Unless you've been living under a rock on Mars or some other distant planet for the past 10 years you may be aware of this phenomena known as 3D, while it is certainly not brand new technology only in the past few years has it really hit mainstream and has taken the entertainment world by storm. Its not just cinema too, now you can buy 3D monitors, 3D TVs, 3D game consoles, 3D DVDs and the list goes on, at this rate even reality will have a 3D edition soon! Now some of you may be asking 'so why exactly is this a bad thing' and in most cases it isn't, not necessarily, the entertainment world is always evolving and 3D is just the newest shiny toy in their arsenal. However when it comes to movies, both cinema and then later DVDs it most certainly is a bad thing and let me tell you why.
Back in the olden days, and by that I mean pre 2000, when a company wanted to make a movie they would have a budget, a certain amount of money that they can spend on making the film as good and as successful as possible, this money they could spend on hiring actors, a producer, filming crew and sometimes a bit of special effects for kicks. The distribution of the available money would be at the companies discretion, they may wish to hire a lot of big name actors and make the movie popular by having recognisable and well known faces, or they can choose to spend a little less on that and maybe hire a very talented producer (which lets be fair is usually no cheaper then big name actors) and make a compelling story with an excellent script. While most films did have some special effects it was not usually a selling point, or at least very rarely, movies only really became successful through the power of their story and actors performances, successful movies were, by definition, successful because they were good.
Now however there is a third contender, what I like to call the 'oooh look shiny lights' way of making films. The unfortunate reality is that people in general are not very intelligent, the masses do not want to think, they don't even necessarily want to understand, they just want to be entertained. Just like a kitten will chase a laser pointer round a room for hours happily most people are content with watching shiny lights flicker across their field of vision as long as its somewhat coherent. So now the producing companies have a new way of making a film successful and unfortunately special effects are not cheap. They could hire some big name actors to make a film popular but there is always the choice of which ones? Not everyone likes the same people, while one particular choice will attract a certain audience it will at the same time alienate another. Or they could go with a compelling and interesting story, but again this doesn't necessarily appeal to the masses because most people simply don't want to try to untangle intricate plots and complex characters, they just want a big bucket of ice-cream fed to them and a little kid repeatedly saying 'ouch Charlie bit my finger!', and even those who do appreciate a finely crafted story, the plot twists and intricacies lose some of their charm after seeing it once.
So this leaves them with the third option, shiny lights and fancy effects, which is not cheap but will appeal the biggest number of people. While it is true that perhaps it will not appeal to the highest class of cinema goers, the connoisseurs of films, at the end of the day all you are to the film companies is another head and €10, it doesn't matter if your Albert Einstein or Wayne Rooney, all that matters is the income. Theres also more to it then just that, when you make a film you want it to give you a return for the longest possible time, this means future proofing and in this day and age that directly correlates to making it releasable in 3D. If you don't have shiny effects then 3D loses its charm, people can see every day things in 3D all the time, what they can't see is lasers and lightsabers and flying blue people on some distant planet. What this effectively means is that 3D usually comes at the price of everything else, good story, clever script, interesting characters etc. because every film is still on a budget and you can't have everything.
A prime example of this is Avatar, it has the most bland characters known to man, honestly paper cutouts have more personality, the story is directly stolen from a another movie except now its set in space, the acting is subpar at best and the entire movie is just dull. What it does have is shiny lights and bright colours and the all important 3D, and while this didn't exactly land them with a truck full of Oscars like some other successful movies it did make more money then the treasury of most small countries. It is the most successful movie of all time in terms of income when it is in essence NOT a good movie. Nice visuals are certainly a good thing to have in a movie but it cannot be the only thing, nice visuals alone is not enough it has to come as part of a package.
3D makes for easy income off the drooling masses, it does not make good films, but unfortunately in the world we live money is king and 3D makes money.
- M
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