Back in the day, movies looked awesome. Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Neverending Story, Aliens, Return of the Jedi, Return to Oz, Ghostbusters…they all looked great. They used CGI only when absolutely necessary and when they did use it, it was a painstaking process to get it just right.
You never questioned if that T-Rex was real. You simply sat in your seat terrified.
Today it’s all to often a different story. Bad CGI can take you right out of a film and put a frown on your face. Take The Matrix Reloaded for example. It was supposed to be revolutionary in its special effects. Computers took days to render the film’s fight sequences. What ended up being rendering however, was Gumby and the characters from Toy Story fighting. Your leader remembers being incredibly disappointed whilst sitting in the theater around 12:45 am seeing this film.
Look how terrible! Not a single texture!
Obviously this fight scene would have been difficult if not impossible to create without CGI, but some movie scenes utilize CGI gratuitously. George Lucas, the man who has ruined his own reputation, is famous for such gratuitousness.
Exhibit A:
Upon viewing this scene for the first time I immediately thought, “why wasn’t this character performed animatronically?” Similar thoughts went through my head (also anger) when computer generated prairie dogs popped up in the horrible horrible Indiana Jones 4.
Exhibit B:
My grandmother-in-law has REAL prairie dogs next to her house in Texas….they’re not that difficult to film. Throw up a green sheet next to a colony and then film them. How challenging is that? They pop up all day long.
Luckily, all hope is not lost. Upon seeing Hellboy 2 with del Toro’s use of a physical suit/animatronics/CGI-touchups for the character Mr. Wink, I realized that directors can still choose to do things correctly.
Mr. Wink looked amazing because Guillermo del Toro understands how to make movies not look like garbage. He understands that nothing looks more like real life than real life. A wonderfully crafted suit will always look more realistic than a computer generated one. Period. And if that suit can’t do everything you’d like it to do, touch it up with CGI, but don’t get rid of the suit altogether. That’s foolish. Perhaps Guillermo should have directed Star Wars Ep. 1-3.
Perhaps the worst (and most puzzling) offense of them all is from the recent film Wolverine. (Side note: Now that Marvel Studios exists, no other studio should handle Marvel properties because all they do is mishandle them.) In the film, Logan learns he has adamantium claws in his forearms and pops them out of his hands in a bathroom. What proceeds on screen are visual effects apparently produced by the SFX intern. It’s unfathomable how this scene made it off the cutting room floor. It looked like test footage that somehow snuck its way in the final cut. It not only helped in ruining the film, it ruined my day and possibly my week if I remember correctly.
If this image makes you want to hurl, the footage will actually cause you to vomit.
There is no excuse. If Neill Blomkamp can do what he did in District 9 with the small amount of money he had, these Hollywood big budget flicks should pee on themselves and think about what they’ve done.
