A short scene from the new computer-animated children’s film
Monster House: a haunted house sits still on an eerie suburban street at midnight. A pedestrian approaches along the footpath. Suddenly, the front door of the house swings open and a narrow roll of red carpet shoots out across the lawn, unfurling wildly until it extends fully, stopping stiff and erect, mere inches away from its terrified human target.
It’s a brilliant sight gag, but it’s more than that. For as the carpet extends fully from the doorway it also reaches out, magically, away from the cinema screen itself and into the auditorium, pointing purposefully above the heads of the wide-eyed Monster House audience. Which can mean only one thing. Yes, 3-D cinema has returned — and this time it’s going to take your eye out!
Once thought to be a failed 1950s Hollywood experiment and the preserve of tribal warriors with long pointy sticks or cowboys with even longer pointy rifles (see the 3-D African adventure Bwana Devil or the western Hondo), 3-D cinema is suddenly back on the multiplex menu. After a surprisingly lucrative box-office haul for recent 3-D revamps of The Polar Express and Chicken Little, Hollywood bosses have taken the unprecedented step of releasing a 3-D version of Monster House in more than 200 specially adapted US cinemas (and five in the UK).
This time, however, contrary to a noble tradition of 3-D movie-going, the Monster House experience doesn’t entail hours of agonising eye-strain, blurry on-screen visuals and idiotic glasses. Instead, thanks to a digital projector, a refurbished silver-coated screen and a new post-production process called Real D, Monster House provides audiences with a tantalising glimpse of Cinema Future (and yes, there are glasses too, but they’re light and relatively inoffensive). “New technologies are changing everything relating to making, distributing and watching movies,” says Steve Starkey, the producer of Monster House. “Real D’s digital 3-D cinema format is helping to create an entirely new artistic palette that lets film-makers tell stories in more exciting ways.”
Naturally, Starkey isn’t the only one sold on 3-D as cinematic salvation. James Cameron, who directed Titanic, recently announced at the Amsterdam Cinema Expo that 3-D was the answer to the looming attendance crisis threatening cinemas everywhere. At the same event Cameron promised to make only 3-D movies in future, while snippets of regular 2-D movies such as King Kong and Star Wars that had been “dimensionalised” into 3-D were shown to industry players.
The possibilities for 3-D are apparently limitless. And not just for wham-bam effects movies either. Jon Landau, Cameron’s producing partner, recently told The New York Times that 3-D was perfectly suited to intimacies of small-scale human dramas too. “If you have somebody on their deathbed,” he said, “you are much better off dropping the barrier of the screen, putting the audience in that moment, and putting it in 3-D.”
And yet, are we not getting ahead of ourselves here? Do we really want to see Jason Robards’s protracted death scene from Magnolia in 3-D? Do we want the thrill of dodging bits of exhaled sputum? Are we in danger of passing everything on screen through the shallow mechanics of unthinking spectacle? Have we so quickly forgotten the lessons of Cinema Past?
We have experienced 3-D booms before. The 1950s boom, originally intended to offset a looming cinema attendance crisis (sound familiar?), climaxed with “quality” movies such as Kiss Me Kate and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. But filming techniques were cumbersome, the results weren’t always impressive, and the novelty soon wore off.
Then in the early Eighties pulp movies such as Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13th Part 3 hinted at a possible resurgence of interest in the format. But again, perhaps unsurprisingly, the novelty value quickly dissipated.
Of course, 3-D apologists will claim that these booms were merely faltering steps for a technology that is finally being realised in the digital age. Yet a quick look at the recent 3-D version of Superman Returns will tell you that this technology, and the contemporary 3-D experience, is still burdened with echoes of past ignominies. In one scene a rusty tractor sticks out needlessly into the foreground while Clark Kent remains slightly fuzzy in the middle ground, prompting the befuddled viewer to wonder whether this is a film about Superman or about tractors.
Furthermore, 3-D cinema is anathema to the fundamental principle of fiction film-making, which is, don’t break the fourth wall. The so-called fourth wall is the movie camera (and, later, the movie screen), and by refusing to address the fourth wall, actors and film-makers create the illusion of a reality, however fantastical, that is being objectively observed. The raison d’être of 3-D cinema, conversely, is the conspicuous destruction of this fourth wall. Three-dimensional movies smash through their own screen and poke and prod the audience into amazement, irrespective of content or narrative.
This, beyond all technological hiccups, formal concerns and industrial relapses, is why 3-D cinema has always failed in the past — its biggest selling point is also its greatest flaw.
On the positive side, however, 3-D cinema and computer-animated movies are undoubtedly comfortable bedfellows. The uniform geometric design and anarchic spirit of the latter is balanced by the physical demands of the former.
But before 3-D can fully colonise the world of real-life fiction film-making it must first, in the words of Starkey, the producer of Monster House, create an entirely new artistic palette for itself — one that’s not built around a garish remix of the traditional two-dimensional movie. Then, and only then, we might have a 3-D format that can do more than just take your eye out.
Monster House can be seen in 3-D at Vue West End, Leicester Square, London; Odeon Printworks, Manchester; Odeon Wimbledon; Odeon Bath; Vue, Cheshire Oaks, Cheshire
3-D AND BEYOND: CINEMA'S OTHER GIMMICKS AND GIZMOS
Percepto
Gimmick king William Castle wired up seats to give viewers mild electric shocks for The Tingler (1959). Also brought us Illusion-O (3-D glasses reveal otherwise invisible ghosts).
Sensurround
Launched with Earthquake (1974), this augmented the screen action with intense waves of sound but it disturbed audiences in nearby multiplex screens.
Showscan
This system delivered a heightened immediacy with 70mm images shot at 60 frames per second instead of the standard 24 but was only adopted by theme parks.
Smell-O-Vision
Tubes under seats piped odours at appropriate moments for The Scent of Mystery (1960). Scratch-and-sniff cards accompanied John Waters’ Polyester (1981). A new hi-tech scent system was used in Japan in May for Terrence Malick’s The New World.
JAMES CAMERON - HOLYWOOD ÜBERGEEK
Since the era-defining success of Titanic (11 Oscars, $1.8 billion dollars at the box office), the director James Cameron has been at the vanguard of the new 3-D movie revival. The Canadian-born former physics graduate has directed the underwater 3-D documentary Ghosts of the Abyss, developed the use of advanced 3-D image-capture technology, and is currently working closely with NASA to make a 3-D documentary about the first mission to Mars.
And if this peculiar obsession with the applied limits of modern technology seems odd for a blockbusting movie director (especially the one who made Titanic), remember that Cameron has always been the high priest of high-tech. His movies, from The Terminator via Aliens to True Lies, are concerned with pushing the boundaries of cinematic technology.
Like George Lucas before him, Cameron has helped to bring cinema, for better or worse, fully into the digital age. 3-D for him — and for the medium itself — is simply the next logical step forward.
