I’ve seen plenty of 3D movies.  Even long ago when they were a brand new novelty, before they fell out of fashion.  Over the last few years, it’s been interesting to see many movies makers use of 3D technology, as an attempt to woo movie watchers from their comfy home theaters into the local cineplex.  After all, it’s hard to gouge a paying customer for popcorn and a coke when their sitting at home.  While I’ve rather enjoyed the 3D movies I’ve watched lately, like Monsters vs Aliens, and Beowulf, a lot of them are just plain gimmicky.  Sure it’s cool to see popcorn and pies and bullets inches from your face, but the novelty only goes so far.  To be quite honest, it sort of draws you out of the movie story telling experience and get’s you all caught up in the technology behind it.  That to me anyway, is not what movies are all about.

I want to be caught up in the story.  I want to be sucked into the plot, the environment, and the characters plight.  I may be a sucker for good eye candy, but I want the complete immersion experience.  I want a movie to totally distract from the trivial details of my every day life.  When a movie does all this properly, my suspension of disbelief is in full gear.  This is what the newest and greatest 3D movie Avatar does in spades.  Sure, at the beginning the average movie goer (that includes me) is caught up in the 3D effects, but very quickly into the movie you forget it’s even there.   That’s because, James Cameron does what no movie director has done in the past with 3D, and that is he doesn’t make a big deal out of it.  He understands, that having gun ships hovering right over your popcorn do nothing for advancing the plot, or making you feel more attached to his characters.

What Avatar the movie does, is use 3D technology to make you a part of the movie.  It draws you into the scene in such a subtle way, that you don’t even realize it’s happening.  You feel like your really on Pandora running through the spectacularly colorful jungle, and experiencing it for the first time just like the main character Jake Sully.  Through the entire 3 hour movie, you don’t feel like your watching a flat screen.  Instead you feel like the images of the movie encompass your entire line of sight to the limit of your peripheral vision.  It makes for an incredibly immersion rich experience.  That fact that the jungle scenes and the characters and animals that inhabit them are incredibly beautiful makes it even more stunning.

I was warned by my 13 year old cousins friend, before going to the movie that it wasn’t worth watching it in 3D.  Given that the advice came from a 13 year old, I took that with a huge grain of salt, and saw the movie in 3D anyway.  I can understand now why he said it though.  There simply weren’t any eye jarring, disruptive 3D effects during the entire move.  To a 13 year old boy, that was obviously a bad thing.  To me, it was one of the best features of the movie.  I think the person behind me in the theater summed it up best, when he said, “Wow, that didn’t feel like a 3 hour move!”.  My initial thought was “That wasn’t 3 hours long”.  But, in fact it was, and well worth every minute of it.