I have just got back from watching TPM:3D. Here is my review:
It is no great secret that i am not a fan of the prequels. I don't hate them, i just think they are just not on the same level as the Original trilogy . So why did i go to see TPM in 3D? Well, that was my own fault. Remind me never to wind my wife up , who hates Star Wars by the way, saying how much i wanted to go and see this in 3D at the cinema as a Valentines Day present (plus it's her birthday a couple of days later so i wound her up by saying she will be having a Star Wars birthday). Then before you can tell her it's a joke, you find out that she has booked two tickets for the sunday afternoon performance and paid for them. Ouch.
I'm not going to go into where i feel this film fails because that has been covered so many times and i have nothing more to add on that subject. I went in there with an open mind to see how this movie would hold up in it's 3D conversion. Well things started ok. We got the cinema pretty much to ourselves. It was a weird atmosphere and it seemed very strange that a Star Wars movie would have so few attending on its first weekend. I looked around the cinema and counted 17 people, not including ourselves. So 19 people at a Sunday afternoon showing is very poor. The opening few days haven't faired much better. The most they have had at any one screening was 43, which was Saturday night, with one showing on the friday having only 5 tickets sold.
Sometimes i have gone to watch 3D movies and there have been major problems with focusing and calibration. This happened when watching Transformers 3, which was unwatchable without feeling ill. If the 3D adverst are all worng, then its a good bet the film will be too. So i was happy to see the Titanic trailer. Boy does that look like a great conversion. The 3D on that was excellent. So here i was, with fingers crossed, that TPM would be as good. Oh, how wrong i was. The new fox and Lucasfilms logos looked great and really stood out. Then came the main crawl. Now that looked amazing, with real depth and 3D really gave this the wow factor. But thats where it ended. As soon as the camera panned down after the crawl disappeared it became almost 2D. But worse than that was just how bad quality many parts of the film was. While some shots looked good, apart from some obvious DVNR, there was a hell of a lot of the film that looked horrendous. The extra shots added for the extended pod race opening was just one example. They looked like bad upscaled images and blurry as hell. This is not how TPM looked at the cinema in 1999.
But back to the 3D. Both my wife, and myself, found ourselves constantly lowering our glasses because we couldn't believe that what we were supposed to be seeing was a 3D image. Now usually when you do that when watching a 3D movie, there is noticeable blurring of the image, but not in this case. the majority of the time the image looked the same with or without the glasses. Shots that you would think should look awesome in 3D just looked flat. For example, the vista shots of the Naboo scenery. Flat, with no depth at all. Now i know George has stated that they went for the subtle 3D approach, but there is subtle and there is none existent. This was the latter.The picture was also dark, thanks to the tinted glasses. Whereas most films will brighten the image for 3D to compensate for the glasses, this one didn't and it suffered for not doing it.
The only thing the 3D seemed to help was the Cg characters. this did actually help them look like they could have been a part of the scenery, instead of flat cartoon like images. The battle droids seemed to profit from this the most.
Even when there was a noticeable 3D image, the backgrounds looked flat, like the characters were acting against a photograph. It just didn't look right at all.
If i pay extra money to see a 3D movie i want to see a 3D movie (yes i know , i didn't pay for this one). I went in hoping to be wowed by seeing Star Wars in 3D, and came out feeling majorly disappointed.
The last time i went to see a 3D movie and i was shocked at how bad the 3D conversion felt was Clash of the Titans. Oh, wait. Wasn't that 3D conversion done by the same company that has handled the conversions for the Star Wars films?
Its obvious that George just doesn't understand 3D. If he could have just got his buddy James Cameron to oversee this conversion, its a good bet fans would have been in for a treat.
Now onto the sound. Well, when you get the trailers before the film sounding BETTER than the movie itself, you know something is wrong. The whole mix sounded as flat as the 3D image. I remember seeing TPM in 1999 and Sebulba's pod engines almost shook the room. Not so today. it sounded more like a fart in a baked bean tin. There was just no dynamic range to this mix at all. It's not the cinema that is a fault here as i have seen many films on this screen and they have sounded great. So what the hell happened with this one?
So all in all, this was a major letdown. Hopefully, if they continue with the 3D saga, things will be learned from this and they will learn how to use the 3D to its best.
My conclusion? If you love the prequels and just want to experience them on the big screen, then i say go for it. If you want to go just to experience the 3D, then i say save your money as you're likely to leave the theater felling the same way we did.