On TV and in movie theaters, the film technique is back and looking better than ever. But is its return to popularity a fad?
Are 3-D movies here to stay this time, or is the latest revival doomed to the same fate as the brief ’80s resurgence that brought us such timeless classics as Comin’ at Ya! and Friday the 13th Part 3-D?
There’s no question that 3-D is hot right now. Arriving in theaters Friday is Coraline, the first-ever stop-motion animated feature to be photographed in 3-D, even as My Bloody Valentine 3D is still riding high at the box office. This is coming within the same week as a 3-D version of an episode of the NBC series Chuck and a couple of 3-D commercials.
The coming year will see more than a dozen more feature films projected in either the RealD or IMAX 3D format (or in some cases both), including DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, James Cameron’s highly anticipated Avatar and the self-explanatory Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.
"Three-D films look better than they ever did before," says Ray Zone, author of the book Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952.
Back to the ’50s
Although stereoscopic cinematography — in which two synchronized cameras film the same material from different angles in order to create the illusion of depth — is nearly as old as motion pictures themselves, the golden age of 3-D dates to the 1952 release of the otherwise undistinguished potboiler Bwana Devil. Although poorly reviewed, Bwana Devil was a smash hit on the strength of its primitive 3-D effects.
In the early ’50s, Hollywood executives were always on the lookout for gimmicks that would lure audiences away from their new TV sets, and the next two years were a boom time for 3-D, spawning such hits as House of Wax, Kiss Me Kate and Creature From the Black Lagoon.
The ’80s revival
The boom went bust in early 1954, and it seemed 3-D was just another ’50s fad like the coonskin cap or the Hula-Hoop. In 1981, however, a terrible low-budget Western called Comin’ at Ya! was released in 3-D, just as the home video revolution was getting under way.
Once again facing a threat from television, as consumer-priced VCRs and neighborhood video stores made it possible for movie fans to watch recent releases and old favorites at their convenience, studios seized on the surprise success of Comin’ at Ya! and the 3-D craze was born again. It was equally short-lived this time around — no surprise given that movies like Jaws 3-D and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn weren’t much better than BwanaDevil.
New technology
A generation later, with Hollywood facing ever greater challenges in home entertainment, from widescreen hi-def televisions to video games to the Internet, 3-D is back — but is it better than ever? "Digital 3-D cinema is a considerable improvement over 1950s 3-D movies," Zone says. "The 3-D films of the ’50s used synchronized projectors. Today’s digital 3-D movies are shown with a single projector, which eliminates many of the problems of the two-projector system."
For now, at least, audiences are eating it up. "The 3-D version of a movie does nearly three times the box office of the 2-D version when a movie is released in both 2-D and 3-D," says Zone.
In the case of My Bloody Valentine, the 3-D version accounted for 71 percent of the movie’s first-week box-office take. For all the technological advances, however, you still need to wear the special polarized glasses; Zone predicts that glasses-free 3-D is still a decade away.
Even if today’s plastic Blues Brothers-style eyewear is snazzier than the cardboard glasses of yesteryear, reports that they no longer cause headaches or nausea are somewhat exaggerated in my experience. (The oversize IMAX 3-D glasses don’t even have the advantage of being fashionable, unless ski goggles are in style this year.)
Still a gimmick?
Is it worth the trouble? Three-D is perfectly suited to the IMAX format, which is all about spectacle anyway, but let’s be honest: the history of great 3-D movies is basically nonexistent. What classic scene in cinema history would have been improved by 3-D? The shower scene in Psycho? The horse’s head in The Godfather? The first appearance of the shark in the original Jaws? These moments are so visceral, our own imaginations supply the third dimension. They would only be diminished by the artificial depth of 3-D, because the whole process acts to distance us from what we’re seeing on the screen rather than allowing us to immerse ourselves in the story.
That doesn’t matter much when you’re dealing with a film like My Bloody Valentine 3D — you just want to see if the ol’ flying eyeball trick has improved since Friday the 13th Part 3-D (it has) — but does anyone really think SlumdogMillionaire 3D would have scored even more Oscar nominations, or that The Dark Knight Comin’ at Ya! would have raked in another $100 million at the box office?
There’s no denying the superiority of today’s digital 3-D effects, but as always, it’s the quality of the movies that will determine whether this latest revival is more than just a passing fad.
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