Trailer Trash (in 3-D)

Went to see Thor on Saturday, about which I may blog more properly in due course. However, because I went to see the 3-D version, I also got to see a bunch of 3-D trailers.

Oh, dear.

As I may have demonstrated here in the past, I do have a certain horribly naive fondness for this technology, although I'd some time since begun to notice that it worked best in computer-animated movies which were designed that way from the beginning, and which could make amiable jokes about the subject. Thor, incidentally, uses 3-D fairly well, or at least harmlessly - there's a vague sense at times that one has a lava lamp exploding in one's face, and it probably makes the big early fight scene even less comprehensible than it would be in 2-D, but on the other side, there's a pleasing sense of grandiose fantasy art coming to LIFE, kerrpow!

Anyway, from the trailers, well, the 3-D in Kung-Fu Panda 2 is probably likely going to be mostly tolerable, because it's another computer animation - I may well go see it (and yes, I have just expressed moderately keen anticipation for a film called Kung-Fu Panda 2.) But the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides made me utterly determined that, if I go see it in a cinema, it'll only ever be in 2-D.

The problem is clearly the post-processing of a live-action film, shot in 2-D, into the third dimension. This doesn't have to be done too badly, to go by other films, but the visual effect in this case was quite horrible and a bit surreal. It was like watching full-colour cut-out pictures of Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz being slid around a toy theatre lined with similarly flat background pictures.

Priest, by the way, appears from its trailer to be a bad joke.