At this point, based on the massive box office sales, most of us and a fair proportion of our household pets have bought tickets to see Avatar, James Cameron’s ‘game-changing’ 3-D epic. The film is breaking sales records like some crazy, covetous bull in a shop full of money, and by all accounts is likely to become the highest-grossing film since, well, James Cameron’s last movie. So before I get mired in the quagmire of 3-D and what it means, here’s my super-abridged one paragraph review.

Well… It’s a kids’ film, isn’t it? It’s weird how all the frothing reviews seem to have missed that out. The characters, script and story have been ripped straight out of the Disney playbook circa Pocahontas, albeit with Cameron’s massive hard-on for science and military hardware thrown in. The precious resource everyone’s fighting over is called…Unobtainium? Come on. I heard that this is actually a term used by NASA when referring to metals capable of space travel, but that doesn’t make it any less retarded. That said, the film is an enjoyable ride, complete with eye-humping battle scenes, a fascinating setting (populated by awesome and surprisingly evolutionally credible creatures) and above all, elegantly implemented 3-D that elevates it from the gimmicky fad it was in the horror movies of the 80s into a legitimate cinematic technique, albeit one that leaves you feeling like a rhino has crapped in your eyes and brain by the end of the movie.

So, as much as I wanted to deride Cameron’s claims that Avatar would be a game changer, I have to admit it is. It’s brought 3-D into the consciousness of the mainstream beyond 15-25 year-old male masturbators. And while we’ve had 3-D versions of a fair number of (mostly animated) movies over the last couple of years, the numbers are going to rise (along with a predictable drop in quality – most filmmakers don’t have several hundred million dollars and the best part of a decade to make their movies) as Hollywood seeks to cash in on a trend that, for the moment, will be a useful tool in peeling people off their sofas and herding them into the cinema.

For a movie like Avatar, 3-D is a perfect fit. It makes FX-driven movies that much more of a spectacle. But it’s hardly a technology that can be whitewashed over movies as a whole. For 90 per cent of films, 3-D would add absolutely nothing other than a light headache. After all, as much as lazy hack directors might wish otherwise, adding depth perception does nothing at all to enhance character, plot, dialogue, or any other conventional traits of a good film. It’s a sheen; a multi-million dollar coat of paint. It couldn’t hide Avatar’s flaws, and it won’t hide the shortcomings of movies that are badly written, directed or performed. But it’ll take a good couple of years for the penny to drop in Hollywood, so expect to see the release of umpteen desperate cash-ins before the bigwigs realise that the heart of a movie still lies with a little dude/dudette tapping out a script at a crummy desk. Or in Starbucks if they’re an overcompensating shitbag.  

Then there’s the 3-D gaming debate. Avatar was inevitably accompanied by Avatar: The Game, which attempted to tart up mediocre gameplay with snazzy 3-D graphics which you could only see if you were willing to remortgage your home and children to buy a compatible TV. In any case, 3-D visuals are, at the moment, an irrelevance to gaming. Business-types often forget that cinema and gaming are very different media. 3-D gaming, I believe, means something completely different than 3-D movies. Games went 3-D in the mainstream the moment the Nintendo Wii was released, because it represented the first step in 3-D interactivity.

Clearly, watching a movie is a passive experience, for which the third dimension must be breached visually. But games are interactive, and that’s the path that developers should take when implementing the concept of 3-D. Because who cares if you can see your game pop out from the TV when you can physically play tennis with it, or punch its face in during a boxing match, or have a genuine verbal conversation with an in-game character? That’s where gaming’s 3-D potential lies. The Wii started the revolution, and now with Microsoft’s Natal and Sony’s thoroughly gay super waggle wand, other companies are taking the idea forward. With Natal, confirmed for release towards the end of 2010, a camera tracks player movement 30 times per second, allowing gamers to physically interact with their games without ever picking up a controller.

 So, our 3-D future starts here. Whether for gaming or for movies, it’s a technology that has the potential to bring out the very best and the very worst of our evolving media. Now that the trend is taking off in earnest, we’re obviously heading into the growing pains period, so we’ll undoubtedly see some clumsy implementation. But when the day comes when you can slap Jeremy Kyle in the face on your Xbox, you’ll know we’ve made it. The future has arrived.

A note on house style: I prefer 3-D over 3D, mostly because the former resembles a giant cannon firing a laser into someone’s butt.