Why? Why can’t I “bitch” because I think if they can’t make it look real, they shouldn’t try it? (Or they can try it if they want, but then I will give it a thumbs down because it takes me out of the “suspension of disbelief” mode.) I’ve read any number of cases about filmmakers who had a vision for something they wanted to do, realised the technology just wasn’t there yet, and chose not to do it, or waited until the technology caught up (in some cases they didn’t wait long enough IMO–yes, I guess I’m picky).
And the “state of the art” is not always going to be at the same level. Yet a filmmaker presumably wants his or her work to stand the test of time, no? A film like Blade Runner* still looks amazing, because they did not use computer animation to make it (whereas TRON, released the same year, looks very dated).
*I should note that the exception in the case of Blade Runner is when actual computers are shown, and those look dated as well.
I watched the featurette, found it interesting, and am fully convinced the people working on it put in a great deal of time, expertise, and money (not to mention raw computing power) to produce images that wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. But again: just because they are the best that can be made now doesn’t mean they are necessarily good enough for cinema realism.
Although I will say that for some reason the orangutans look a *lot *better than the chimps, and the really old and raggedy looking chimp looks better than Caesar or the others. Maybe different teams with different levels of ability had different animals assigned to them? Dunno, just a guess.
Who are they waiting for? The people who venture forth and give it the red hot go, and learn as they do so. Which is most of them.
I also think Caesar wasn’t quite as realistic as he needed to be to convince me (though he had to have human characteristics blended in with his ape-like ones, which confused things a bit), but the other apes were astonishingly well done. The orangutan, Maurice, especially.