Roger Ebert has never been a fan of Hollywood’s current 3D push. Although he praised James Cameron’s “Avatar” for how “carefully employed” its 3D images were, Ebert outlined nine reasons last spring for why studios should not adopt the technology as a marketing default.
On Sunday, the critic published a letter he received from noted film editor/sound designer Walter Murch that purportedly offers a technical explanation of “why 3D doesn’t work and never will.” The biggest problem, according to Murch, is that 3D films tax viewers’ brains by forcing their eyes to focus at one distance (the plane of the movie screen) while “converging” at varying distances to follow the 3D action. Hence the headaches that some 3D viewers report. “Case closed,” Ebert declares.
But not everyone agrees with Murch’s view that 3D film effects create insurmountable visual challenges.
Slate science editor Daniel Engber, for one, is taking a softer stance on the technology after complaining of 3D’s shortcomings in 2009. “After watching 10 or 20 of these films since then,” he writes in a response to Ebert’s latest article, “I’ve grown accustomed to the ocular aerobics, and the same format that gave me splitting headaches back in 2009 hardly bothers me now. Meanwhile, certain technical innovations, especially in animated [3D], have begun to eliminate some of the medium’s most egregious visual quirks.”
Engber also agrees that a “puppet-theater effect” persists in live-action 3D movies, but “that ‘problem,’ too, may diminish as we all get used to it.”