Phantom Menace was loaded with CG, but the only time I heard the audience go “Wow!” was during the mega-cool swordfight in the power plant. I take this as a good sign. A modern audience isn’t going to be suckered by gee-whiz special effects if there isn’t some decent drama mixed in and good swordfights still work, as they have since Douglas Fairbanks.
Of course, not even swordfights can save a truly horrid picture, i.e. the recent Musketeers flick.
Chronos: Actually, you’re wrong about the VLA. That’s all CGI.
What happened is that they shot the scene in front of the real thing, but the director wanted the dish to rotate fast enough that the audience could see it. So they removed them, built a CGI version with a rotating dish, and replaced it. Then since they had the model already, they replicated it a whole bunch of times to make the array look much bigger than it really was.
Contact is a good example of CGI being used for mundane things. There’s not a lot of reality in that film. Watch the movie with the special effects guys doing the commentary - it will blow you away, and make you realize that we don’t really know what’s real in movies or not any more.
The commentary has a lot of paragraphs like this: "In this scene, there was an overcast and we wanted a blue sky. So we CGI’d a new sky where the old one was. This scene in the house? The window view wasn’t very good, so we took some scenery we shot in Venezuela and replaced it. So the house is in LA, but when she looks out the window she’s looking at Venezuela.
Also, we couldn’t get a good imagine of her in that mirror when she runs by, so we replaced it. And that big zoom-out from her eye into space? We couldn’t get a good closeup of her eye, so the little girl you see standing there has one real eye, and one that we did in CGI so that when we zoom in on it we can maintain detail and seamlessly transition to the all-computer environment".
Etc. Even ‘non-effects’ movies today use CGI heavily to add interest to scenes, fix flaws in post production, etc.
I think a lot of the bitching about “bad” or “obvious” CGI is just people seeing something that they realize can only be done using CGI so it becomes too “obvious” or “bad”.
Reading about how SFX are done nowadays may be boring, but the SFX are much better than they were in the past. Even the bad effects.
This thread might be the appropriate place for me to observe that, prior to watching Citizen Kane with the DVD commentary tracks, I had no idea how much that movie relied on special FX. And it’s mostly the Forrest Gump-style “invisible” FX, augmenting the image as opposed to depicting something fantastic or impossible.
Except for the pterodactyls.