3D has had many heydays through out the history of cinema. The early fifties saw RKO running with the new process and Universal taking punts on many films, some successes and some flat out failures. The ship finally sank after it was deemed too expensive to upkeep dual projectors and panned after terrible syncing issues with running two strips of film simultaneously.

The delivering technology simply couldn’t keep up with the “fad” and it wasn’t until 1954 when single strip 3D was perfected. After that, everyone got into it, even Hitchcock, famously releasing Dial M for Murder in the third dimension. Shlock classic The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Howard Hawks’ hit The French Line, which managed to fit Jane Russell in all her glory, into 3D saw the format finally with a steady footing. Or so it seemed until once again cinema finances crumbled when wide-screen formatted screens were demanded ten fold and 3D was left for dead once more.

It’s popularity fluctuated throughout the 60’s and started making money at the box office once more in the late 80’s with a spate of franchised horror films helping it make a mini comeback. Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D and Friday the 13th III all used established money spinners to get people interested once more but to little avail and 3D sank again.

Odd then that a documentary called Ghosts of the Abyss would spark the new revival in 3D cinema in 2003. James Cameron’s obsession with the HMS Titanic spectacularly took IMAX viewers into the ship that he’d reconstructed so painstakingly in his special effects driven, Oscar winning clunker of a film. It obviously would only be a matter of time before the format’s most outspoken director would return to 3D.

Avatar has been in development for more that 5 years and Cameron claims to have had the bulk of it written from as early as the 80’s even attempting pre-production after Titanic, but first, as was the case in the 50’s it was once again necessary for technology to catch up. This time, to Cameron. The real breakthrough is not the 3D format at all but his very own camera system, designed in a way that allows the actors in Avatar to perform on a stage called The Volume first and then lets Cameron get the shots he wants later on virtual cameras from their fully 3D captured takes. Cameron and techo-wiz kid Vince Pace have also developed a real time rendering component where by a rudimentary 3D environment can be viewed live during shooting. “Its like having my own Skynet” Says the 55 year old director.

Weirdly, lying somewhere between Aliens and Pocahontas, Avatar sees a group of humans fighting a race of warrior beings on a beautiful planet through the use of “Avatars”. Fully working, fully fighting projections of themselves. The story focuses on Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic who can once again inhabit a working body, his infiltration into the alien community and his romance with an alien princess. So, the plot isn’t too ground breaking then?

Not being a big fan of 3D feature films I’m not as tantalised by the way the film is going to look with those ridiculous glasses on, rather the technology that was used to create it. The trailer which is available online now (and breaking all kinds of records over at apple.com), although interesting, still looks to me like cut sequences from an expensive computer game, the colours too brash and childish and the look far too unreal for me to be in any way as immersive an experience as Cameron had hoped.

It was always his plan to hold off until CGI had progressed enough to create photo realistic character animation, which seems like folly to me. There is something very strange about capturing a performance only to hide it behind jostling blue pixels. Is it truly going to be something we’ve never seen before? Andy Serkis’ Gollum (Cameron’s realisation that Avatar could now be possible) looked great in the Lord of the Rings films but had that feel of hyper real and although a stunning technical feat, simply wasn’t real enough to keep me as immersed in the film as I would like to have been. I’m still not sold that Avatar can push film into a new age of anything as a cinephile. In fact I’m certain that it can’t really be anything more than a technical landmark and massive box office success.

Don’t get me wrong I do hope it comes out and proves me an idiot. I hope its powerful and clever and emotive and inspiring. I wouldn’t go to the cinema as often as I do if I didn’t have faith that every movie I sat down to watch was capable of exceeding my expectations. I’m not that bitter.

Yet.

So with Steven Spielberg shooting Tin-Tin in 3D and Peter Jackson converting the Lord of the Rings to 3D for IMAX it’s an certainly an interesting time for 3D cinema but will it change the way we really see the medium of film as an audience, will anything ever be as “alive” as good old 35mm and a great script or will this be the revival that sticks?