Much as I love the original King Kong (along with all stop-motion animation, and the films of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen), I’m not going to say that it was better than Peter Jackson’s film, which I love. If Obie could have done what Jackson’s technicians did in the remake, he would have.
What we’re seeing is the maturation of the process of film effects. In O’Brien’s day, extending through Harryhausen’s, you used all your cleverness and technique to produce effects that could surprise not only the film-going public, but also other effects technicians. There are layers of effects in there, all carefully crafted and pushing the envelope of capability. But it’s all dependent upon careful use of technology and art. A 5 minute piece of animation still depended upon the day-long effort of a single animator. If interupted, he could lose his focus and that day’s effort was lost.
Now we have batteries of technicians and computers, and we can go back and change an effect that doesn’t work, or re-light it, or view it from a different angle. We can blur it realistically so that “strobing” is a thing of the past, and there’s no need for “aerial braces”, matting out supports, or maintaining careful alignment of fixed or travelling mattes. Damned near anything you can imagine can be put convincingly on screen. They may still argue about whether fully hand-managed animation, motion capture on a human being, or motion-capture maquettes are the best ways to obtain such motions, but that’s more a matter of taste and preference – Preston Blair argued that hand-drawn cartoon ladies were superior to rotoscoped women, and his were damned good, but that doesn’t mean he was absolutely right.
They’ll still be fixing up such details (the lighting of the dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park film sometimes looks completely wrong today*), but the “quantum leap” in technology is mostly done.
it’s rash to say such things, I know, but with computer-generating imagery now approaching maturation, it seems that you can now put on 2-D film (and even stereoscopic 3-D film) anything you want to, and they’ve effectively pushed that technology as far as it needs to go for those purposes. We are reaping a rich harvest of movies it wouldn’t have been possible to make years ago. So the croip of superhero films and things like “Inception” will continue. I’d like to hope that this means that we’ll see more and better science fiction films, with realistic moon gravity indoors, for a change. But I’m not holding my breath.
