Re: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Pre-release) (Use Spoiler Tags)
The problem with 3D is more related to the fact that it's not actually 3D space, and so it's more distracting than impressive. The effect invites you to look at things in front of or behind the subject of the shot, but of course your eyes are unable to bring them into focus if the camera hasn't, and the expected relative angles of your eyes is incorrect (objects close to you require those sightlines to converge, while distant objects create near-parallel lines). This is the source of a lot of people's headaches during/after a 3D movie. You're causing your eyes to strain themselves automatically as you explore each scene, in the same way people who need glasses do.
That's the problem with watching them. There are problems with producing them, as well. Walter Much (the greatest mind in the industry!) lays out a few of those issues:
- It affects the edit itself, because you need to allow the audience extra time to register any given shot. It dictates/necessitates a slower pace to the cut than the story might call for.
- The resulting image is about a full stop (in camera terms) darker than a proper image.
- There's a heavy strobing resulting from horizontal movement of the camera.
- It's very expensive!
Several critics have wisely pointed out that tradition film IS in 3D, as our minds perceive it. We can already tell relative scale and distance from the image, and our brains interpret that as a 3D space just fine. Depth of field (parts of the shot falling out of focus while one plane remains in focus), camera angle (wide/long), and composition of the frame all give us a sense of space. Beyond that, they're also tools which filmmakers use to direct our eye where it belongs in a shot, at a cut point, or to learn some critical bit of information for our story. They're still in place during a 3D showing - again, we can only see in sharp focus where the camera does - but we've got a clutter of unimportant bits inviting us to ignore that compositional information while we watch.
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On the spoiler count:
Hypothesis are not spoilers. We could speculate all day, and that's all those early posts people are referring to were. Rumors, on the other hand, can actually be spoilers and should be marked as such. If it's generated from someone claiming to have an inside source somewhere down the chain, it's potentially true.
