With a minimalist cast, a single cockpit set, and a stunning 3D presentation, “Charlie Victor Romeo” is a hyper-realistic, claustrophobic thriller that looks at in flight horror through a lens we often never get to see.

The effect of the film adaptation of Charlie Victor Romeo is claustrophobic, a 3D film contrary to the typical conventions of form. It will not benefit from the larger-than-average premium branded large format venue (like IMAX and RPX), but seems custom made for the intimate screening rooms of Film Forum.

The 3D photography brings an exceptional clarity to the film, but doesn’t in the end seem like a factor critical to the story.

Charlie Victor Romeo has nothing in the way of bombast. It is not big, or colorful, or campy. It is an acutely distressing film shot with minimal cast on a single, small set with limited camera action, yet it’s enhanced by its extra dimension as much as Avatar or Hugo... The 3D removes the flattened feeling plaguing so many recorded stage performances, trading the visceral presence of live actors for added intimacy and claustrophobia.

The film’s only shortcoming involves its use of stereoscopic 3D. The intention is to cultivate a feeling of proximity—to bring us directly into the cockpit. Nothing jumps out at the screen, but the light lost as a result of this technology does the film a disservice, especially during some of the early segments. While it’s affecting to see the beads of sweat on a pilot’s forehead, the overall image quality is sometimes a bit fuzzy. Since the visuals are largely static, there doesn’t seem to be any specifically filmic reason to use 3D, and it comes across as an attempt to recapture the theatrical intimacy of the original production. At times, the 3D presentation nearly contradicts the movie’s intentional—and effective—minimalism.

The power of our production is the intimate communication of the intensity and emotion of these emergencies, communicated between our cast and the audience. That's the energy of live performance, of theater. How do we take that closeness, that connection, and carry it over to the cinema?

When we saw our technology partners’ demonstration of their stereoscopic 3D camera technology, designed specifically for the recording of live performance, we were amazed and completely hooked. To have an opportunity to place an audience in the best seat in the theater serves one of the requirements we needed to make the Charlie Victor Romeo Film.

We have been granted a residency at 3LD Arts & Technology Center (3ldnyc.org,) and have scheduled a series of live performances in August, as well as an extended theatrical run in October. We will now be able to bring this groundbreaking and powerful international phenomenon to the big screen allowing moviegoers the same thrilling, devastating and uplifting experience live theater audiences have experienced for years. A performance documentary film intended to bring CVR to its widest audience yet will document an anniversary production of CVR in New York City.

Checking reviews for CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO, they seem mostly positive, although the response to the 3D is mixed. [size=13px]I think 2012 is still within the era where there was still some excitement about 3D and its potential, including possibly eventually shooting everything in 3D.[/size]

"A SPECTACLE OF JAPAN IN THE MOST AMAZING VISUAL PROCESS EVER”

We are restoring Arch Oboler's final feature film, Domo Arigato for 3-D Blu-ray release. This campaign is your opportunity to show your interest and support for this project and pre-order the Compatible 3-D Blu-ray release.

Domo Arigato is the finest example on film of the amazing Space-Vision system!

Matt Rovner is an independent film scholar who is currently writing the first ever biography of Arch Oboler, tentatively titled “The Devil and Arch Oboler.” He shares his thoughts on the film:

“Domo Arigato is Arch Oboler’s overlooked final film. It is a melancholy Space-Vision travelogue through early 1970s Japan. Domo Arigato is also Donald Peterman’s (Point Break, Men in Black) first film as cinematographer, and he captures the “sometimes vulgar, often raffish and almost always exhilarating display of 1970s Tokyo”, qualities that Ian Buruma describes in his own photography of Japan. In sharp contrast to the film’s visual beauty, Oboler depicts a tense love story that is haunted by the ambivalent legacy of his generation, the so called “Greatest Generation”. His cinematic swan song is not only a tour of Japan, it is a tour through his career-long artistic obsessions with the crushing threat of human extinction and the faint hope of renewal. Long past the point where it was reasonable, Arch Oboler refused to accept defeat. Until his death in 1987, he wrote screenplays for films that were never produced and radio scripts for dramas that were produced and heard by a mass audience.”

3-D expert Mike Ballew (author of the upcoming book "Close Enough to Touch: 3-D Comes to Hollywood") writes about the superb stereoscopic qualities.

“Say what you will about writer/producer/director Arch Oboler, the man was a true believer in the powerful potential of 3-D motion pictures. More than a decade after the pop culture whirlwind unleashed by his 1952 film Bwana Devil, Oboler encouraged and financed a fellow 3-D visionary, Lt. Col. Robert V. Bernier, to create Space-Vision, a revolutionary camera lens and projection system. Cleverly stacking its stereopairs one above the other on a single strip of film, Space-Vision eliminated problems that had bedeviled prior 3-D systems for years. The left and right images always ran in perfect sync, and with proper care in the lab and in projection, they were perfectly matched for brightness, sharpness, and color fidelity. But Space-Vision’s most magical feature by far was its uncanny power to bring people and objects far forward into theatre space, producing 3-D images that appeared completely detached from the screen. Audiences did not always respond to the slow-building, oddly ruminative science fiction mystery plot of Oboler’s inaugural Space-Vision effort, The Bubble (1966). But they were never less than completely amazed by the spectacular off-the-screen effects that make that film, for all its quirks, a 3-D fan favorite to this day.

Half a decade later, Oboler found the opportunity to make another film in Space-Vision, this time a love story set against the backdrop of a thriving postwar Japan. Domo Arigato headlines two unknowns, Bonnie Sher and Jason Ledger, but the real star of the show is Space-Vision. In the capable hands of future Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Donald Peterman (Flashdance, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) and his camera operator, future DP Nick McLean (The Goonies, Spaceballs), Space-Vision never looked so gorgeous. Working hand in glove like the friends they were, Peterman and McLean pushed the system’s capabilities to the limit. Careful, often inventive camera placement beguiles us with deeply layered compositions, bearing stereoscopic witness to the dynamic mix of ancient and modern that throbs like a heartbeat in the Land of the Rising Sun. Charming scene transitions bring carved toys and trinkets seemingly within arm’s reach. Perhaps most striking is the film’s audacious use of lowlight photography, offering a living window into neon cityscapes and radiant interior spaces long since lost to the march of time, while giving us a “You Are There” tour of Tokyo nightlife in cabarets, restaurants, even a circus. Domo Arigatonever lets viewers forget they are watching a 3-D movie. But Oboler’s bittersweet tale aspires to more than mere witless gimmickry, casting its thoughtful gaze deep into the fascinating world its characters live to explore even as they discover one another.”