Cinematic spectacle is on life support.

In some ways, the death knell of grand, eye-popping feats of onscreen ingenuity and artistry was finally sounded this year by the hack trio of Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers and Roland Emmerich.

With Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra and the upcoming 2012, these three filmmakers have signaled the final devolution of the disaster movie into grandiose, CGI-swollen pissing contests to determine who can blow up the most famous landmarks.

Regardless of the efforts of Hollywood to gorge themselves to death on CGI, digital cinema and obscene running times, the very notion of film as true spectacle remains in a strange purgatory. The limbo was created mostly due to the efforts of Jeffrey Katzenberg and James Cameron in pushing the medium fully into the third dimension.

Katzenberg, that gregarious DreamWorks Animation CEO who has poured an untold fortune into the technology, would certainly have you believe that 3-D is the future of the medium. With the help of his competitors at Disney, he is determined to shove it down our throats whether we want it or not.

Disney, not far behind DreamWorks, will release redone versions of the classic Pixar films Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3-D this weekend. The Toy Story films are undoubtedly made for such a transition — all manner of things have potential to fly off the screen in startling fashion — but it will be interesting to see if the narrative flow suffers from the distractions that 3-D entails.

Certainly, the wonderful colors will grow blander. Thankfully, Disney’s upcoming classically animated The Princess and the Frog will be in beautiful 2-D.

For all the money the industry is using to push the format, 3-D remains a gimmick. The process dulls color and the projection detracts from the image. Look at Up, that great Pixar film from this summer, which relied so heavily on color and conveyed the majesty of flight and motion so effectively in two dimensions — an emotional display Bay, Emmerich and Sommers could never reproduce.

So far, however, all 3-D has done for cinema is repeat the extravagant act of having objects fly off the screen and into your face to the point of exhaustion. For narrative and for visual coherency — falling deeply into the world on screen without being aware of it — it adds nothing.

The only hope for the third dimension in cinema stands with the master of modern spectacle, Cameron.

The Academy Award-winning director’s forthcoming Avatar, which might just arrive in theaters as the most expensive movie ever made, meshes the lifelike digital motion capture pioneered by Robert Zemeckis with Cameron’s own experiments in immersive 3-D technology. It is the film he has wanted to make since Titanic. It is the film he desires to use to redefine cinema as a visual and narrative experience. Lofty expectations, to be sure, but Cameron knows film — his films are wildly successful and critically acclaimed.

With money and preparation, any animated film can have the third dimension quality added in scenes of mayhem, but Cameron’s purpose with Avatar runs so much deeper. He wants to change the way we are immersed in a film’s world. It is easy to imagine the innovative director, so obsessed with deep sea diving, visualizing a cinema built on a similar model. The spectator floats in the fantasy onscreen, lost in the life passing him or her by. It would be a rebirth of cinema spectacle.

The preview footage of Avatar was received mildly and the trailer footage doesn’t seem to represent any revolution in narrative. Speculation into what Cameron’s film, if successful, might yield is especially difficult to predict. The process is expensive and, really, would only work for spectacle. Can you imagine an Apatow film or a courtroom drama in immersive 3-D?

Whenever this empty challenge that cinematic spectacle has become enters my mind, I think it would be nice to have been there at the beginning, in 1895 when cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière premiered their short film, Arrival of a Train at a Station. The pure spectacle of reproduced motion infamously drove patrons in terror from the theater. It was a simpler time.

While I might seem like some film studies snob sitting in his ivory, two-dimensional tower bemoaning the state of the medium — which is exactly what I am — innovation without purpose adds nothing to any art form or business model. Sure, Cameron’s experiment makes me very excited, but Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 3-D does not. If the format doesn’t have any room to expand within, then it will quickly grow tired and audiences will no longer seek it out.

3-D could be the wave of the future, the next step in a long tradition of cinema as spectacle and, if Cameron’s experiment proves successful, a new means of storytelling. All one can do is wait for December. As it stands now, 3-D remains an expensive, questionably lucrative gimmick — a revelation sold by false prophets as the next evolution.

John Wheeler is a senior majoring in cinema-television critical studies and East Asian languages and cultures. His column, “The Multiplex,” runs Fridays.