The Soap Box: 3D, or Not 3D?

Ideally, evolution should be a natural process, the organic transformation of one thing into another over time. It's been this way for both animal and man, for technology and philosophy, and in a more abstract sense, for storytelling. There was a time, friends, before man first imagined to himself, before he first pondered aloud, "What if..." when fiction simply didn't exist, when all stories were true stories. And then came fire, and around the flames we sat, imagining together, spinning yarns that became the origins of folklore.

We drew on the walls of caves, giving shape to these words...Then paper and pen; then scrolls, then books...At some point, we found that a series of progressive images, glimpsed rapidly, produced the illusion of motion. And sometime after that fortuitous discovery of early animation, we were gifted with film. We used each of these tools to craft stories, and each new addition allowed us to expand our narrative vocabulary, to conjure new emotions, to invent new characters and illustrate new locales. In other words, to draw the listener further into the tale.

There is a difference between doing something because it's what's next for the medium and doing it simply because we can. The former is evolution which, more often than not, leads to greatness; the latter is gimmickry.

Nothing pains me more than when skillful, nuanced film directors sing the praises of 3D as an immersive storytelling tool, as if the illusion of distance made the characters somehow more believable, the themes more poignant, the narrative more complex. 3D can make a hallway seem longer, certainly, but the death of a hero is no greater a loss, or the defeat of a villain more reason to celebrate simply because we can judge the distance between them.

And there's a price we pay for this, beyond the extra five bucks at the ticket counter, and it's the necessity of physically placing something between our eyes and the screen. Even with the best 3D technology, the colors can be dull and muddy; the glasses can create areas of refraction or discoloration in our periphery; the pinch of plastic against the bridge of our nose; the added weight of glasses on top of glasses. Sitting in the dark, staring at a shoebox of light, listening to the sounds of a thousand people shifting in their seats or ruffling through bags of popcorn, we are already sufficiently distracted from the illusion.

But if a story is well crafted...if a filmmaker succeeds at their task of building a believable world and filling it with dynamic characters...if the tale is worth the telling...then we are already transported, and all the distractions of a 20-theater megaplex are back there, with our bodies, while our attentions, if not our minds, are somewhere entirely else.

The third dimension of any story is the teller.

Too often, filmmakers claim that 3D has the power to pull the audience into a story. So is it surprising then that most filmgoers seem to enjoy 3D the most when it pulls elements of the story into the audience? Make no mistake, 3D has its place when the experience proves to be more important than the narrative. A carnival proves that gimmickry can be fun if there's no real attempt at substance. If cotton candy and roller coasters is all a movie is intended to be, that's where 3D has its value. Horror films are a place where 3D can thrive, or pure, blockbuster-style action movies, where the glasses resting heavily atop one's face aren't filtering out theme or emotion, but are, instead, grabbing severed limbs and exploding shrapnel and pulling them into the theatre.

All of which is to say, let's not confuse depth of field with depth of story, or substitute one for the other.  Filmmakers, make your films, and if you do it well enough, we'll see them in however many dimensions are reasonable.