The return of 3D cinema

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By Nigel Andrews

Published: July 24 2009 17:03 | Last updated: July 24 2009 17:03

Journalists at the Cannes film festival are relatively inured to the weird requests made of us but this May saw the weirdest yet. Standing on stage before the screening of Up , Thierry Frémaux, the festival's director, welcomed the audience with his customary salvo of bonjours and bienvenus, before saying: "Before the film begins would you please all put on your glasses so I can photograph you."

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Do what? What fresh bizarrerie was this? Were we about to be recorded for the private picture album of an unsuspected French specs maniac? Happily, the explanation was simple and the confusion momentary. Up, a Disney/Pixar animation, was showing in 3D. The specs were the stereoscopic glasses pressed upon us for the screening – hence the request for a commemorative pose. And, although Dorothy Parker once said, "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses," it is different when Hollywood makes the passes and we filmgoers are the willing seduction victims.

Yes, 3D cinema is back, enjoying one of its cyclical world crazes. A year that has already played horizontal yo-yo with our eyeballs in My Bloody Valentine 3D, Monsters Vs Aliens, Bolt and Ice Age 3 has a further consignment of these leap-out-at-you films to come.

Up (pictured), the most high-profile release, has become the second-highest grossing film in the US so far this year after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and is due in the UK in October. The first 3D film honoured with a place – let alone the opening gala – in the Cannes competition, it tells of a little old man whose house is floated into the sky by balloons and wafted to a South American jungle kingdom run by a mad explorer. If that sounds too much like social realism, your 3D glasses will confer instant out-of-this-world enchantment. The airborne house will fly belief-bogglingly towards you, the giant balloons will brush your face, the climactic chase scenes in the sky will have you giddy with touchy-feely proximity. 3D is a contact sport. If you can't stand the pace, get out of the theatre. If you can, join the growing band of enthusiasts.

Also due this year are two other Disney films with specs appeal, A Christmas Carol and a 3D-refurbished Toy Story. And December sees the most keenly awaited blockbuster release of 2009, James Cameron's Avatar. From the director of Titanic (1997) comes a stereoscopic epic about a war-riven planet, using, we are promised, the ultimate in crowd-wowing 3D imagery and graphic immediacy.

Even so, this epiphanic outbreak has arrived less expeditiously than Cameron and his peers once hoped. At the entertainment industry shindig ShoWest in 2005, Cameron, George "Star Wars" Lucas, Robert "Back to the Future" Zemeckis and other A-list filmmakers appeared together on a Las Vegas stage, wearing 3D specs to promote the imminent revolution. They predicted 2,000 3D screens would be in place in the US by 2007 but it took until this year to reach that tally. And in America, Europe and elsewhere, there are film exhibitors complaining – or some are – that the 3D "bang" isn't worth the bucks it costs to provide.

Broadly, theatre owners have a choice of expenditures thrust upon them by the studio or distributors, which seldom volunteer the exhibition costs for a 3D film themselves. Either the theatre must install a special screen, expensive and incompatible with normal feature film showing, to accommodate the RealD system, the first one off the grid in the modern era. (Introduced in 2005, it was invented by author/filmmaker Lenny Lipton, whose other claim to fame is having written the lyrics to "Puff the Magic Dragon" at age 19.) With RealD, theatres save on spectacles, which are cheap and disposable. Or they must buy or subsidise the costly "active" specs used for XpanD, a Slovenian-US system requiring no special screen. Some exhibitors say, "Why bother?" They maintain that many of the new new films do not exploit the form's potential for leap-into-your-lap imagery, as 3D used to do in its gaudy heyday, they just add extra depth of field to movies that play almost as well flat. And it is a fair comment when applied to some 2009 releases to date, even the popular Monsters Vs Aliens and Bolt.

But then we still haven't seen Cameron's Avatar. And who knows how many eyeball-bashing enhancements Disney has packed into Toy Story 3 ? That company's ambitions for further 3D revamps of catalogue oldies include Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland, due next year.

What exactly is cinema up to when it assails us with these screen gimmicks? Historically and cyclically, it has mobilised them in periods of film industry paranoia. Afraid of losing its audience to rival media, such as television, DVDs and computer games, cinema ransacks its arsenal of tricks to try and lure the homebody into the multiplex. The industry asks itself, "What would a viewer like to experience that he cannot on a domestic screen?" The answer: "Something bigger, louder, giddier and more spectacular."

At home you cannot get 3D, or not to the sense-assaulting scale experienced in theatres. And unless your home is unusually large, at home you cannot get the Imax effect: 3D's main rival in the size-ist stakes offers a screen 22m wide by 16m high.

In the old days – when screens endeavoured to be bold amid similar customer crises – you couldn't get Cinemascope or Cinerama at home, both born in the 1950s to combat the TV sets suddenly invading everyone's homes. (Cinemascope, patented by 20th Century Fox, was the wide-screen process once caustically described by director Fritz Lang as "suitable for snakes and funerals". Cinerama was the wraparound process thought by some to have been inspired by the three-image tricolore sequence at the climax to Abel Gance's 1927 Napoléon).

Sensurround in the 1970s offered something seismic for the age of home video, newly arriving to menace ticket sales. Universal Studios dreamed up this seat-quaking sound system, ideal for movies about earthquakes and rollercoasters. Throughout this time, there were the maverick showmen patenting their maverick follies. Most successful was Mike Todd, whose Todd-AO was a kind of single-camera Cinerama, most famously associated with Julie Andrews twirling on a hill in The Sound of Music (1965). Todd was also behind Smell-o-Vision, a process that used odour-bearing conveyor belts to visit all parts of the theatre. This never became popular, unsurprisingly, though a few films were later made with the technologically simpler "scratch'n'sniff" card.

My own favourite Barnum of the screen gimmick is American producer-director William Castle. His low-budget horror films were cranked up to cult status by audience-impacting gizmos. "Illusion-O" provided spectacles enabling viewers to see extra ghouls in 13 Ghosts (1960). "Percepto" used buzzers attached to seats to jolt spectators at horror moments in The Tingler (1959). For House on Haunted Hill (1959), Castle had a skeleton moved above the audience, brushing its heads. Castle's enemy was not home-viewing so much as his rivals in the B-movie production empire. He wanted his schlock to have more get-up-and-go than the competition's.

Of all these format experimentations, 3D has been the most tenacious. As early as 1890 the British camera pioneer William Friese-Greene patented a process involving two films projected side-by-side, requiring the viewer to look through a stereoscope. But it was too elaborate and impractical for cinema use. Russia, in the early-middle decades of the 20th century, dabbled with a system that would render spectacles unnecessary. And in the 1950s, contemporaneously with Cinemascope and Cinerama, 3D movies burst out everywhere. If you saw a horror film in that era – House of Wax (1953), for example, or Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) – it would sock you in the eye regularly during its action. If you didn't believe a musical could be made in 3D, there was Kiss Me Kate (1953). If you passed a poster for the 3D jungle adventure Bwana Devil (1952), it promised you, "A lion in your lap, a lover in your arms."

Today many cinemas still hold out against the arduous job of adapting for these new formats. One argument is the diminishing returns factor. Once the novelty of the bigger-and-better screen process wears off, a film's appeal reverts to pretty much the same elements as those of any other feature: story, stars, style, strength of dramatic idea. For myself it's the Achilles heel of these systems that charge gloriously into battle to conquer the box office, yet are always lamed as spectacle – sooner or eventually – when the pugnacity loses its novelty.

After all, we get 3D in life. We get Imax-sized and bigger fields of vision. But when did we last wake up saying, "Yippee, the alarm clock is visibly nearer to me than the bedside lamp." Or, going outside the front door, "Yippee, the world is 16m high and 22m wide with surround-sound."

Those who disagree will claim I am a jaded critic crying in the wilderness. They will respond, "Fact: this year's 3D films are doing big business. Fact: in the UK the 3D version of Bolt outgrossed the 2D version by more than three to one. Fact (moving beyond 3D): last year's showpiece Imax presentation The Dark Knight, the first feature to include scenes shot with Imax cameras, was the highest-grossing movie worldwide. Fact: audience figures nearly always increase, and media interest in cinema regenerates, with a new screen process."

Touché. Even a nine-day wonder, I guess, makes things better for nine days. No one can deny at present that the word is out and spreading. "3D or not 3D" is barely even a question. Germany's first feature in the format, The Gate, a horror film, shoots later this year. The Child's Eye, another horror movie, is being made by Chinese brothers Danny and Oxide Pang. Australia's Guardians of Ga'Hoole, an animated film, opens soon in the UK. France promises Louis La Chance, a 3D animation set against the background of the 1934 Monaco Grand Prix. South Africa is about to present us with Zambezia, South Korea with Dino Mom and Norway with Pelle the Police Car Goes Bathing. Abandon hope, flat-screeners. The world is round and the movie world is becoming ever more multidimensional.

We could almost forget – we almost had – that America led the way and still does in popularising these giantist systems. Stephen Sondheim, composer and lexical faddist, noted that "Cinerama" is an anagram of "American". Which other nation could have stuck with this Brobdingnagian mission to make things bigger and bolder, through thick and thin and thinner? And what could be more synergetic with a country of high skies, wide lands, big cities and busy entrepreneurialism than the obsession with pioneering ever more impactful screen systems.

Sometimes these systems can be a pain in the eyeballs or in other parts of the body. Sometimes we want to warn, when the latest band of Lala-land lab rats comes up with another multimillion-dollar viewing lark: "Beware of geeks bearing gifts."

But just as humans want to explore the cosmos, flying up, out and beyond from what was once deemed a flat earth, humans want to explore the possibilities of space, depth and plurality of dimensions in the "flat" movie image.

Maybe it isn't a coincidence that the new 3D craze takes place in the year of the 40th-anniversary moon landing celebrations. Nor that the gravity-repudiating Up promises to be 3D's headline movie in the second half of 2009. Small step for a man (or house); giant leap for mankind.

The cinema wants to ensure that every possible step or leap is available to us poor earth-lubbers, who have spent too much time believing that a screen must be merely an inert, polite, well-behaved 2D rectangle.

Nigel Andrews is the FT's film critic

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The wonder of 3D

For a reminder of the power of cinema to shock, awe and amaze, there are few things better than sitting with children watching a 3D film at an Imax theatre. Banked on steep seats in front of the giant screen, there's an air of anticipation as the glasses go on and the lights go down, writes Isabel Berwick.

The short films made for the Imax format are often quasi-educational and narrated by Hollywood A-listers (for example, a deep sea film voiced by Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp, and a space station documentary narrated by Tom Cruise).

The sharks really leap, causing shrieks, and a sea of little hands reaches up to touch shoals of fish that seem to swim into the audience. The 3D world, as experienced by children, is large, fantastical, and (emotionally) touching.

For some children, however, the Imax special 3D effects are a little too special. My son, who is five, says: "The Imax looks too real: I don't like them to come out at me at all." He prefers the rather milder computer-generated 3D of the mainstream cinema, where the fish won't leap on to your lap. His sister, a 3D veteran at nine, sums up the effect in Disney films such as Bolt: "You can see it's deeper but sometimes the 3D is a bit too like HDTV. I mean, it's a clearer screen but sometimes it's too clear and too exact."

Though the children say it can get annoying wearing the glasses for 3D films, I think we all like the popcorn and specs experience. It feels oddly nostalgic, although the first 3D film I saw was as a teenager, the awful Jaws 3-D (1983) which we peered at through flimsy paper glasses.

G-Force (pictured), the new Disney film featuring "gadgets, gizmos, guinea pigs", opens next week and will be showing in 3D at some cinemas.

We saw the film at a 3D preview screening and approved, in particular, of the chase scenes, which make you feel very close to the action, and some spectacular fireworks. Even if, as my son happily concedes, "The G-Force one didn't come out of the screen."

'G-Force' opens in the UK on July 31