![]() There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. They were slick and dazzling, but also hollow and soulless-a condition that Cameron sought to rectify through Avatar’s metaphysical gamesmanship. In movies like The Polar Express and Beowulf, Zemeckis strove to use 3D imagery inventively, especially when it came to motion-capture performances, but for the most part the movies ended up stranded on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. ![]() After getting an Oscar for Forrest Gump, Zemeckis seemed set on finding ways to bend the medium to his will regardless of whether the stories themselves demanded such flourish. In the 2000s, the highest-profile director to utilize 3D consistently was Robert Zemeckis, a self-styled problem solver like Cameron whose relationship to filmmaking technology was not-so-subtly aggressive. ![]() In these stage spectaculars, 3D was still being used in a primal, jack-in-the-box-sort of way-to tease the audience with the idea that props or characters were jumping out of the screen at them. Budgeted at $24 million and hosted at Universal Studios in Orlando, T2-3D was made with the blessing of Cameron, who at the time was diving to the bottom of the ocean and having his soup spiked with PCP by someone on the Titanic crew. There was also an uptick in 3D-style theme park attractions, the splashiest of which was surely 1996’s multimedia, partially live-action T2-3D: Battle Across Time. In the ’90s, IMAX cornered the market on 3D documentaries, which were typically aimed at families and shown in specialized theaters. (The technique also flourished in experimental and avant-garde realms where the style was more important than the content.) Synchronized exhibition proved costly and difficult, however, and by the mid-’80s, 3D had migrated almost exclusively to lame-duck sequels-i.e., 1983’s Jaws 3D, which at least delivered on the promise of hurtling shark chunks directly into the faces of paying customers. A quick survey of influential 3D titles of the 1950s and ’60s encompasses mostly B-movies, including House of Wax and Revenge of the Creature the titles suggest a certain reticence on the part of producers to risk elaborate (and expensive) dual-camera shooting practices on more adult or prestigious genres. In the glory days of the 1950s, the format was promoted as a novelty: a rejection of the passive comforts of television yoked to subversive or spooky subject matter. ![]() But in terms of exhibition, it’s primarily been associated with carny-style gimmickry-a special attraction thrust at moviegoers every few decades or so. The history of 3D cinema is almost as long as that of moving pictures: the first stereoscope, offering left-and-right-eye views of a single scene or backdrop, dates back to the mid-19th century. It’s a thin line between a paradigm shift and a downward spiral, and in addition to all the other things riding on the The Way of Water, the ultimate direction of 3D makes for a major industry talking point.ĭoubt James Cameron at Your Own Risk “It’s Going to Be Epic”: The Oral History of James Cameron But circa 2022, the question of 3D’s dominance is hardly a settled issue one way or the other. Because Cameron’s is an iron will, it was just a matter of time before he got back on track (also, $3 billion worth of ticket buyers can’t be wrong). Avatar 2 and 3 were supposedly just over the horizon at that point as well, but delays led to the kind of push-backs that stoke expectations and anxieties to an unbearable degree. “It’ll all be 3D eventually because that’s how we see the world.”Ĭameron made this claim nearly a decade ago, when Fox executives were still lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills after the release of Avatar, a movie whose unprecedented success represented a kind of proof of concept for its maker’s prophecy. “For me, it’s absolutely inevitable that entertainment will be 3D,” Cameron told the BBC when asked about the long-term evolution of his artform. Not for himself, of course, but for the good of all mankind. Or maybe it’s because after five decades as Hollywood’s reigning spectacle maker, the once and future King of the World sincerely believes he’s reconciled the great divide between biology and technology. Maybe it’s the legacy of The Terminator the idea of a calculating android convincingly hidden in the skin of a human being. Part of James Cameron’s particular megalomaniacal charm is that he can make even the most technocratic declaration sound like a humanitarian manifesto.
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