Quality | 2009.12.17
Off with the 3D blinkers | Ryan Gilbey
I don\'t want my films to have an extra dimension. Being shut behind those specs spoils cinemagoing
If 2009 has been the year that 3D came good, where does that leave those of us who can only see the bad in it? I was already sceptical last year when the Hollywood establishment, from DreamWorks\' Jeffrey Katzenberg to directors like James Cameron (whose 3D spectacular, Avatar , opens next week), decided that this extra dimension was going to liberate cinema. The only thing it looked likely to liberate was the passage of money into studio coffers. The 3D revolution would surely prove to be another way of getting audiences to pay for old rope by disguising it as ribbon.
Perhaps I was just being a grump or a luddite. And maybe my apprehension was born out of painful memories of squinting at dodgy science fiction and horror movies during the 3D boom in the early 1980s – a case of "been there, done that, had the migraine". Not that there is anything to fear now on that front. The old red and green spectacles have been replaced by black plastic "Real-D" glasses that resemble pre-school Wayfarers. And the quality of the image is far easier on the eye.
But the optical onslaught of the past year has confirmed my suspicions that 3D would be used to prop up movies that couldn\'t stand on their own merits. With the exception of Coraline and Up , 3D has served as nothing more than the eye-catching garnish on an endless succession of turkeys. You didn\'t need a pair of Real-D glasses to see that coming.
What came as more of a shock was how those shades undermined the delicate dynamic of cinema-going. Sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers, watching light projected on a large wall, has its own special thrill. Introduce heavy-duty compulsory eyewear and everything changes. The simple pleasures one takes for granted are the first to go. It\'s now more effortful to turn to your neighbour conspiratorially to share in a corny moment in A Christmas Carol, or to communicate surreptitiously, via a roll of the eyeballs, that this 3D My Bloody Valentine remake is the pits. The glasses inhibit the social nature of being part of a cinema audience. When we put them on, we are sealed off: we may as well be wearing racehorse blinkers or motorbike crash helmets.
What I miss at a 3D picture is sensing the audience around me, or being able to interact with my companions. I spent my formative years at London\'s now-defunct Scala, where the cinema\'s cat would pad along the backs of the seats during the film, and where dancing in the auditorium was encouraged during late-night screenings of Hairspray or Abba – The Movie. Consequently I grew to adore that raucous informality.
I can\'t say I retain the same affection now for my fellow viewers in the cheap seats. Visits to a multiplex always seem to involve me asking teenagers to stop making phone calls, then fetching the manager, before spending the rest of the movie wondering if they\'re going to jump me on the way out.
But when I\'m shut away behind those unwieldy 3D specs, I start to miss the odd camaraderie of being part of a crowd in a public space. The end point is still the same – I\'m no less suspicious of 3D movies than I\'ve ever been – but the reasoning has changed. Now it\'s not the gimmickry of the films themselves that I dislike so much as the way 3D imposes on our moviegoing habits a whiff of the peepshow, with each viewer segregated in his or her own furtive space.
It doesn\'t help that the 3D experience is built on an unspoken flaw – that a great movie already surpasses anything new technology can offer. Coming out of seeing There Will Be Blood, no one thinks: "What a pity the geysers of oil didn\'t hit us between the eyes." Singin\' in the Rain manages to be wondrous without making us reach for our brollies. Psycho grabs the attention perfectly well despite Norman Bates\'s knife staying firmly on his side of the screen.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/08/a-dimension-i-detest-3d
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