Film review: Step Up 3D

No other film this year is as weird (to me, anyway) as Step Up 3D. It’s harmless enough, at least in terms of plot – a generic street-dance musical where a dance crew called the Pirates battles a crew called the Samurai in a contest called the World Jam. There are romantic sub-plots, and comic relief in a hero called Moose (Shia LaBoeuf lookalike Adam G. Sevani, who was also in Step Up 2) as well as a mouthy, conspicuously ‘ethnic’ pair of Argentinean twins. Yet it left me as perplexed and tormented as if it were a film from another planet.
Partly, it’s the 3D. I’m not often bothered, since Hollywood mostly saves this technology for cartoons and fantasy films – but giant blue aliens (Na’vi, whatever) still look like giant blue aliens in 3D, and cartoons look like slightly snazzier cartoons. It’s only when you film ordinary people in 3D (as they do in Step Up) that magical things start to happen – though I guess I can see Hollywood’s point, because I don’t know if audiences are ready for this kind of magic.
Maybe it’s just the new technology – maybe 19th-century audiences had to go through a similar suspension of disbelief, when first faced with Cinema – but people don’t look human in 3D. They look like holograms, computer-created totems floating in space. There’s a disconnect between the theatre-like effect of a living panorama and the film-like dimensions of the onscreen characters, so the brain responds by calling them unreal – yet they’re also hyper-real, overwhelmingly perfect. Sometimes, for instance in the scene where Luke (Rick Malambri) and Natalie (Sharni Vinson) sit on the roof with New York in the distance, the 3D effect looks like back-projection, adding to the air of artificiality.
Then you have the dance scenes, where bodies start to jerk slightly and look like videogames – though I think that’s just a question of 3D technology not yet being able to keep up with high-energy movement. After all, the dance scenes are why Step Up is in 3D in the first place, so the film can feature silly (but effective) moments where dancers do their moves – pointing, jabbing, undulating – straight into the camera. The effect is aggressive, but of course that’s the point – and another reason why the film is so weird.
When did dancing become a weapon? Even more mysteriously, when did dancing become a sport? “Let’s train!” say the characters in Step Up. “If dance is our weapon, this is our armour,” they say (talking of shoes). “You’re like a ninja!” one kid tells another approvingly. More insidiously, dance is seen throughout as a thing, a commodity, something you talk about and analyse. We open with a series of interviews – supposedly part of Luke’s documentary – in which the various Pirates answer the question “Why do you dance?”. “Because I’m more myself when I dance,” says one. “Dance saved me,” testifies another.
I don’t mean to sound naïve. I know this is the effect of TV reality shows, So You Think You Can Dance and so on. And of course I know that dance is like a sport for those who do it, in the sense of training and practice. But dancing in movies used to be an art. It used to be about grace rather than energy. Above all, it used to be about expressing the inexpressible. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers weren’t sure what to say to each other in The Gay Divorcee – so instead they danced to ‘Night and Day’, and that proved they were in love. Gene Kelly didn’t actually set out to sing in the rain. He (or his character) simply started walking home – but he felt so happy, and the night was so sublime that the dance just bubbled out from him. Something very big has been lost when dancing gets reduced to a workout, or a lifestyle choice.
Step Up 3D sees dance as empowering. As in sports movies, characters are constantly bigging each other up. Moose, so we’re told, is “an amazing dancer”; Luke’s film has “amazing footage”. Actually it looks like an infomercial, and Moose’s twitchy acrobatics look more like an epileptic fit – but then everyone in the street-dance community seems to be doing the same three moves (despite Luke’s insistence that the Pirates all have their own individual styles), so what do I know? It’s surely significant that the team who triumph in the World Jam Finals – I won’t say who, so as not to spoil any minimal suspense – do so not because of their moves, but because they wear special suits that light up like Christmas trees.
This is not a very good film. At one point, Moose has to choose between taking an important exam (he’s a college student) and joining the Pirates for the latest round of the World Jam. Much is made of his dilemma, we see him sitting down to take the test while Luke bombards him with messages – then suddenly he’s there with the others, and no more is said about it. Did he find time to do both? Did he flunk this very important test? (If so, it doesn’t seem to have any consequences.) Step Up doesn’t know, and it doesn’t care; it’s content to be cheerful and impossibly clean-cut, with its high-energy steps and empowering Message – the World Jam dance-floor festooned with flags of many nations, Dance as a unifying force: “Maybe we’re all plugged into the same song!”.
Are we all plugged into the same song? Probably not, since I found the film so strange, from its 3D look to its weird sports-movie vibe. Yet I can’t hate it, because I can see why people love it. For once, 3D genuinely seems to add something new, the youngsters – especially Sevani – are all very sweet, and the hard-sell view of dancing clearly fits our age of endless consumer choice more than the old, ineffable view of dancing. Step Up 3D could actually, conceivably be the Future of Cinema. And that’s the weirdest thing of all.