[Mr. E (Unverified) Posted Jul 16th 2008 11:07AM]

Well, in my town probably more than half of the theaters showing JttCotE had it in 3D, so I'm not too surprised that more people saw it that way. In addition, I went to a matinee showing of the 3D version. Normal matinee price at the theater is $8.50, but the 3D showing was $11.00 (normal non-matinee price). So the theater did gross a higher amount on my purchase, but I did get a pair of glasses sealed in plastic, so that has to eat into the difference a little bit.

This was the first modern 3D movie I've seen. My main purpose was to check out the actual live-action stereoscopic cinematography process, which is technology invented by James Cameron. Cameron is using this process to film his upcoming movie Avatar, so I wanted to get an advance preview of it.

My impressions of Cameron's stereoscopic process are mostly positive. During the movie, I didn't see any double images or ghosting, the way I used to with the older analog projection 3D, and I didn't have a headache, even after an hour and a half or so. That's good! I kept the glasses and I'm going to check the Internet for any cool other stuff I might be able to use them for.

There were a few "in your face" moments with the 3D effect, but fortunately they were fairly far between, so it wasn't too badly overdone. One thing I noticed was that some of the shots with excessive "depth" tended to draw my attention away from the story and pull me out of the movie. For instance, there was a shot of a building exterior with trees in the foreground. The apparent depth difference between each of the trees and the building was pretty excessive and distracting. Also, I noticed that when the depth is really cranked up, the scene almost appears like cardboard cutout objects at each location, like a shadow box or a play background with set pieces simulating depth at the back of the stage. It's kind of strange. On the other hand, during scenes with little depth I was ironically disappointed. I remember Cameron saying that by varying the distance between the two lenses, the director/DP can adjust the depth effect as desired. I hope he's erred on the side of a subtler depth effect for Avatar, but more importantly that it stays fairly consistent throughout the movie so the viewer will tend to just accept the added depth as part of the story and forget about scrutinizing the changes from scene to scene. Of course, this is Cameron we're talking about, so I'm sure he'll do it right, especially since he's promoting stereoscopic as more involving, not more distracting.