CGI killed the Movie? February 15, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 2 commentsThanks again to those that commented on my previous post, they were all well-thought out arguments. I thought I’d post my reflections on those comments as a separate post.
First, my last post may have suggested that I wish CGI would be discarded to the cinematic bin. I don’t hate CGI- hell, I loved TRON back in 1982 and have followed the advances in CGI with great interest over the years since. CGI has many positive benefits- for one thing there are a number of movies that would be simply impossible without CGI, including the LOTR trilogy. When used properly, CGI can greatly enrich a movie experience. I think Ridley Scott has an excellent eye for it, and that KINGDOM OF HEAVEN features some of the finest CGI in any movie… the visual effects are spectacular but don’t distract from the viewing experience. Likewise I think the CGI in BLACK HAWK DOWN is very effective.
However it has to be said that CGI has been responsible for some of the worst decisions in movie-making; there is a tendency with CGI in that just because something can be done you go ahead and do it. So you can have armies of 20,000 battling it out onscreen… big deal, there’s nothing as involving and dramatic as just two combatants head to head in a duel, eye to eye. The duel between Eowyn and the Morgul Lord is far more involving than watching those thousands of CGI puppets battling on the Pelennor Fields in ROTK. It makes me wonder about the law of diminishing returns- whats most effective, twenty riders of Rohan? Ninety? Two hundred? Five hundred? When does it become a spectacular-looking but emotionally redundant CGI cartoon? No matter how spectacular the space battles are in the STAR WARS prequels, they just don’t match those of the original trilogy.
There’s just something bewitching about watching the Millenium Falcon in STAR WARS. Its a model, sure, but it’s shot so well and moves so convincingly across the frame. Back in the photochemical days and optical printing, shots had to be worked out months in advance so that all the elements shot separately could be placed together convincingly. It’s all a matter of eye, and of craft. Or rather it was- now it’s just a click of the mouse.
And herein is the problem with CGI; just plain awful film-making. It encourages all the worse excesses. I hate those impossible sweeping camera moves in many new films, they just pull me out of the movie. It’s like I’m suddenly in a videogame. It’s a weird thing with movies, we watch passively, involved in the plot, and accept our ‘camera-eye’. It’s something that we learn as we grow up watching the medium. But then suddenly that ‘eye’ is spinning around in circles or flying thousands of feet up a precipice or over a vast vista. Ugh. And just because Gollum works so well in the LOTR trilogy, everyone forgets the lessons of Jar Jar Binks and shoves all manner of annoying CGI characters onto the screen. CGI artists may be great CGI artists but they aren’t necessarily great film-makers with a good eye, or an ability to act, to emote.
Hollywood is clearly aware of this - many of the big summer blockbusters are nothing more than amusement rides that depend on the wow-factor of the CGI visuals rather than involving scripts and believable characters. I think thats the root of my problem with CGI these days- it is increasingly being used as a crutch to support the failures in so many other areas of modern films. Whatever happened to decent scripts, quality direction? There seems so little genuine life in modern blockbusters, they seem as synthetic as the CGI that dominates them. Look at SPIDERMAN 3- who actually cares what happens at the end of that film? Mary-Jane’s vertiginous plight is just so much greenscreen, the Sandman a cartoon baddie, and Venom and Spidey just cgi puppets… there’s nothing real anymore.
I guess those of us who marvelled at TRON back in 1982 should have seen it coming. All the faults of that pioneering film have been revisted upon Hollywood many times over. In the real world the characters are involving, their plights genuine, but once transferred into the gameworld, it’s just that, an arcade game. Most modern films are soul-less, movies inwhich major decisions are made by marketing committee, directed by young turks who think they know how to make movies because they have a great big collection of DVDs of post-70s era Hollywood. And that bigger has to be better. This is why I am so suspicious of 3D movies- whats the point, how is it going to improve movies?
I’m not wholly blaming CGI for this but clearly its a guilty culprit. And if Hollywood doesn’t change, CGI really will kill the movies we used to love.
2019=Nice February 14, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , 6 commentsMy friend Andy, who has shared a love for BLADE RUNNER ever since we first saw it back in the golden summer of 1982, lent someone his copy of the recent BLADE RUNNER:FINAL CUT dvd a few days ago. This friend of his is in her early 30s, and had never seen BR before, no doubt often bemused by Andy’s frequent adulatory comments about it. Anyway, Andy reported to me the other day her comment having finally seen the film- she had said the film was “nice”.
Well I have to say that word has bugged me ever since. I might have expected her not to have liked it, to have thought it was dated, slow, boring, or on the other hand thought it a revelation, to finally understand why it’s been such a big deal for Andy. But nice? What’s all that about? Of all the things I have heard said of BR, the word nice has never been one of them. Perhaps it was her conciliatory attempt to say something positive about a film that she hated, if only to not upset Andy’s feelings.
Andy and I spoke about it the other day, both of us bemused at what his freind actually meant. We finally decided that it was simply that his freind is watching it for the first time in 2008, and that in the years between 1982 and 2008, there has been a lot of celluloid under the bridge since then, so to speak. Does BR look dated now, seen through fresh modern eyes? Has its thunder been stolen by all the pretenders that have stolen ideas/images/styles in the years since? I’ll be the first to admit, that whenever I watch BR, it’s always with nostalgic eyes from 1982, recalling its impact, how new it was back then. We simply can’t imagine what BR looks like now to someone watching it for the first time.
The same must be true of other films. What does a 10-year old lad think of the original STAR WARS watching it now? Is it horribly dated, even with Lucas’ ill-judged cgi special edition tinkering? Can cinema-goers of today possibly understand the impact of that film back in 1977? How astonished everyone was when that Imperial Star Destroyer endlessly crawled into the screen from overhead in that startling first shot? Cgi has made everything so easy, hardly anything impresses in the same way anymore. I remember the cgi dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK, how everyone marvelled at them. Well, the quality may not be exactly the same, but how many times have we seen such cgi creatures on tv programmes now that it leaves us bored and jaded?
Perhaps this is the conundrum for Hollywood today- is cgi a Pandora’s Box? A revelation and spectacle at first, has it done more damage in the long-term? Films like THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy would not have been possible without cgi, but look at all the films ruined by it. Hollywood, for the last ten years, has seemed hell-bent every year to produce bigger films with bigger stunts, explosions, effects, and they have become emptier, shallower experiences every year. What’s the shelf-life for these new films? Do any of us actualy have any interest in going back and re-watching them years later, like we do the old 70s and 80s classics? I have no interest in ever watching TWISTER again (cgi Tornadoes) or PERFECT STORM (cgi storms) or any other of the films whose prime reason for being seemed to be a new and novel use of cgi. Even a film like TERMINATOR 2 seems dated now due to its cgi effects, and yet I would love to see the original 1977 version of STAR WARS, and still enjoy CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.
I would like to see cgi have its day, that Hollywood would cease its pre-occupation with all this cgi spectacle and go back to old-fashioned storytelling. BLADE RUNNER has a lesson in this, in that for a film so visual and famous for its visual effects, there are actually very few effects shots in the film. Due to budget restrictions, the film-makers had to be prudent with the effects, spending money on shots they only really needed. They total less than 100 shots, whereas in so many contemporary films effects shots number in the thousands. Are films any better for this blitzkrieg of cgi spectacle? X-MEN 3 just bored me senseless, and SPIDERMAN 3 hurt my eyes, there was just too much too fast. Compare the space battle finale of RETURN OF THE JEDI to the cgi opening space battle in REVENGE OF THE SITH. SITH is woefully inferior, in my opinion, to the more restrained battle of JEDI (limited by the optical printing processes of its day). But why could Lucas not see that? Why couldn’t any of the guys putting that sequence together for SITH not see it, and say hold on, guys, we’re missing something here? The asteroid sequence in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is far more thrilling than that of ATTACK OF THE CLONES. What’s going on? Is it just me?
Alas the cgi bandwagon seems to be unstoppable, even to the extent of cgi actors and a progressive pre-occupation with going 3-D. 3-D for goodness sake. Would 3-D make any previously-made traditionally 2-D movie any better? It’s just a gimick, like cgi dinosaurs were a decade or so ago. 3-D doesn’t improve the storytelling, the scripts or the actors performance.
Perhaps movies are paying the price of decades of increasingly sophisticated commercials on tv, and mtv, and increasingly frenzied cutting on avid editing machines. Perhaps its just a generation thing, I’m getting too old. But consider this- if genuine bona-fide classics like THE GODFATHER and JAWS were being put together now, would they be any better for the way films are made now? How would someone like Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock fit in now, were they still alive and trying to make their movies? Would Hitchcock only get the funds for PSYCHO now if he agreed to shoot it in 3D and cast it with horny teenagers?