I'm glad that Ebert could finally find a way to put into words how I've felt about this for the last few years. I've always hated the advent of 3D films, and what it might mean for the future of the film industry. But every time someone made a comparison to talkies, or technicolor, I could never come up with a good retort for how I felt that didn't have me coming off like the people who said sound in films would never take off. But now Ebert is able to formulate the real difference.
We see in color, we hear things, we see in three dimensions. This should be the same for our movies. But with technicolor and sound, we're not trying to trick our brains into accepting these things as reality. It is reality, the colors are really there, the sounds are really being made. But with 3D, it's all just a trick. We're already creating the depth in our head in the same process we always do. We don't really see in three dimensions, we take the two dimensional image we perceive and add depth to it. That's exactly what happens when we watch a 2D film, and 3D is just a gimmick, trying to mess with your brain, not recreate an experience that is missing with film currently.
When technology gets to the point where we can have holographic films, that is something I will fully endorse. But I'm not going to pay twice the money for a gimmick.
