3D is Ruining Movies for the Rest of Us

Ok. Own up. Who is it? Which of you is it that keeps buying tickets to watch films in 3D? There must be some of you out there that have been to see more than one movie with the added dimension, because the cinemas keep putting them on and studios keep making them.

Ok. Own up. Who is it? Which of you is it that keeps buying tickets to watch films in 3D? There must be some of you out there that have been to see more than one movie with the added dimension, because the cinemas keep putting them on and studios keep making them. The principle of supply and demand still exists - while there are customers, there will be someone creating the product.

But this product is one big dog turd, in a bag.

It adds absolutely nothing to the film, other than a few quid to the ticket price. The image on the screen looks like a series of 2D layers, with the ones at the front sticking out slightly more than the ones at the back. Then any illusion of reality is shattered instantly when some of the object that's being thrust from the screen into your eyeballs passes out of the edge of shot.

From there, it just looks like a piece has been sliced off the end of it. Mid-shots of actors make them look like they have no legs. Vehicles jump over the camera and are vaporised from front to back. Superheroes whiz around with some parts of them vanishing as they leave the frame.

The whole screen looks like it's been miniaturised and like it's the set for a stop-motion animation, built small enough for the director to move the models inside a tiny amount before taking another still image.

Cinema goers have to wear glasses - that they inevitably have had to have bought for another £15.95 - and that's not a problem per se, unless they're of the 60% of the country that's already bespectacled. That majority of people have two choices: either wear contact lenses, which aren't everybody's cup of tea, or delicately balance two sets of specs on their face.

The latter also has the side effect of leaving the viewer unable to move throughout the two-and-a-half hour CGI masterpiece for fear of bringing the delicately balanced metal and plastic frame assembly crashing down from their face and into their £149.86-worth of popcorn and drink.

The whole concept of 3D is potty. Cinema has evolved to the point where we can make things look spectacularly brilliant and film sequences in such great detail that we can pull focus from a tiny ant in the front of picture on the left side of the scene to an impending helicopter crash in the distance on the right. So what do we do next?

Of course, we ruin all that by making bits of it appear slightly closer than other bits and making sure the audience has to spend the first ten minutes of the movie working out how they need to sit in order not to get a headache by the experience.

Anything that detracts from the story of the film is an unnecessary fad. When the appeal of a feature is that it makes a movie look pretty, then the flick itself must be a bit rubbish. The plot should be strong enough to sustain the attention of the average adult for long enough that they don't need things poking out at them to keep them in their seats.

The best bit is that the cinemas then charge customers more to have their viewing experience ruined by the pile of cat vomit that's dished up. That's on top of having to buy six litres of drink and two-and-a-quarter tonnes of popcorn because they're the smallest sizes available at the kiosk staffed by teenagers who are contractually obliged to ask you if you'd like to "upgrade" to a medium (nine litres, four-and-a-half tonnes) for an extra 40p.

You probably wouldn't believe it, but I actually like going to the cinema.

Mankind has damn-near perfected making a good film in two dimensions, so let's not throw a brick through the screen and take a dump in the projection unit by adding a needless gimmick. We've worked out how to tell a story using that set-up, so just tell a bloody good story.

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