is jammed full of moving stuff.
Now our eyes are used to dealing with 3D in the real world. So we are good at figuring out that this set of gears is near the kid but is not going to hit the kid. We automatically analyze the 3D scene and figure out that the clearances are small but adequate. Nothing is going to all of a sudden bash into something it's not supposed to. And all this machinery is photographed very prettily. But it is a distraction. It is not the classic 3D distraction of something sharp all of a sudden projecting out of the screen and into our laps. It's not that over done. But it is a distraction and therefore robs the film of its emotional and narrative power.
What is obvious to me in retrospect is that Cameron understands 3D much better than Scorsese. There are all kinds of 3D elements in Avatar. To name an obvious example there is lots of flying. And specifically there is lots of flying close to high vertical walls. In the Avatar case, this adds to the "action and adventure" component of the movie. It is dangerous to fly that close to the vertical walls. So the 3D enhances the experience Cameron is going for. In Scorsese's case we have a lot of scenes where the kid is working on clockwork machinery. Now the parts in real clocks actually move very slowly. It takes, for instance, a full minute for the second hand to rotate all the way around just once. That's not exactly excitingly fast. So Hugo is full of clockwork gears rotating ten or more times faster, in other words, unnaturally fast. And there are steam jets blasting away all over the place. All of this is done very prettily but it detracts from the overall effect rather than adding to it.
My bottom line is that Scorsese could have made a better Hugo if he had designed it to be a traditional movie rather than a 3D movie. He could have made it every bit as pretty and he could have frankly more effectively manipulated our emotions if he and we didn't have to deal with the essentially distracting 3D components.
Color eventually became so cheap relative to black and white that it became the de facto standard. Now one or two movies are occasionally still made in black and white. But black and white is now seen as a distraction in most cases, an "artistic affectation" which must be justified. I am sure that some hope that 2D will become like black and white and 3D will become the overwhelming norm. The problem with this is that you have to deal with the damn glasses. There has been some success with figuring out how to do 3D without glasses. But its success is still limited. So for the present, I am with Harold and Kumar on this one.
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