3D, and I can’t stress enough that I’m talking about the best uses of 3D that we’ve seen so far, looks incredible. There seem to be enough people who have stated agreement on this, vocally and economically, that a near-consensus exists around this. It looks cool. It’s fair to take the few really excellent examples of what 3D can do, because these best practices are the ones that will be emulated and built upon by the people who are serious about making the best quality films possible. To some it will remain a gimmick, but the longer it’s around for and the more people experiment with it, the more improvements we’ll see, until the baseline quality of 3D movies is at the level that the most optimistic among us hope it will someday be.
There’s plenty of reason to hope. This iteration of 3D is really quite young, and while it has a ways to go before being the standard of quality for the medium, with time there’s no telling how much it could improve. Having filmmakers on board like Martin Scorsese and James Cameron is enormously helpful for bettering the technology and the artistic use of 3D. It’s important to remember that while it has its problems that are kind of undeniable, all technologies tend to come with these types of growing pains, and once those responsible for developing innovations like 3D learn from those errors and shortcomings, this could become as normal a quality of movies and movie watching as the spread of color imaging was—a gradual and somewhat opposed development that is now the cinematic norm.