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A 3D Home Theater?

Dec 31, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jason Bovberg

When I was a teen, back in the 1980s, I had the good fortune of enjoying the 3D renaissance that hit movie theaters during the first half of that decade. I have indelible memories of getting dropped off at our local theater—no one seemed to want to join me for these weird, seemingly gimmicky experiences—to see such schlock as Comin' at Ya!, Friday the 13th Part III ("in super 3D!"), Jaws 3D, Parasite, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Treasure of the Four Crowns, and even revivals of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and Andy Warhol's sleazy Dracula and Frankenstein films.

I would dutifully pay for my ticket and grab my paper 3D glasses, the red-and-blue anaglyph variety. (Back then, the flimsy glasses came free with the price of the ticket, and you could reuse them.) I would find my seat and wait for the proper moment to don my red-and-blues, and, being a kid, I would occasionally try to reach out and grab whatever prop the movie decided to dangle in front of me, whether it was a ball, a bloody heart, or a machete. (Yes, I was a fan of cheesy horror.) I have a strong memory of being suitably impressed by the 3D imagery despite the fact that it was achieved on film, with its inherent image instability.

Compare that with our modern 3D renaissance, which begins and ends with James Cameron. With the advent of digital cinema and consumer IMAX productions, Cameron decided early this century to create the first full-length 3D IMAX feature, Ghosts of the Abyss, which took full advantage of the latest, top-end digital HD video cameras. He had found that the image stability of digital filmmaking offered an ideal platform for 3D. It produced a reliably rock-solid dual image that our minds could smoothly process. That opened the door to this decade's 3D revival, which includes Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express 3D and Beowulf, and the plethora of 3D animation bombarding theaters these days, including the under-appreciated Monster House, Tim Burton's 3D-tinkered Nightmare Before Christmas, and Pixar's fabulous Up. This year, we also saw some truly wonderful 3D work in Neil Gaiman's Coraline. And just recently, of course, is James Cameron's eyeball orgy Avatar, the most purely immersive 3D experience I've ever seen in movie theaters.

This time around, the 3D process uses a new kind of eyewear: sturdier, polarized glasses, which produce the 3D effect more effectively for today's digital color films. (If I have any complaint about 3D in theaters, it's that these polarized glasses are by nature dark. It's almost like wearing sunglasses to the movies. The result is that the film looks a shade too dark, as if it's being projected with a dim lamp.)

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