Kelly Stewart

Staff Writer

Graphic by Scott Bennett

In days long gone, showings of 3-D movies were magical experiences that were few and far between. Today, not only has the magic worn off, but 3-D technology has become just another step in the quest for mindless entertainment.

Since it has become easier for movies to be made 3-D, directors have taken the idea and run with it. Some of them seem to only want to make their movies 3-D because it will drive up the ticket price.

However, 3-D doesn’t really add much to the movie beyond the fact that it has three dimensions. Yes, Avatar was a good movie, but in my opinion it would have been just as good if seen not through blue and red lenses.

In fact, next to HD television, 3-D looks like a pointless gimmick to draw in audiences with nothing but the fact it is a new, shiny toy to be played with and then forgotten when something even “better” comes out. This is what happened when a lot of people started buying HD TVs, except HD actually enhanced the quality of the picture and did something for the movie.

And 3-D may even come to invade the TVs at home soon as well. Electronic companies such as DLP have unveiled their new 3-D television that utilizes high definition and 3-D to bring the viewer into the world of the movie. For some people who have been waiting for this day to come, it seems as if it couldn’t get any better.

Except, of course, you’d have to wear those huge glasses you have to wear when you’re watching a 3-D movie at home.

The glasses are doubly annoying to me. My eyesight is poor, so I constantly have to wear glasses in order to see, which means that whenever I go to see a movie in 3-D, I have to put the 3-D glasses over my regular glasses. For those of you with glasses, imagine doing that every time you want to watch a movie.

Glasses that, according to the Electronics Weekly website, may cost up to $300 apiece (not to mention the television itself, which will cost $1,700, not including the cost of other equipment.) Money that many may not have, considering the fact that millions have only just finished shelling out thousands of dollars in order to get HD TVs that got big a few years ago.

And when something even better comes out a few years later, 3-D will just be obsolete. Technology is changing constantly, and who is to say the next decade will introduce us to something even bigger, like in the book Fahrenheit 451, where all four walls of a room are just one giant TV.

Of course, TVs may actually reach that size eventually. When they first came out, TVs were only a fraction of the size that they have reached today, and they will continue to grow far beyond the size that is really needed to do something as simple as watching TV. The increases in size did make it easier to see, but now companies have made it a competition to see who can make the biggest TV the fastest.

Too many movie directors use new technology to cover up for what would have been a mediocre movie otherwise anyway. Movies should be judged by the story that they tell, not by the methods used to tell it.