Are 3-D movies (still) bad for your health?
Daniel Engber suggests that 3-D movies like Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens are not the avatars of a new era in filmmaking; instead they are doomed to obsolescence like their predecessors of the 1980s and 1950s.
Something different happens when you’re viewing three-dimensional motion projected onto a flat surface. When a helicopter flies off the screen in Monsters vs. Aliens, our eyeballs rotate inward to follow it, as they would in the real world. Reflexively, our eyes want to make a corresponding change in shape, to shift their plane of focus. If that happened, though, we’d be focusing our eyes somewhere in front of the screen, and the movie itself (which is, after all, projected on the screen) would go a little blurry. So we end up making one eye movement but not the other; the illusion forces our eyes to converge without accommodating.
Translation: some viewers will suffer from eyestrain, headaches and even nausea (not to mention those upon whom the effect is completely lost).
The fact is, the technology for projecting a 3-D movie is unchanged since the early days — and people complained back then, eventually leading to the demise of the technology.
So how come, if these movies are still giving us headaches, no one talks about it?
It may be that the visual fatigue, however pervasive, is small enough to hide in the novelty of the experience—we’re so jazzed up that we barely notice our eyes hurt. If we did become aware of some discomfort, we might not recognize where it came from: Were my eyes tired from watching Monsters vs. Aliens last night or from having sat in front of my computer all through that morning and afternoon? Did the RealD projection give me a headache or was it the movie’s lamebrained script?
Indeed, several of the critics who reviewed the film seem to be suffering from a form of source amnesia: A.O. Scott calls Monsters vs. Aliens “strenuous, noisy, 3-D fun;” Anthony Lane describes growing “fuzzy with exhaustion;” even Time’s Josh Quittner must confess, “After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out.”
Well, we plan on seeing M vs. A this weekend; I’ll keep you posted.
