Crash would still suck in 3-D

Hmmmm. Methinks Daniel Engber at Slate is missing something.

Clash of the Titans is a washed-out, dimly lit, cardboard-looking mess of a motion picture. But don't take my word for it: The film has so far earned a mushy score of 34 percent on RottenTomatoes.com, and just about everyone who's seen it—including the few who actually liked it—have decried its chintzy stereo-vision effects. "It's an odd sort of 3-D that serves mostly to blur images in the background," says a critic for the Arizona Republic. The film "redefines 3-D but in the wrong way," reports the St. Petersburg Times. "As far as 3-D goes," concludes the Boston Phoenix, "this might be the worst your $16 can buy." (As usual, Roger Ebert gets the final say: "One word of consumer advice … I saw it in 2-D, and let me tell you, it looked terrific.")

So what happened? Most viewers blame the fact that Clash of the Titans was never intended to be a three-dimensional movie and that it was converted from a flat-image format at the last second. It's clear that Warner Bros. invested millions in the upgrade to capture the stupendous success of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland—giga-blockbusters that rode high on premium ticket prices and the promise of awesome spectacle. But the new film has critics grumbling over studio greed: It's been "3-D ized on the cheap," they say, with a " 'quickie' conversion" that "few moviegoers will think [is] worth the extra bucks."

I am sure that the lousy visual effects are a big reason why Clash of the Titans is a failure in 3-D.

But also, maybe it's the lousy dialogue, acting and plot? Yes, many of the negative reviews mention the chintzy visual effects. But the majority of the ones I skimmed also lament what a crappy, crappy film it is, period.

3-D can't save a bad film. Even if the effects had been good for the CotT remake, the movie would still be awful because cool visuals can't cover up the flaws of a truly terrible effort.