I saw the Pixar film Elemental this week. It's a story about Element City, where fire people, water people, cloud/air people and earth people all live together, sometimes uncomfortably. You have to admire the inventive way it creates its world of flames and bubbles and flowers and white clouds, and the way all those things make up the characters it's about. On top of that, those characters live in a world of smoke, rivers, and all kinds of other earthly delights.
The screening I attended was in 3D. While it works pretty well these days, I take it more a gimmick than a genuine edge. The glasses are delicate and just become more plastic junk. As is often the case, it gets distracting, and it introduces more opportunities for technical problems. And for a while, I felt like my side was winning the argument — you don't see as many random "but this time it's 3D!" sequels(续集)as you did for a while, what with Saw 3D and Piranha 3D and Step Up 3D and so forth.
If you've ever picked up a pair of the Real D glasses that you use for a film like this, you can see it —they are literally dark glasses, and as sunglasses would do, they make the picture look darker. That is the very problem. It's impossible for me to believe I even saw the best version of Elemental. I feel certain that my appreciation of its colorful take on the world would have been, what, 30% greater, if I had just watched it in a regular 2D presentation.
Honestly, maybe this is tech that belongs in cheap horror sequels, where it can be used for jump scares and tricks in a style that relies on them, rather than in films that are designed to be visually joyful. Besides,who wants to try to make a restless kid wear plastic glasses for two hours?
