CGI killed the Movie? February 15, 2008
Posted by ghostof82 in : Film General , trackbackThanks 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.
Comments»
What you’re commenting on in the third paragraph harks back to a point I was making previously: part of the problem is that people are allowing the fact that they think they know how the effects have been achieved (i.e. on a computer) to pull them out of the movie instead of just enjoying the movie for what it is regardless of how it’s been created. If you’d never seen any of those DVD extras or had any idea how these kind of effects were concocted you’d probably be sitting there with your jaw open completely absorbed by what you thought was an incredibly realistic alternate reality (for many films, not all of course). Perception here can therefore be considered dependent on a state of mind. Try not thinking about things on screen in terms of blue screen and pixels but rather whether you’re enjoying the story that’s been recreated in front of you.
There is one good point about the eye of the audience - the camera: I agree that it’s sometimes moved to excess because there are no physical limitations in the virtual environment and that’s precisely why I personally try to maintain realistic movements with a camera when I’ve been creating my own short (computer generated) films.
The computer is an amazing tool and it’s revolutionised film-making; not always for the better of course but the creative decisions made are still down to humans and not computers, the latter definitely not to blame for any problems that we believe we’ve identified in our excessively critical and difficult-to-please evolutionary states as you quite rightly suggest.
We need to just enjoy movies if they’re good and not complain about how they’ve been made.
I thought the main problem with Spiderman was not the excessive CGI (Sandman was quite convincing I thought) but the decision to put far too many characters into the story.
Tron: I’ll always be grateful for this film, not just as it was entertaining but because it planted a seed in John Lassetter’s mind that didn’t go away….
Hollywood will always be lazy and churn out duff films irrespective of the technology that enables them. When we look back at non-CGI era’s it’s easy to see just the successes such is nostalgia.