9. "Based On A True Story" Drama Meant Glossy, Expensive, 3D And Disappointing
Seen In: The Walk, In The Heart Of The Sea, Everest At first, the wave of 3D movies that came out with the latest revamp of the technology in the last decade was a gimmick to sell huge scale blockbusters and derivative horrors. Last year, however, the extra dimension came into play in the sort of Ron Howard/Robert Zemeckis true life drama prestige picture that seeks to straddle audience popularity and awards success. It was a little odd to see such real life tragedies as the wreck of the whale ship Essex (In The Heart Of The Sea) or the blizzard causing the 1996 Mount Everest disaster (Everest) given the same glossy, high budget treatment as Star Wars or The Avengers, but these were still movies that were expecting critical acclaim for their handling of the high drama inherent in their true stories. As it turned out, though, giving these complex real world narratives the event movie treatment simply reduced them to following a well trod path of conventional, even cliched, plot beats. A little superficial and shallow they may have been, but, like any other gimmicky 3D movie, they at least made the spectacular money shots work. Zemeckis' The Walk, a film that covered the same material as highly regarded documentary Man On Wire, really only came to life when Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Philippe Petit stepped out onto the tightrope to walk between the Twin Towers. Just like Everest, the 3D could make the film induce vertigo, but it couldn't give it real depth.
