Scorsese likens 3-D to early motion pictures: what once was mere gimmick now has the potential to be an artform. Too bad it’s nearly two and a half hours. There’s a reason that the Lumieres Brothers’ Arrival of a Train was only fifty seconds long, after all. Brevity is the soul of wit, right?

That’s a little unfair; I should say more. This film is, at times, breathtaking. It contains moments of supreme beauty. Seeing George Melies come to life in glorious 3-D was a dream come true for a special effects fan like myself. I just… I don’t know. Hugo, as a character, is really boring compared to Melies, and yet the film wouldn’t be as interesting if Melies was the main character. Viewing him from afar, treated with such tragic grandfather-like reverence (Ebert even calls him “the grandfather of special effects” in his review), is a treat. This makes the entire first act, before Melies is revealed as the central conflict, a bore, and while, by the second, things really start to get interesting, I feel as though it’s too little too late.

What we basically have here, to use such a metaphor, is a series of static images that, while beautiful when isolated, never coalesce into the illusion of a moving picture. The 3-D is textured and sculpturesque as long as the camera doesn’t move and as long as the edits don’t cut. The need to evolve towards a higher framerate standard has never been more apparent. A technology as young and turbulent as stereoscopic 3-D (perhaps adolescent is really the right word) needs a young filmmaker to helm it into the 21st century. The fact that legitimate masters are now making use of it (Cameron, Herzog, Scorsese) is undeniably exciting, but they are all playing by the old rules of cinematography.

Hugo is a fascinating film because of its implications, because of its extrinsic value, so to speak, and so I can’t really regard it as a great film. However, as a young student of cinema, Hugo had a considerable, albeit esoteric, appeal to me. I’ll put it like this, once the film had revealed its hand as being a “movie about movies,” I instantly expected a specific shot: A first-person perspective of a train careening towards the camera at high speed, a verbatim reconstruction of the Lumieres’ Arrival of a Train , only now, to preserve the gimmick, in stereoscopic 3-D. The shot was there. The gimmick worked. I jumped back into my seat. So, while the film isn’t the film to usher in a new era of 3-D filmmaking (neither was Avatar or Cave of Forgotten Dreams for that matter—I think we’ll have to wait for The Hobbit films for that), it is an intimate and personal meditation by one of the medium’s masters. If Scorsese says that 3-D is the future, then we should probably, if nothing else, listen.