When I went and saw Avatar in 3D I was transported to another world.

I think the subtle use of 3D as an immersive tool to help flesh out the alien planet of Pandora was awesome and I found the 3D only served to make the experience richer.

Unfortunately I and others spoke too loudly and the other studios upon seeing the film Avatar topple its little sister Titanic in the most Ka’Ching stakes paid attention.  Not very closely though.

From the last two sentences the studios only seem to have picked up on two words and a sound, then they mashed them into an equation:

Awesome = 3D = Ka’Ching

Now every film that they think will make any money at the box office has to be in 3D and you know what?  When you don’t make your film in 3D in the first place and digitally process it later on it looks like shit.  Add to this the complexity of getting this right on the cinema side of things especially serving up enough light so the film doesn’t appear dull through the polarised glasses and what may have been a visually pleasing film becomes a waste of my money seeing it a cinema who can barely stock choc tops in the first place*.

Recently I saw Alice in Wonderland and my main complaint with the film was that I couldn’t really see all of the wonderful signature Tim Burton look and feel because it was too fuzzy or blurred thanks to the 3D treatment.  It really bugged me as it was completely unnecessary and was only effective in two sequences that didn’t involve any live action.

But maybe that was just a one off misstep, a mad rush to try and capture some of that sweet sweet 3D cash that misaligned itself to the film.  I’ve read several reports of directors and studios getting into arguments over using 3D so my only hope was this was forced onto an unwilling production team (although I’m not saying this was the case at all with AiW).

Then yesterday I saw Clash of the Titans, which I will write about soon but in relation to this story we tried really hard to get a 2D showing of it, but they were only in crappy cinemas and at bad times.  So we bit the bullet and saw it in 3D.  Now as I will talk about at a later date, the film has enough problems as it is without adding, the dullness, the double ghost images and the complete and utter blurriness so that the four people in our party who went to see it all missed different parts of the film and had to compare notes afterwards.

So enough with the 3D already!

It’s a shit gimmick that is hurting the films you are so desperate for us to go see.  I’ll completely pass up the option of watching a film in 3D if I can’t see it in 2D in the future.  It’s like $40 that I’m wasting on a poorly lit and barely comprehensible display of an otherwise impressive looking film.

I hear that George Lucas is talking about bring Star Wars back in 3D in his latest money grabbing attempt.  There’s no way I’m going to see that.  But if you bring out the original Star Wars as it was shown in 1977 I might just take you up on that offer.

*one is not related to the other but it really pisses me off no end when there are no choc tops at the cinema.