The Like/Hate Thread

[Jonathan Meer]

My problem with 3D in movies is that you can pretty much count on one hand the number of movies that not only were designed to have 3D from the get-go, but also had 3D effects that were worthwhile and added anything positive to the movie at all. That's less than 20%, as far as I can tell.

In every other instance, be it stupid post-processing or a movie designed to have 3D that just executed it poorly, it's merely a marketing ploy to get people to go see the movie in 3D and pay that extra surcharge and the movie makes more money, or it's an excuse to re-release an old movie with added 3D to get people to go see it again and make even more extra money!

Sounds like you have a problem with a specific type of 3D, rather than 3D itself. You even admit that there are uses of 3D that are worthwhile, and add positive things to a movie.

But that's not the thing about 3D that irritates me the most; it's that 3D is so often used as some sort of catch-all addition to try and make a movie better or more appealing, and actual quality film-making is left at the wayside in exchange. Money is put towards adding these stupid 3D effects when they could instead be used on just making the movie better in general.

Except you don't improve the quality of the creative aspects of a film by throwing money at them.

I imagine the same argument you've made here was made eight or nine decades ago with the advent of non-silent films.

The same idea applies to CGI used in live-action movies these days. I studied this a lot last year in all my film and TV classes at uni, but it was brought fresh into my mind this week when I watched those Red Letter reviews of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Time and time again they sacrificed good direction, screen writing and all sorts of other things that actually make films good, just so that they could add all these flashy CG effects to make the movie look cool. In the end they had a lame, cool-looking movie that was so shallow a bird wouldn't bath in it.

They didn't sacrifice those things. It's not as though you can either have good direction/screen-writing/etc OR cgi. You can have good direction/screen-writing/etc WITH cgi.

It may be used by many as a crutch, but that's only a reason to criticize those that use it as a crutch, and not a reason to criticize cgi.