Thoughts On TPM 3D

[lazypadawan]

The biggest concern I had before the film started was, “Is this going to give me a headache?”

The last 3D film I watched in its entirety was “Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone” in 1983. I haven’t seen any recent movie in 3D, not even “Avatar.” Given that I sometimes get headaches from watching movies in the theater, I was kind of worried.

After having a sushi lunch and figuring out with the theater the deal with tickets I bought for tomorrow on MovieTickets.com (in short, MovieTickets.com totally fluffed my order so I had to repurchase for tomorrow), I got my Darth Maul glasses (whee!) and headed off to the auditorium.

Unfortunately, my AMC theater did NOT have the Clone Wars Darth Maul trailer that’s now online nor did I get the free toy. Those were the only negative things I could say about TPM in 3D.

The film itself looks AMAZING. It was good enough just so I was able to notice details I hadn’t seen in a long time, but the 3D completely enhanced the film. This is not obtrusive, obnoxious 3D. Nor this is a cheap, quickie conversion. If you hadn’t known this film came out in 1999, you’d never know this was not natively shot in 3D. Sure, the battle scenes look great and the pod race is fabulous. We knew those would look good. We knew we’d get the fun of seeing fireballs, lasers, and shrapnel flying toward us, and they do. When that one guy goes flying into the cave wall during the pod race, you recoil a little.

But you know what really impressed me? How the holograms looked. They’re supposed to be three dimensional “in universe” so to speak, but could only look two dimensional on screen. Well, not anymore! Every cockpit scene looking out is amazing.

The thing with this conversion is that at times, it’s so non-intrusive you start to forget it’s a 3D movie…until something else catches your eye that makes you go, “Wow.”

It’s definitely going to be challenging to convert matte painted scenes done for the first set of Star Wars movies, but it will be incredible if they can pull it off. I can’t wait to experience the Hoth battle, the Death Star trench run, or the speeder bike chase in 3D. One thing became very clear to me while watching TPM 3D: Star Wars was born for 3D…it’s just taken 35 years for the technology to catch up.

Comments

[imhilien.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review. :) I'm planning to see it - I want to see the pod race and 3-way lighsabre duel in 3D. :D

[sreya.livejournal.com]

Yay, glad to hear it's so seamless! Avatar gave me a nasty headache , so I was nervous about the 3D enough to skip going last night when I was already queasy. Now I have much more confidence it will be great!

[shadadukal]

I've already seen it twice. I agree that the 3D is unobtrusive. To me, that's what makes it so great. It's really there to make things more realistic and not simply to have things fly into your face from time to time. This is 3D as it should be, a 3D that gives dimension, depth, but isn't gimmicky.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Good to hear. I, too, haven't bothered with watching any recent 3D movies because it seems so gimmicky. I was hoping to learn that Star Wars would do it differently. It'll be great to see TPM in the theaters again.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I get off work fairly early in the afternoon, so I was able to go to an afternoon showing. The theatre didn't seem very full at first, but it seemed to fill up a bit as the show time approached with a number of parents and children (which did leave me thinking about those who hadn't been born when the movie premiered...)

I don't have much of a standard of comparison, having only seen the stop-motion Coraline and the computer-animated Up as feature-length 3D movies before, but I'd have to agree the conversion went very, very well, wiping away any worries I might have had about having to "fake the second camera view." There was one single shot, I suppose, that did give me that old-fashioned feeling of "stuff right in front of the camera," when some fish swim by just as our heroes are entering the Gungan city bubble, but I went back to the Blu-Ray (and then the DVD) and realised they'd been there before. (I suppose that before doing that I'd entertained mischievous thoughts of the conversion putting in one "obvious" addition early on to freak out those who "don't want things to change"... although I still wonder about having been struck by the way the Radiant VII's landing legs flexed touching down.) Still, there were other interesting small details I noticed; as you said, the holograms were interesting, but I was also intrigued to finally see that Darth Maul's "macrobinoculars" appeared to give a 3D image themselves.

I suppose one of the highest compliments I can think of giving was that after a while, I wasn't thinking so much "Star Wars with added 3D" but just "a Star Wars movie back on the big screen." However, I do feel a little ambiguous about admitting I had a headache by the time the podrace was starting; it does somehow feel like one of those calculated "rain on the parade" comments. I don't remember that happening with Coraline and Up... It might have had to do with feeling tired from work, or with the screening getting in the way of when I usually eat dinner.

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

Sometimes a headache is just a headache.

[nic]

The film itself looks AMAZING.

It looked so good I forgot it was 3D, if that makes sense? It looked real.