"There were two major developments in cinema during the 20th century. The first came in the Twenties when silent movies became talkies. The second came in the following decade, when we went from black-and-white to color. Now, 70 years on, we're in the third great revolution: the new generation of 3D." That's Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, explaining why the release tomorrow of the company's Monsters vs. Aliens is such an historic occasion that you must bow down before him. ""I honestly believe that," says Katzenberg. "I really don't think this is an exaggeration." (If he'd just said that he didn't think he was exaggerating and left out the "really", there'd still be room for us to doubt.) But those of us with long memories--memories that stretch back as far as, say, last month, when Coraline was released, or even those senile few old enough to remember Beowulf, practically a whole year and a half ago--have been down this road of hype before. Why is this 3D revolution different from all previous 3D revolutions, going back to the bygone days of 1953's House of Wax? Let's wind Jeffrey up again and see what comes out:

"Until now almost all of the 3D movies that audiences have seen were filmed in 2D and then post-produced into 3D. With Monsters vs. Aliens, this is our first film totally authored in the 3D format – and not just any 3D format. We use something called InTru3D, which combines DreamWorks Animation's authoring tools with the latest Intel technology, allowing artists to tell a more compelling story and give film-goers a more exciting, immersive 3D movie experience. It's a huge development and so very important. This is something that people have to see and experience and write and talk about and let the audience know that it's coming. Hopefully, that will make people aware that this not our fathers' 3D." That shit that your father put up with sometimes had notorious side effects, and that was on top of the most obvious cost of watching a 3D movie, which was that more often than not, the movie you were watching was something along the lines of Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. "People used to get headaches and some even got nauseous," says Katzenberg. "And who ever heard of a successful business that makes its customers throw up? Well, apart from the alcohol business!" Let it be noted that even when on the verge of making history, Jeff still had it in him to make a funny.

Monsters vs. Aliens inaugurates a new slate of DreamWorks animated films that will be made in the new 3D process, but in a knowing move that may be lost on a significant portion of its young target audience, the story, involving a strike force of mutants, including a not-quite-fifty-foot woman (voice by Reese Witherspoon), who are called into action to combat a threat to the Earth posed by Rainn Wilson--playing an alien visitor, though I think it would be just as plausible if he were just Rainn Wilson in a bad mood, is a parodic throwback to the kind of '50s sci-fi spectacle that was routinely served up in your father's 3D. This perfect fusion of form and content was not planned. As The New York Times has reported, Katzenberg informed the project's directors, Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, that they were making it in 3D when " work on the movie was well under way". “We were totally taken aback,” says Vernon. “I didn’t sign up to do something garish.” Well, yeah, dude. Nobody would think you were planning to make a garish movie called Monsters vs. Aliens. (I see Sven Nykvist as chief D.P. and Anthony Hopkins as the Jello-O monster.) According to the Times, "The DreamWorks team associated 3-D with Captain EO, the 1980s-era Disneyland attraction, long since closed, that starred Michael Jackson as a space explorer. Stuffed with 3-D gimmicks that extended from the screen into the audience — lasers, smoke, flying fuzzy aliens — that film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola with George Lucas as executive producer, defined cinematic cheese for a generation of Hollywood creative types." But Katzenberg made the "not-your-father's-3D" speech at them, and even assured them, “I’m pretty sure that no business can succeed in which it makes the customer hurl.” (You'll note that this is a version of the same joke he tells the British newspapers, but when he's telling it to people who work for him, the gloves come off.)

There are also clear business advantages to making 3D movies, which may conceivably have appealed to the capitalist pirate who dwells deep inside Katzenberg's gentle-Buddhist-monk soul: "Tickets for 3-D screenings can be sold for a premium. It would also be harder to pirate DreamWorks movies: sneaking a camcorder into a theater — which is the way most bootleg DVDs are born — wouldn’t work at a 3-D screening. And 3-D was a way of standing out in a marketplace increasingly cluttered with computer-animated movies, as Coraline recently demonstrated with surprisingly strong box-office returns." The downside is that DreamWorks did have to scale back its plans to open the movie on 5000 screens across the U.S., because there aren't that many 3D-friendly screens in the U.S. (Instead, it'll be rolled out on about 2000 screens.) After a period of adjustment and a "tutorial" from John Bruno, who worked on the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time,, the group assembled for Monsters vs. Aliens felt they were ready to make the leap. "Although Mr. Katzenberg had promised that 3-D would not be used as a gimmick," says the Times, "DreamWorks ultimately couldn’t help itself. When the film was nearly finished, Mr. Katzenberg asked the creative team to add some more 3-D 'pow,' according to Mr. Vernon. Most of that pow was tooled back — B.O.B.’s lone eyeball no longer rolls out into the audience, and debris from explosions doesn’t land in the front row — but they kept one at the beginning of the movie: a paddleball sequence. 'That was basically us telling the audience, "Look what we could do to you, but we’re going to control ourselves" ' Ms. Stewart said." Will history be conclusively made on Friday. Having seen Coraline, I can tell you this much: it's definitely true that the glasses you have to wear are now a lot cooler.

Related: Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Precursors: Mars Attacks!