Movie Review – Avatar 3D
This is a sort of addendum review now that I’ve seen Avatar in 3D, for the base review please see my Movie Review – Avatar post. Most of this post I realize is more about 3D movies in general than about Avatar 3D specifically, but again if you haven’t seen it yet, you may want to avoid this review for the couple of minor spoilers that could have gotten in. I would like to preempt my own review with the information that I loved the movie, and would like to see it again in fact, and that things I say are observations more than complaints.
In the realms of 2D and 3D there are some important, and likely obvious, differences. A 2D movie is like really any other movie you’ve seen at the theater or on your TV at home. The picture you see is the only picture being projected on the screen when you are watching it. This may also be obvious, but 3D movies need to project two movies onto the same screen at the same time and then provide your eyes some way to let each eye see only one of them. With each eye seeing a different image there is really nothing that makes it any different than the way your eyes actually work, thus things can pop out of the screen or fall into the screen almost like magic.
The chosen method of “letting each eye see its own image” for the IMAX 3D version I saw was a pair of opposing polarized glasses with a light green tint in one lens and light purple tint in the other. The glasses were light weight and reasonably comfortable even over my normal glasses, but in the warmth of a theater full of people made me feel a bit clammy with sweat after about half of the movie. The effect the glasses have on the movie is that everything is a little bit darker and the colors are a little bit skewed. It also left the whole movie just a little bit out of focus. I’m not sure if that changes based on where you are sitting in the theater, but I suspect not thanks to the polarization that seemed to be at 45 degrees off of horizontal or vertical. These two problems took away from the vibrantly colorful and amazingly beautiful scenes of the movie for me.
The most commonly used effect for most of the 3D in Avatar was that things fell into the screen providing a parallax scrolling style depth to things. Occasionally things felt like they were out in the theater with you, but generally never in the hokey need to duck and flinch to keep from getting hit in the face with things kind of way made famous by older 3D movies. The most common thing that was in the foreground was the seeds of the spirit tree or an occasional bit of plant life. These effects were cool and didn’t feel overused to me, but I also felt they didn’t really add much to the movie.
My final determination having seen the movie both ways is that I prefer it in 2D. A movie full of such bright colors and clean crisp graphics genuinely loses a little bit when darkened, color skewed, and slightly out of focus. I highly recommend you see it both ways to compare for yourself since it’s a great enough movie that seeing it more than once is a wonderful thing indeed, but if you are only going to see it once, see the 2D version. The true beauty of the movie speaks for itself without the need for added depth from forced 3D.