They make such a fuss about shooting things at you and trying to make you duck.
But I would think that 3-D would just make most 2-star movies go to three stars if they just staged it without modification. No jump-out-at-you scenes at all.
You would just feel more like you were there where the story is. The people would look rounder and more like real people, and the buildings would look more like buildings, etc.
Are you referring to this week’s episode of Medium? If so, I don’t think it was the 3D that made that show suck. Anyway, it might help if you were to mention some of the titles of 3D movies you thought were so bad.
I’m guessing you haven’t seen Disney’s new Chicken Little in one of the 80 digital 3D theaters that are showing it now. Because that’s exactly what they did in rendering it to 3D. (Here’s a list of theaters showing it in 3D.)
Personally, I dislike 3D. I think it’s a gimmick, and that it’s not more realistic than 2D, it’s less realistic. My main objection is that it constantly reminds you that you’re in a theater watching a movie, instead of letting you get absorbed in the story. But that’s just my opinion.
Here’s the problem with small screen (i.e. TV and 35mm theatrical) 3D. Imagine a pyramid with your nose as the vertex and the screen as the base. If you want objects to extend in front of the screen, all of the 3D effects will happen within that pyramid. The smaller the angle that the screen subtends in your field of view, the narrower the pyramid. When an object moves off the screen, because of its own motion or a camera move, the frame is broken and the 3D effect is lost. It’s jarring, and a good stereographer will try to prevent it from happening.
But having objects jump out from the screen, apparently over the heads of the people in front of you, is dramatic, splashy, and attention-getting. It’s what people expect from 3D, because it’s obviously different from regular 2D movies.
Doing as you suggest, and having most of the 3D effects appear behind the screen, as though you were looking through a window, is more subtle. So much so that over the course of a 90-minute film, you begin to forget that you’re watching 3D. (This was my experience in watching Chicken Little.) And once that happens, you might as well be watching 2D. And the filmmakers might as well have saved all the money it cost them to make a 3D film.
Now, I referred to “small screens” to distinguish them from IMAX 3D. The giant size of IMAX screens makes the 3D effect much more effective, because the base of the pyramid is much wider. You also aren’t as aware of the edges of the screen, so the breaking of the illusion isn’t as much of a problem. For an example, see The Polar Express, which will be returning to IMAX 3D theaters this week. (Here’s a list of theaters showing it.)