U2 3D Opens Wide After Dazzling Sundance

By Katey Rich

 

In the Carpetbagger blog earlier this week, The New York Times' David Carr described the crowd outside a Sundance screening of U2 3D as "a massive crush." He goes on to describe the frenzy, explaining, "The guy next to the Bagger said that he had heard of offers of $1,000 for a $15 ticket. To a movie."

I'm not lucky enough to be in Park City this week, but all I can say to that is, well, of course. U2 3D, released exclusively in 3D today, is a spectacle beyond belief, a multi-layered, multi-dimensional concert movie that takes the old 3D format way, way beyond the red and blue plastic lenses of old. But perhaps the most amazing thing is that U2 3D is not alone, but part of what might be a new wave of 3D concert movies bringing the roar of the crowd to the multiplex.

"It's taking audiences someplace they couldn't go," said Mark Katz, president of National Geographic Cinema Ventures, which is distributing U2 3D."[It's] putting audiences in the concert like they're in the stadium. 3D does that brilliantly."

U2 3D was directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington, the former a longtime collaborator with the band to create the visual look of the concerts. On their Vertigo tour U2 played before several giant screens, which featured abstract animation, images of the band and, yes, occasionally political messages (this is Bono, after all). In U2 3D, Owens and Pellington incorporate the animation into the 3D layers, creating at some moments four different dimensional layers: the screen, the band, the audience, and above it all, the animation. The effect is to sweep up the theatrical audience as much as a concert audience would be, making the experience even larger than the movies, if not larger than life.

Catherine Owens said about as much when I interviewed her for a Film Journal article about 3D concert movies: "It was less about making the film, because none of us are filmmakers, and more about extending the U2 live experience." She and her collaborators filmed several concerts over the course of the Vertigo tour, all of them in Latin or South America. Certain locations were dedicated to getting certain kinds of shots, and at the end of the tour the band agreed to one concert with no audience, so the cameras could capture some of the film's breathtaking close-ups. "The desire was to make a film that would capture [the band's] intimacy of how they are with each other, and how it extends out into the audience," Owens explained.

I laughed especially hard reading about the celebrity-studded mob outside U2 3D at Sundance, given National Geographic's plans for distributing the film. Suffice it to say, Bono and company ain't goin' nowhere. "This film can play everywhere. There's no reason why both the hardcore U2 fans as well as fans of 3D can't see the film again and again over time," Katz said. "We absolutely hope to and plan to have return engagements and make it as evergreen as possible."

The reviews are in for U2 3D and the critics seem as enamored with the experience as I was. You can read more of what I learned about U2 3D, as well as fellow 3D concert movie Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana: Best of Both Worlds, in my Film Journal article "In Tune with 3D."