One of our crack team of writers will present an argument on a subject of their choosing, using their guile, wit and powers of persuasion. Another will then step up to the plate and present a rebuttal, principally consisting of facile name-calling, “yo mama” jokes, pedantry and playground-level sarcasm.

In this week’s Face/Off, the spotlight swings to 3D films. Is the re-emerging trend of 3D-ising every big new film release warranted? Or is it an outdated way to embarrass cinema audiences by forcing them to wear ridiculous glasses for no reason? Whack on your crazy specs and get ready for one crazy ride of intellectual debate. No blue people though. Sorry.

For the Prosecution:

Remember back in the days when 3D was last cool? You’d go to some terrible theme park with your parents in the school holidays and sit in the back of a dank cinema, poking fun at your siblings for looking a right idiot in glasses made of cardboard and cellophane. There’d be a brief period of oohing, aahing and exclamations of, “Look out, the dinosaur’s going to eat you!”, then the lights would come up and you’d move on to the rollercoaster or the laughing clowns. A pleasant enough half an hour’s entertainment (especially for the adults, as it was something that didn’t involve whiplash or nausea), but you’d probably have forgotten all about it on the way home.

Which is why the recent re-emergence of 3D films is so baffling. Sure, technology has improved in leaps and bounds since the days of the ’90s theme park attraction – the beasties look more fearsome, the sound quality is better, and whole worlds can be created on a computer and green-screened into a studio of actors. There’s no question that 3D works better on screen than it did then, but what does it actually add to a film? Can it make a crap or average film good?

The answer, sadly, is no. Take James Cameron’s recent bloated blockbuster Avatar. Yes, the effects were great, and you noticed that even more if you were lucky enough to view the film in 3D. But despite critics waxing lyrical on the beautiful, immersive world of the Na’vi, there was one thing nearly every review mentioned – the fact that the plot and characterisations were thin. While the film has been nominated for Best Picture in this month’s Golden Globes, its actors were curiously missing in the other key categories, most likely due to the fact it’s not very hard to play a brawny hero or a damsel in distress. The fact is, if you don’t identify with a film’s protagonists, if you find the story it’s trying to tell predictable and laughable, it’s not really going to be a good film, and there’s nothing any amount of scary animals looming really close to your face can do about that.

3D effects in film are essentially a sideshow – in a truly beautiful film, like 2009′s Up, they’re not necessary, and in a whizz-bang blockbuster like Avatar, they’re there to distract you from the emptiness of the writing. We’re not nine years old anymore – we know the monster isn’t really going to leap out of the screen and eat us. So really, directors’ time would be better spent making sure they’re actually creating something intelligent that will be remembered well after the lights come up.

For the Defence:

Bored of movies that only entertain you, eh? Tired of plotlines, special effects, shiny shiny Oscar-worthy acting and directing that quickens the heart and sparks joy in the brain? Well, then I guess you’re a bit bored of life. But fret not! 3D is here to bring some magic and joy into a life otherwise dominated by gruel, dyspepsia and chewing tin foil for kicks.

The moviegoing experience has always been evolving, from the first use of special effects (a trick-photography beheading in an 1895 film, fact fans) to the the rise of the modern blockbuster. Cinema’s a medium where anything can happen, and the main part of its appeal is surely the extent to which you can become immersed in a story. The next logical step for verisimilitude – beyond smell-o-vision, obviously – is films that have all the depth of beauty of reality itself. And that, my friends, is where 3D comes into its own.

We’re not arguing here that old-skool 3D was pretty shoddy. Those damn paper glasses that either cut your nose or made you feel dizzy? Screw ‘em, they were rubbish. It also wasn’t proper 3D – more of a feeling that characters were creepy moving cardboard cutouts placed about a foot in front of the backdrop. But hey, it must’ve seemed pretty impressive at the time, especially when going to watch such cult classics as Cat-Women of the Moon (1954), Gorilla at Large (1954) and Robot Monster (1954).

Luckily, we don’t have to put up with any of that passé Fifties guff any more. No longer do we have to look like David Bowie with those weird glasses on – nope, the funky new polarised glasses make the audience look like an audience comprised solely of Blues Brothers and Reservoir Dogs. And if that ain’t groovy, what is?

We’ll tell you what is: The new era of 3D effects, that’s what.

Yup, you can say goodbye to the world of cardboard cut-outs. Now we get true depth and a real sense of tangibility from our 3D experience. My esteemed colleague mentioned Avatar in their sterling – yet misguided – attempt to defame the modern resurgence of 3D, which is almost like arguing against drowning by tying bricks to your feet. Avatar is easily the best ambassador for 3D we’ve seen in recent years, from the various Pandoran beasties popping out of the screen to subtler uses, such as cinders from the Hometree floating down among the dispossessed Na’vi. That’s right: we even get 3D metaphors. And so what if the story in Avatar was a bit flaky? The 3D was immense, and with technologies developing as they inevitably do, thing can only get better.

Especially with the advent of smell-o-vision.

So, is 3D bringing cinema into a brand new age, or the redundant stepchild of a bygone era? Do spangly blue aliens make it all worthwhile? Leave us your thoughts below!

Unfortunately for them, the Na’vi’s ancestral home – a whacking great big tree, no less – sits right on top of one of the richest seams of the mineral. Augustine, Sully and über-geek Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) don their Avatars in an attempt to find a peaceful solution before trigger-happy nutjob Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) shifts the Na’vi using shock-and-awe tactics. But as Sully learns more about the Navi and the bizarre world that surrounds them – as well as a burgeoning romance with Na’vi princess Neytiri (a sublime Zoë Saldaña) – he finds his loyalty to the human race tested.

Escape From Uncanny Valley

If anything, the plot is one of the weakest aspects of Avatar, with its down-the-line simplicity and black and white morality. But bizarrely, this simplicity complements and supports the film’s fairytale quality, and allows the narrative to progress at a measured, intelligent pace – despite other reviewers lambasting its length, Avatar doesn’t feel overlong or laboured. Slower, character-driven scenes mesh perfectly with adrenaline-fuelled and unobtrusive action set-pieces – there’s literally something there for everyone, and it all works.

And then, of course, there are the effects.

Or what should properly be referred to as the lack of effects. We’re happy to report thatAvatar really is the start of a new era in filmmaking – and that’s not idle hyperbole. The computer-generated characters are so real, so believable, that you quickly forget they’re computer generated at all. The giant blue Na’vi – lambasted in the popular press as “Thundersmurfs” – are easily the most intricately rendered alien species ever committed to the silver screen, miles away from the Uncanny Valley that has plagued previous GCI characters. They’re truly living beings – expressive, emotional and beautiful, moving through their jungle home with a grace and precision unseen outside – well, outside true animals living in their jungle homes. A massive amount of praise has to go to Zoë Saldaña here, whose performance is animalistic, heartbreaking and utterly spellbinding. Pandora itself is so exquisitely detailed and well-designed you become lost in an alien world so immersive it transcends sci-fi clichés and becomes something so much more – it’s like a David Attenborough documentary about a totally different planet.

Putting it simply, Avatar has everything – jaw-dropping effects, solid performances, slam-bang, eye-popping action and an entertaining, eco-aware story. Even the spiritualism latent in the plot feels refreshing in comparison to other guns-and-explosions blockbusters. It’s as simple as this: go and see it, in 3D if you can. Without question it’s the film of the decade.

What do you reckon? Agree with our enthusiasm, or have you spotted something in Avatar we didn’t? Leave us your comments below!

Mind you, 30% is pretty restrained compared to some examples, where practical magic is sidelined almost exclusively in favour of CGIing everything from sets to characters to the wind in the trees. The biggest offender here is arguably real-life Ewok George Lucas in the Star Wars prequels, where an entire universe is denigrated to the level of charmless and garish pixels. Nobody’s arguing about the practical benefits of using CGI in filmmaking. It’s cheap and resource-efficient, allowing directors far greater freedom than they’ve ever previously enjoyed. But is this freedom necessarily a good thing? Admittedly, if you start off with a duff script then a duff film invariably follows (cf George “Everybody Loves Galactic Trade Disputes” Lucas), but an over-reliance on CGI has jaded audiences to all-too-obvious digital effects. CGI no longer has the wow factor – impressive back in the days of Tron or Jurassic Park, sure, but nowadays an audience barely notices yet another humdrum pan across an implausibly epic landscape.

This may be due, in part, to the fact that CGI allows many of the physically-constraining rules of moviemaking to be broken. Growing up with films, we’ve been subconsciously trained in the language of visual cinema and the limits of what a camera can do. When you’ve got CGI guffery whizzing around at a rate of knots, we know – perhaps without noticing it – that this is dishonest. The ever-suspicious “Suspension of Disbelief” ganglion at the back of our brains knows we’re being deceived. When you watch Lord of the Rings (arguably the most impressive use of CGI in recent years) these sort of flash-bang camera aerobics are at a minimum. As a result, the film visuals are superior and the (mostly static) CGI shots more believable than the plastic landscapes of Lucasfilm. Though Peter Jackson isn’t totally blameless – King Kong was so bloated with CG he might as well have sacked the whole thing off and filmed the XBox game instead.

Yet there’s another aspect of  movie artistry that’s been left bleeding on the altar of the digital revolution, and one whose decline represents a sad, sad day for cinema. We’re referring, of course, to the lost arts of puppetry and modelwork. Consider, if you will, the following: Return of the Jedi‘s Jabba the Hutt and the Episode IV Special Edition digital version. The former’s truly repulsive, a reptilian sock bursting with rendered grease and character. His smell alone is almost a physical presence. The latter’s little more than a badly-rendered punchline – a laughable, weirdly-lit Saturday morning cartoon villain who seems to float on the background like an afterthought. No character, no meanace, no point.

As far as practical demonstrations go, here’s a clip from Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, produced in 1974:

Putting aside the consummate animation of the Kali statue (and the fact that – ooh! – Tom Baker’s playing the villain), the model itself has weight, depth and mass; precisely the kind of tangibility that even the most sophisticated CGI finds difficult to replicate. It’s ironic, really – $200 million can be spent on special effects, but you can’t buy the almost imperceptibly subtle interactions you get for free from gravity.

Classics such as Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monster flicks, Ben Hur, or the funeral scene in Ghandi (which employed no less than 400,000 extras) impress because of their ambition and scale. There’s something deeply satisfying in watching spectacle that has been painstakingly set up and recorded for posterity; as an audience we appreciate the effort because we can see it on the screen. Nobody’s diminishing the work that goes into CGI effects, (cheers, geeks, for individually animating those half a billion hairs on King Kong’s pinkie!) but that doesn’t change the fact that computer generated effects should serve to enhance reality, not replace it.

Of course, this whole discussion may be rendered moot on December 18th with the release of James Cameron’s hotly anticipated Avatar. The buzz surrounding the film has been massive, not least because we’ve been promised the beginning of a new era in stereoscopic filmmaking. The lengths to which Cameron has gone to bridge the gap between live action and CGI is certainly encouraging, not least with a new technique of rendering motion capture directly. This brings a whole new immediacy to CG effects, allowing Cameron to work in real-time with computer generated characters. But is this all little more than a new toy for directors whose effect the audience won’t even notice? If Avatar can’t put the spectacle back into CGI then it’s unlikely anything can. Maybe it’s a good thing that filmmakers will have to return to the tried-and-tested way of impressing audiences with special effects – hard work and ingenuity in the goddamn real world instead of a nebulous blue warehouse. It might be an old-fashioned idea, but – unlike yet another ho-hum pixellated planet, ship or beastie – it’s guaranteed to be appreciated.