Park City, Utah — For some time now, the more far-sighted (and tech-savvy) Hollywood bees have been buzzing about the 3-D future of the movies. DreamWorks animation announced last March that by 2009 all its films would be released in 3-D, director Robert Zemeckis used 3-D motion-capture, a hybrid of animation and live actors, for his recent film “Beowulf,” and “Titanic” director James Cameron has spent the last several years readying his mega-budget science-fiction film “Avatar” using a more realistic performance-capture technique.

As any disgruntled advocate of independent film (or any delighted member of the Park City service industry) will tell you, Hollywood has more of a presence at Sundance than it once did, and so it is perhaps no surprise that the once-modest Utah film festival has a splashy 3-D premiere of its own this year in the form of “U2 3D.” touted as the world’s first live-action film shot in digital 3-D, the film screened (twice) to much hullabaloo on Saturday night here at Sundance.

The 85-minute concert film, slickly assembled from the South America leg of U2’s 2006 “Vertigo” tour, is an impressive achievement. Directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington and the production company 3ality Digital bring U2’s high-wattage act to life with surprisingly mobile high-tech cameras and a robust illusion of the human eye’s depth distinctions. To make the film, the directors employed a formidable battery of 18 digital cameras linked to 3-D recording decks, as well as an in-camera motion control that gives the crystal-clear footage an extra kinetic kick. Diehard U2 fans in particular may have their socks knocked off. Fueled by a typically exuberant lead vocal performance by Bono, it’s a grandiose presentation of the band’s hit songs, with the filmmakers omitting quieter offstage moments (quiet moments of any kind, really) in their pursuit of pure spectacle.

In short, like the band, it’s a crowd-pleaser.

This is good news for a format that hasn’t always lived up to the hype. “Historically, 3-D has a bit of a gimmicky association,” the film’s co-producer, Peter Shapiro, said. “I think anyone who sees this film will realize that what this technology is about is replicating what you see in real life.”

He’s right, up to a point. The thrilling spatial illusion (which, yes, still requires those laminated glasses) does force you to recalibrate your relationship with the screen. Even as you wonder whether the neck of bassist Adam Clayton’s guitar is going to poke your eye out, you can’t help but crane toward it. And the simple fact that the film depicts recognizable humans doing something the viewer wouldn’t mind being a part of is boon to a format traditionally associated with psychedelia and creature features.

But is “U2 3D” — and the live-action 3-D movies we can expect in the future, for that matter — closer to reality than those that came before? From Orson Welles to the French New Wave to fly-on-the-wall documentarians, filmmakers have long wrestled with the question of what defines real. The formula is surely more complicated and empathetic than “depth equals reality,” and it seems facile to claim that the answer lies exclusively in technology.

A U2 performance and live-action 3-D cameras are perfectly suited for one another, although not necessarily in the sense the filmmakers had in mind. “if you have this new technology and you wanted to showcase it, going to South America and shooting U2 in front of 100,000 people was kind of at the top of the list,” Mr. Shapiro said. The band, which already has one concert film, 1987’s “U2: Rattle and Hum,” and has used cutting-edge video installations (many of them overseen by Ms. Owens) on previous tours, is known for its willingness to explore video technology.

Yet the members of U2 — Bono in particular — are also international stars. Despite the group’s (seemingly) earnest desire to be “One” with its fans, it is not — and if anything, the film widens this fundamental gap. It is Bono, not his screaming fans, who hovers over the front row of the movie theater. In providing generous close-ups of the band’s lead singer (some of which had to be shot during rehearsals) while presenting the audience as an amorphous mass of swaying bodies or illuminated cell phones, “U2 3D” replicates the inherent artificiality of this pop-culture exchange — between the very popular people on the stage and the group of unknown people off it.

The filmmakers are characterizing their 3-D extravaganza of light and sound, which opens in New York on February 15, as an “intimate” experience. Mr. Shapiro pooh-poohed the suggestion that viewers might actually feel less of a connection to what’s on screen in “U2 3D” than they would watching a traditional concert film such as D.A. Pennebaker’s “Don’t Look Back,” which used both performances and backstage footage of Bob Dylan to draw an illuminating portrait of the artist.

“How can it be less intimate with those shots where you’re next to Bono? Everyone says that it’s more intimate. Flat is cold. Depth is intimate,” he said.

The film’s marketing team couldn’t have put it better. Is it true? Luckily for them, rapt viewers may not care that much.