Just back from seeing U2 3D, the new concert movie from National Geographic and 3eality Digital featuring my favorite band and some pretty breathtaking 3-dimensional visual technology.

Aside from wishing the theater audio system would have been cranked up another 10 or 12 db, I suppose I enjoyed the movie, though it was certainly not soul-shaking or emotionally engaging in a way that replicates the live concert experience.

I went with my brother and a friend of his, and we found ourselves surrounded by people ready for a movie. Popcorn. Soda. 3D glasses. And nary a peep of excitement… no clapping, no screaming, no singing along.

I wouldn’t have thought to expect that behavior, but I took a moment to think about it as the credits rolled and realized it made perfect sense… we were, after all, seeing a movie.

A concert movie, but just a movie.

Being separated from each other by the thick sides of the plastic glasses we were forced to wear (to perceive the effect of visual depth… though the picture without glasses was, oddly, not unwatchable) meant having to turn your head to see anything other than the picture. Maybe the hoped-for effect is more pronounced in the IMAX version - I saw it in a Dolby Digital cinema with a regular movie screen.

Without the benefit of standing through the entire show and singing along, smelling the air, feeling the sound system thundering the earth beneath us… it just felt more like a display of technology than an impactful concert. A really cool display of technology, but a display nonetheless.

The shots above the drumkit were most impressive - all of the different surfaces and depths available at a set of drums really made the 3D effect pop off the screen.

My favorite use of the movie’s 3D effects probably had the least to do with the band :

The first song of the encore features gobs and gobs of 3D text effects, layered over and behind the concert visuals. Having computer generated effects blended with live footage really made the front layers come to the fore, and navigating with the camera lens along a path through these graphics was nothing short of extraordinary. It seems to me this is the real applicable future of this particular 3D technology, and I can only imagine what a director such as Michel Gondry would be able to pull off given these new tools to work with.

If you love U2 and love technology, you’ll probably like U2 3D.

I do, and I did.