Opinion - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 14:40 - 9 Comments

Curmudgeon: 3D smartphones have no depth of feel

Delimiter’s new Curmudgeon column is contributed by David Braue, who has forgotten about more heavily-hyped gadgets and supposed life-changing technologies than you’ve probably ever seen. His hobbies include long sunset walks along iPhone-lit beaches, setting the proverbial clocks on peoples’ proverbial VCRs, embedding hidden swear words in the Delimiter CMS, and ranting about anything in the tech world that has it coming. Oh, and Scrabble.

opinion If there ever was a worse cinematic idea than giving M. Knight Shyamalan free reign to make The Last Airbender as long and ponderous as he wanted, it was bastardising what could have been a half-decent movie – were it about a third shorter and 185 percent less bombastic – by converting it to 3D.

The result – apart from leaving millions of moviegoers with searing headaches from both the plot and the shoddy post-production 3D effects – won the inaugural Worst Most Eye-Gouging Mis-Use of 3D award at the 2011 Razzie awards. It was also a watershed moment in last year’s trend to 3D-ise everything: studios realised that hastily-produced 3D versions of movies like Airbender and Clash of the Titans, designed mainly to extract more money from our wallets, could actually dilute their brands. The much-advertised 3D version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 was apparently so bad that it was actually canned before it could see the light of day.

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