Computer Graphics give the special effects people too much to do. And I think CG looks very cartoonish. It also makes it more dificult to act in these movies. I think relatively cheap and easy special effects increase the temptation to wow people and not do as much plot development. So when the boys from ILM are recruited to do the new star wars, they go nuts. So while there’s some lucas magic peaking through some of the romance parts, the ILM boys take over the movie in the end. Its so annoying.
Then there’s teh lightsaber battles.
Lightsaber battles in the original 3 were awesome. So much discussion, so much plot/character development. Now they are just there to be cool and be spectacular. The first time, I admit, I was wowed. The second time… I was discusted. Yeah it was a technical feat, but I dont care. I need to CARE about the characters involved. And they have to more than fly around. I want them reinforcing what they are fighting for. You know that 3 seconds where Dooku is trying to tempt Obi-Wan? Imagine that being a drawn out battle. Much like the original series.
I think we should remember what G. Roddenbury said about Star Trek- “Star Trek is a show about people” (roughly). Similarly I think any drama is about people. You have to be made to care about the peopel. Science Fiction, however, also has the goal to ‘wow’ and ‘bedazzle’ people with curious new interesting science and technology. Unfortunately, this wonder we should feel about the universe in sci-fi, often adds to the temptation to gussy up everything with CG.
Yeah, dorky people. Kirk, Spock and the rest are just as one-dimensional as Star Wars characters. Hey, I wonder if Scotty needs more power. Do you think that Spock might find that illogical? Maybe Worff is going to lose his temper. Uh oh. I think Janeway MIGHT make some stupid, self righteous decision that keeps them stuck halfway across the galaxy for another season. And so on.
Aside from that, I agree with you. I haven’t seen episode II yet, but just looking at the trailer, I see Lucas is back with his usual subtle touch.
Couple of peeves:
“Who the hell would build a ship full of choppy-crushy things?” Can we at least pretend that Lucus isn’t setting us up for Episode I / II Playstation games?
Swarming troops across no-mans land by the tens of thousands sort of went out of style after WW I with the invention of the machinegun. In ESB, in made sense to see indestructible giant walkers lumber across the battlefield with their ground troops INSIDE until they got close to the rebel base.
Well, fantasy was a well established genre in the written word about 3000 years before the motion picture was invented, and science fiction became established as a genre about the same time as movies became popular. Hence, the OP as stated can be easily refuted – the effect of CG on videographic SF/fantasy (TV, movies, and whatever else) will have no significant impact on the published material.
And, technologically, there are constant advances in how to do good CG and other effects. So if anything CG will increase the amount of good SF and fantasy on film.
One movie does not a genre kill. Phantom Menace came out, sucking mightily, in 1999. Since then we’ve had…
Spiderman
The Matrix
The Lord of the Rings: FOTR
The Iron Giant
And to counter your Roddenberry quote, I hereby invoke Sturgeon’s Law:
90% of anything is crap.
I think CGI is anoter tool which can allow us to explore the amazing worlds created by artists’ imaginations. Sometimes those imaginations aren’t worth visiting; blaming CGI for that is pointless.
You’ve hit a peeve of mine, too. Too many SF movies are designed to present bright shiny objects to primatives. Special effects are nice, but if you leave a film talking only about the special effects, then the film is a failure. Special effects should be no more the sign of a good film than costume design is – it doesn’t hurt to have good ones, but that shouldn’t be why people go to movies.
**Star Wars ** was a success because of the story. Lucas long ago lost sight of this (to be fair, few in Hollywood seem to understand this). Too many moviegoers are undemanding; show them a bunch of flashy special effects and they don’t care that the rest of the film is dull and just plain boring.
We’re seeing a real dumbing down of the genre. Take a look at the top SF films of the 50s (The Thing, It Came from Outer Space, Them!, War of the Worlds etc.): they were all about something. They assumed their audience were intelligent people. Now, everything is about effects, so much so that a dumb film like Gattaca is hailed as a masterpiece simply because it tries, however ineptly, to do more than give a two-hour thrill ride.
Good science fiction is about people. Good fiction is about story. Good special effects is about neither.
Maybe it’s just me, but I found that the CG was merged perfectly. Can I tell when it was used? Hell yes. But, in the same vein, I was also always able to tell when animatronics, muppets, prosthetics, or foam-rubber costumes were used, too. I mean, are you actually going to suggest that the original Godzilla looked more realistic than GINO?
As this pertains to Star Wars… compare the Pantheon of Aliens from ROTJ’s Jabba’s Palace scene, and the mishmash of beings see in AOTC. Are you actually postulating that either of those two had creatures that were realistic? Please. Sy Snootles and Jar Jar Binks looked equally fake. Even Chewbacca - may he Rest in Peace - despite being a cool-ass character, was obviously just a guy in a hairy suit.
Personally, even though it’s obvious when animatronics are used, it’s even moreso when CGI is used, and it just looks worse. When you use a puppet/robot, it’s something solid, it’s there, and the actors can respond to it so much better than if there wasn’t anything there. It always amazes me when a character is put in afterwards, and yet, the conversation is thrown off by the fact that whoever is talking to the post-production add in is looking three inches off. How can they fuck that up? Yet they do, just look at Qui-Gon’s conversation with Uuatu, or whatever Anakin’s owners name was.
And look at the difference in the special addition Empire between the Falcon when it was CGI and when it was based off a model. The model one looks so much better. It’s dirtier, you can see all the dents in it, it looks like it’s beaten up and trashy, and REAL! The CGI one is too clean and also too flat.
Plus, as far as fantasy goes, CGI helps to kill some of the fantasy. Sure, it’s nice to have a monster/creature be there, big as life and in all it’s glory (the Balrogg in LOTR was great, for example), but a lot of fantasy is what the viewer/audience brings to it through the use of their own imagination. It used to be, when special effects weren’t thier best, you either tried incredibly hard to make something look realistic, or you left the big baddy somewhat hidden. This allowed you to give the audience a basis for what the monster was supposed to look like, but hide enough of it so that the audience makes the creature even more horrifying in their own mind, thus making it more horrifying on film. Some of the best monsters in movies are the ones you hardly ever see. Yet, nowadays, they just throw it right in your face, right off the bat, and it looses a lot of tension, build up, and fear/excitement. And that’s a big shame in my opinion.
As for the CG in Episode 2 being merged perfectly, did anyone else count a rather LARGE amount of bluescreens that would have been beautifully constructed sets just ten years ago? To me, that’s a step backwards.
CGI is in its infancy. There’s much room for improvement, but they aren’t going to be able to improve if they don’t experiment and push the boundaries with every subsequent movie.
Star Wars is not just George Lucas wanking off or waxing eloquent with an unfeasibly popular fairy tale, it’s his attempt to make filmmaking as a process easier and more powerful.
He uses the Star Wars movies as his vehicle to do that. Yes, he loves his universe, and he loves that they’ve become part of cinema history and popular culture - but really he does them for his own ends, and is incredibly successful at that.
Compare Terminator 2’s hand animated graphics, with AOTC’s hand animated Yoda. Utterly incredible, and in only 10 years development.
I saw AOTC both in a traditional 35mm film theater and in a digitally projected version, and I have to say, the latter makes a lot of difference in how integrated the CGI looks.
[nitpick mode]
That isn’t a ship, it’s a factory for building battle droids. Those things you see in the trailer are metal stamping presses.
Right. And ESB takes place some 40+ years after AOTC, and neither of them takes place in Earth’s future, so what exactly is the problem? The battle tactics change between Episodes II and V, just as between WWI and WWII.
What’s more, the battle scenes in AOTC do involve bringing troops close to the enemy position in vehicles, both airborne and ground-based. Which is much easier to determine if you actually do see the movie.
I agree. How can better SGX be the end of Science Fiction/Fantasy? I know it’s in vogue to bash CGI nowadays, but it’s pretty silly to think that CGI will kill SF/F. Just the opposite will happen. We’ll see more SF/F in the future (most of it will be crap of course, but that’s always the case).
I do not in any way believe that computer graphics spell the end of good fantasy and good science fiction.
Lord of the Rings never would have, or could have, been made as a live-action film that was true to the books without computer graphics, and I for one am damn glad that LOTR finally came around to show audience what a GOOD fantasy film looks like.
Can you imagine the Balrog as a giant puppet? I shudder to think.
Oh, and I have to add this in response to the Gene Roddenberry quote: ST:TOS was “about people” and TPM was about special effects? Huh? Are you talking about the same series? Captain-Kirk-beams-down-and-fights-elaborate-monster is about the “people”?
This is just snobbery. I for one do think that Star Wars in all of its incarnations IS about the people. I’m interested in Vader/Anakin’s background. The problem seems to be that we’re only getting little nips of that development in the midst of other (often fleeting) characters and great political upheaval and historical changes. I personally think that this isn’t a bad thing and if anything it is more realistic than having the characters sit down and talk about how they “feel” just for the sake of character development.
I’ll say right off the bat that there are very few situations where I would prefer CGI over a really good model or animatronics (Model Jaba or computer Jaba… I pick model Jaba). Not saying CGI is inherently bad, it’s just my opinion. It certainly will not be the end of science fiction and fantasy. I mean, one could have said the same thing about movies themselves, but they have exploded the market for sci-fi and fantasy to millions of people.
I’ll also agree that the enduring movies are the ones about people. IMO, the best science fiction movie to come out in the last three or four years is… (please don’t shoot me)… Galaxy Quest. That movie was (aside from just being damned funny) completely about Tim Allen’s character developing and his relationships with the other actors. The sci-fi bit was just the vehicle for presenting it.
Eonwe It’s weird that you mention Galaxy Request. This quote reminds me of the outburst by Sigourney Weaver, when she and Tim Allen are in the bowels of the ship.
Anyway on the OP, I think CGI is great, it’s just in it’s infancy, as it progresses it’ss get better and writers will have to go back to work.
Oh and I think the best Sci-Fi of recent years was 12 Monkeys, also strangely one of the only performances of Brad Pitts I’ve tolerated.
There was a film critic in the local papers who had this to say about Dinosaur (paraphrased) “the computer effects in this movie are spectacular. But in 10 years, CGI will have far surpassed what’s shown here and audiences won’t even notice it anymore. They’ll look past it, realize that there’s no actual story, and move on.”
I look at the first two Planet of the Apes films and think how wonderful they are. Combined, they were made on a total of $2 million budget. I look at the third movie and laugh because of the ridiculously outdated wardrobe choices they made when portraying “modern” society. I probably wouldn’t have done that if the movie had been good. It wasn’t.
I can still watch Clash of the Titans, one of the last pieces by claymator Ray Harryhausen, and I love it. Why? It’s a fun story. I don’t want it redone. I like the imperfectness of Medusa.
Excessive CGI annoys me because it’s like a magic trick. It’s sleight of hand. Dazzle you with a planet-city and 10 bazzillion flying cars and maybe you won’t notice that there’s no real plot. The only thing I noticed was that the plot was boring and I kept wondering why it is that cars were allowed to fly that close to government officials. Any one of those background cars could have rammed right into Senator Palpatine’s office and that would have been the end of the movie.
I may not have been thinking that if the actual plot kept me mildly entertained.
The problem is that a signifigant fraction of the moviegoing audience will respond to flashy effects with entusiasm and approval. They’re there to see spectacle, not for a story or a plot.