Due to wearing glasses, I have never been that comfortable with 3-D in cinemas. The last time I tried was when Avatar came out. I have actually never seen all of Avatar because I felt horribly sick in the first 20 minutes and decided to go home, leaving Chris with friends to watch the rest.
I felt bad that Chris has basically not seen a 3-D movie in years because I couldn’t cope, so we decided to try getting clip-on 3-D glasses from Amazon. They were actually just as terrible as any in cinemas as they were actually too small to clip on properly, so we decided to just cut them up a bit and attach them to my glasses. This looked absolutely ridiculous, but it did allow my glasses to be properly connected to the extra lenses. I think this is the problem most glasses wearers have with 3-D: the cinema glasses tend not to sync perfectly with their own glasses, which causes nausea and headaches.
That said, even though I didn’t feel sick, I wasn’t that impressed. As this was a test, we decided to see a movie we had already seen, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I actually preferred it in 2-D. I don’t think 3-D added anything. If anything, if this film is any indication, I don’t think we are good enough at 3-D for it to be worth it. I think it looked better in 2-D because the 3-D was often not done carefully enough. It caused a lot of blurring at various points. Motion often looked less good and less real than it did in 2-D. Depth just felt more complicated rather than more realistic.
I might consider seeing a movie in 3-D if it seemed like that would advance the plot in some way, but for the most part, I am happy to stick to 2-D as it’s cheaper, looks consistently good and doesn’t involve looking like a crazy person in public with pipe cleaners on my glasses.
As for Fantastic Beasts itself, it was lovely going back to the Harry Potter universe. It was much, much better than the play that came out earlier this year. I really enjoyed getting to see a more adult take on the wizarding world and exploring wizarding society in another part of the world. I hope she will explore other corners of the magical world in the subsequent films. I’d love to see one set in Brazil. More than that, I am very much looking forward to the prospect of what almost has to be the return of Albus Dumbledore. He is one of my favorite characters in fiction ever and certainly my favorite from the Harry Potter universe.
Here’s the video: