Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Clash of the Titans

Movie-makers seem to have been bitten by the 3D bug since Avatar happened. A slew of 3D movies are coming out these days. I have always found 3D movies to be a lot of fun since the first time I watched one (remember My dear kuttichatan? My mom still recalls both sis and me reaching out eagerly to grab ice-cream in one of the scenes).

Last weekend, S said that Clash of the Titans was out. Since the movie is mythology based with scope for plenty of monsters and CGI, we shelled out an extra 10 bucks for the 3D version of the movie as we thought it would be paisa-vasool*.

We had reached the theater at 11.00am for a 11.00am show. No problem - usually the trailers run for a good 20 minutes or so before the movie starts. We put on the dorky 3D glasses and settled down. When the movie started, the titles leapt out of the screen. Cool - this was going to be good!

The movie continued on its mythological way. After a while I realized that I could not see any 3D-ish effects even in the places where 3D effects should have been obvious - like a coin being flung towards the screen, a sword being pointed towards the audience etc. Was this really 3D or what? To validate my suspicion, I took off my 3D glasses and peered at the screen. Whereas for Avatar, the entire screen was kinda blurry when I took those glasses off, for Clash of the Titans, the movie continued being crystal-clear.

Aaaaargh! Evidently the movie makers had 3D-fied about 10 minutes of Clash of the Titans for the trailers and left the rest of the movie as is. Effectively, we had paid 10 extra bucks for a few minutes of watching fancy-looking titles.

Only after we returned home did I read on the Net that the movie had had 3D effects added after it had finished being shot. Essentially the producers had decided to cash in on the 3D-mania without actually spending much on it besides adding the words 3D to the title, and providing dorky glasses to the theatre patrons.

The movie itself was not too bad - an okay masala entertainer as movies in this genre usually are. Regardless, we felt cheated.

Flash news for the producers: Dorky glasses doth not a 3D-movie make.

*value for money

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sometime last year producers figured they can charge extra if you publicize a movie as 3D. Also you get folks to come to the theater instead of sitting at home and watching on dvd.

Wait for the assault from 3D TV's soon and TV shows in 3d from all providers.

I am sure some shows/movies are going to be awesome, but most of them are just going to be duds.

-T

Serendipity said...

:D heehee

Archana said...

T - sad but true! Next time I am going to make sure I read all the reviews first!

Serendipity - my sad fate so amusing, huh :-)?

Vishesh said...

lol :P

Archana said...

Vishesh - :-)!

i3lh4m said...

Good article...keep share!

i3lh4m said...

Thanks for good article

Unknown said...

I worked for a few 3D movies so far. And I remember the failure of Clash of the Titans.

Usually, the movie like Avatar, Resident Evil Afterlife, were shot using 2 Camers, left and the right eye.

But, Clash of the Titan, the producers decided to make money like you said, and they came up with a lame plugin (that time, now we have some cool tools that can do this in an efficient way), that is basically trying to create depth, meaning generating the right eye FROM taking the existing footage, left eye. It was such a horrible output claiming to be a 3D movie.

The inside joke for us is that, Clash of the Titan is referred to as a bad example of how horrible if a stereoscopic team is performing. Dude...Clash of the Titans had better 3D effect than this, keep working!!