There are some movies that feature very expensive CGI or digital FX, and I’m sometimes left thinking that a cheaper alternative would have been just as effective, or even better.
This is not about CGI and FX that you think are good or bad. Just instances where you wonder why they went down the CGI / fancy digital FX route, given the vast amounts of time and money involved, when you think the story could have been presented just as effectively in a simpler and cheaper way.
I know this will seem like heresy to many, but I recently watched the LOTR trilogy and I wondered whether it was so crucial for my viewing pleasure for the Gollum character to be a billion dollar pixel feast. I know about how it was done, how much of it was a performance by Andy Serkis, and how ‘cutting edge’ it was at the time to so seamlessly integrate a digital character into the live action. But quite honestly, if they had just found a rather scrawny-looking actor with good movement skills, I wonder if this wouldn’t have worked just as well if not better? It’s the kind of role Doug Jones or someone with equivalent talents might have fulfilled very well, given a little help from wardrobe/make-up.
Godzilla has to be the classic example. People who love Godzilla love a guy in a rubber suit stepping on toy trucks. Why spend a fortune messing with it?
The film would have been much better if the zombie vampires were just actors in makeup. The CGI was so awful (and unnecessary in that particular instance) that it took me out of the film.
I disagree with the OP about Gollum – I don’t see any way that you could’ve come up with something at all fiting Tolkien’s conception and had a human being performing it. I know I would’ve felt cheated by it.
I disagree about Godzilla, too, but that’s a matter of taste. There were lots of proposals for a US Godzilla, and all of them AFAIK involved special effects beyond man-in-a-suit*. I do think that you could’ve come up with a CGI Godzilla that would satisfy most, if not all, fans. But the guys who made GIMO did a lot of things wrong, including not agreeing to the conditions Toho had set.
*FWIW, even the original Toho Godzilla wasn’t always a man in a suit. I’ve seen behind-the-scenes shots of mechanical models used for some shots.
There are some newer Godzilla movies since 1991 where the man-in-suit doesn’t look so bad. The budgets hover around $10 million with a one-year production schedule, so it’s not fair to expect Hollywood blockbuster SPFX.
More recent movies since 2000 have used CGI for ancillary effects, like missiles, jets, tanks, etc. Or on the monsters themselves; like tentacles, blast weapons, insect swarms, and transformations. But the monsters themselves remain a “man in suit”*
As an interesting aside, the 1998 US movie called “Godzilla” had a man-in-suit in some scenes, like running down the city streets. I can’t find an online pic, but the suit looks like a marionette suspended by cables, where the person’s legs touch the ground.
*One of the recent Gamera movies had a “woman in suit”, since they used less bulky flying monsters.
The updated versions of the original Star Wars movies. Ironically, when you watch them today, the old-school models still look pretty decent, but the CGI elements stick out like a sore thumb.
Blade 2 comes immediately to mind. Here you have what I thought was a rather entertaining movie for that sort of thing, then for no reason during a well-coreagraphed fight scene they added a few CGI scenes of the vampires attacking each other with super-bouncy unrealistic maneuvers that completely called attention to themselves.
I’m glad you brought up this example, Spoke. I was going to mention it myself, but I got a little confused. When I saw the movie (which, broadly speaking, I liked), I thought that the zombies (or “the infected”) were rendered using CGI, and I thought they didn’t really look right and using actors would have been better. I saw a few comments (here and on the IMDB) that said more or less the same thing, and it would have been a good example for this thread. But then I noticed on the IMDB that there are many real actors credited with playing the infected, and so I wasn’t quite sure of my facts.
Maybe in ‘I Am Legend’ it was a mix - sometimes using real actors plus gory make-up and sometimes CGI characters. If this is the case, to the extent that CGI was used, perhaps to depict the infected moving in a way that a real person never could, I didn’t think it worked at all well. If anything, the CGI zombie elements undermined the sense of ‘realism’ that the rest of the movie worked so hard to create.
I’m not sure who the FX studio or artistic vision behind that movie was, but I am Legend is not particularly well envisioned. It’s I am Legend Lite with zombies from video games… how fuckin’ original… The full bite would have been I am Legend Vampire… bloody and reál. I hate this crappy new formulistic cinema. Give me the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s … seems like we’ve gone back to the sixties…god forbid.
Well, no, not for what they showed. You can’t get trained lions to take down a deer on cue, and real footage shot in the wild can’t practically be incorporated into your NYC street scenes. IANASFXP (special effects producer), but some of my best friends are (really!), and CGI was the only way to do what they did.
Same thing with Day After Tomorrow. I know it’s an already CGI heavy fim and maybe they’re trying to get their money’s worth. But why not use real wolves?
As I understand it, the CGI was built over the movements of the actors (which is also what they did with Gollum), and that’s why actors are getting credited. But the CGI was awful and, per the OP, unnecessary. Why not just use makeup? Would have been more realistic, and therefore more terrifying.
The stupid unhinged-jaw screams were particularly egregious. It looked like the filmmakers recycled that particular effect from The Mummy.
I think the best example of poor (unnecessary) CGI by counter-example in previous movies is “Alien 3” compared to “Alien” and “Aliens”.
The CGI aliens in 3 were so blatently unrealistic. And for what ? So they could show the aliens scrambling along the walls and upside down ?
But perhaps the best way to think of it is to flip it around - think of how different the first Alien would have been had they used CGI instead of a guy in costume ?