DVDFile

A&E / 179 Minutes / 2011 / Unrated / Street Date: November 6, 2012

History in 3D is a triple-dimension box set that includes WWII in 3D, Titanic: 100 Years in 3D, and History of the World in Two Hours 3D. For an overpriced $80, you will get a chance to watch these short docs - they run about an hour each - with the pomp and circumstance of relatively low-rent 3D pizzazz.

The representation of familiar footage in WWII in 3D is definitely unique - newsreels are distinctly 2D, but somehow their upgrade to a new dimension here adds a level of intrigue (though after a while, it becomes a bit annoying). As a doc, it's neither in-depth nor particularly accomplished, but the shtick of the format makes it somewhat interesting for a while.

History of the World in Two Hours 3D spends way more time with homo sapiens than with any other animals that have graced our shores - a tack that is in its simple makeup a bit flaky - but even as a chronicle of the human experience over the eons, the documentary never makes any kind of real case for anything. Sure, a survey's illuminations may simply be with the data they manifest and not with their implications on cultural or historical platforms, but around every corner of Two Hours, we're left wondering what the point of telling our collective story this way really is.

What Titanic: 100 Years in 3D offers is a quiet, solemn, state-of-the-art look at what that boat looks like in the year 2010. We get a bit of a background into just how impressive the mega-cameras that filmed this endeavor really were (and the tricks involved with plummeting them a couple miles under the surface of the ocean), but mostly this short doc treats us to lingering shots of once-fancy relics now crusted with the underwater sands of time: via interview subjects and actors narrating thoughts as real-life members of the ship's crew, we get a snapshot of what might have been and what now is at the bottom of the sea.