The Jurassic Park Lesson on Why 3D is Unpopular

Back when I started this blog, I was well aware that I was writing to a niche market of people who, like me, see 3D as a potential improvement to the film industry. I still stand by that. I want to see 3D flourish into the great cinematic experience it should be. That said, if 3D was the lump sum of its awesome potential, I wouldn't need this blog to defend it, and my recent voyage to the cinema to see Jurassic Park 3D led me to understand why 3D isn't appreciated.

Barring a few conversion errors (transparent objects and between trees being the largest offenders), the 3D conversion in this film was a fantastic technical achievement. When those conversion errors weren't present, I would not have been able to easily identify this as a non-native 3D movie, thanks to the care they obviously took to accurately map people and objects. Given the number of details they got right, I am permissive of the errors that persisted. Regarding the cinematic benefit, 3D didn't always help (some scenes were framed so that the 3D version drew your eye away from the action of the scene due to the convergence/focus technique I described in a previous post), but when it did help it felt like the movie's natural state was in 3D (in particular, I think of that vegetarian hacker kid dangling from the air vents above a hungry velociraptor). They made the best possible 3D conversion for this film, and the studio should be proud of what they created. It was extremely good, but they were contending against external elements outside studio control that fought my attempts to enjoy it.

The first was the critics. Now, admittedly, most critics gave Jurassic Park 3D favorable reviews, even for the 3D. But, as I've seen with critics before, nobody has ever talked qualitatively about why the 3D was good. And unfortunately, the first critic I found to actually give some sort of qualitative assessment claimed that, "like most 3D conversions, it looked like a cardboard cutout." (Forgive the lack of a reference; I don't want them to receive traffic, and therefore ad money for such a ludicrous statement.) So, we have an outright lie declaring the film poorly produced technically, or no information to go on at all about attending this movie. I imagine a number of people were filtered out of wanting to see the film at this stage.

The second problem was the theater itself. What hurt me especially was that I wanted to attend a premium showing of the film. Consequently, I purchased tickets for a showing labeled under Cinemark's XD branding (which is supposed to compete with IMAX as a premium screen size and projector quality). The theater I attended was instead using the XD branding for a film that was clearly being shown in a regular movie theater rather than an XD one. On top of that, I never recieved a pair of 3D glasses (fortunately I had snuck in my own pair of higher quality glasses). I wasn't charged the XD price for the showing, but I am still annoyed that I was unable to attend what I intended to when I arrived, and the staff provided me otherwise poor service.

Speaking of which, the third problem was also the theater's fault. Jurassic Park 3D makes heavy use of floating windows to keep the 2D film decisions of the movie from hurting you eyes in the 3D version. But there's a problem common enough that Disney created a tutorial video for theater employees specifically telling them not to do what they did in the theater I attended. Basically, in 2D theaters, employees will sometimes cut off the edges of the movie because it's difficult to set up the movie precisely and there's rarely critical information there in 2D movies. But floating windows exist entirely in the edges. Consequently, I had the worst of both worlds: frame violations and black bars on the edge of the screen.

Now, this isn't meant to be a post about how bad that theater is. Typically when I've attended this theater, my experience has been great (I would still recommend it to any of my friends as my preferred theater). But it highlights 3D film's biggest weakness: its complexity. There are so many layers to a successful 3D exhibition that if any portion of it is inadequate at all, 3D becomes a painful experience. Everything has to be just right, or audiences will find it unacceptable (especially since it's billed as a premium service), so there's no room for laziness or incompetence in the 3D business.

I think that may also help to explain why 3D TV is failing to gain traction as well. While it fixes the problems I had in the cinema by being completely in control of exhibition, there are few channels available to those interested in 3D (Comcast, for example, has a 3D demo channel and ESPN 3D). Those that do air commercials from whoever's brave enough to advertise on such a slim market. The people who advertise resort to the cheapest possible conversion for their commercials (I saw one where the actors in the ad looked like anorexic zombies because their necks had no depth whatsoever).

That said, this doesn't mean 3D is bad, or that it will ultimately fail. Jurassic Park 3D is doing very well at the box office, and 3D TV purchases are way up this year. This market will survive, but only if it insists on some quality control.