Pinyapplesuckas
He's A Good Man
ive recently watched the original Star Wars movies and George Lucas damn near ruined them with the CGI added in years later. it looks so out of place with the rest of the film.
Are financial constraints ruining action movies that need to use CGI unlike in 90s/Early 2000s?
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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NERO
All Star
Yeah I get your point now and I kind of agree.
CGI will probably never look real so practical effects are better. Some things can't be done with CGI at all but if it can be done practically, it should be.Bingo. And it changes everything from how believable the scenes are to how people interact with the environment.
That's the thing. The new Star Wars will be amazing...for like 3 years. Then we'll see the flaws in all the cgi and how flawed it looks.
92Inc
Fear me
92Inc
Fear me
That fukking Jaba/Han scene and the one with the female alien singing at the cantina are so obviously shoehorned in and look terribly out of place. Don't know why he thought that was a good idea.
mbewane
Knicks: 93 til infinity
I had this discussion with this guy one day and basically he went on a rant about how "well it's cheaper" and I was like "Well ok it's cheaper, but is it better?" And he was like "It's just a goddamn movie, who cares?" 
I always feel old movies have an extra "feel" to them because indeed everything is "real", I mean they use real things to create something they imagined. I dunno, it's just more "organic" or something. There's still a "link" to the real world while with CGI you can basically really do whatever you want.
I have a theory of how this, added to all the screens we have in our lives, plays a big role in us humans somehow moving away from the reality we live in. Won't get too much into it because it's not clear in my head
but I feel all this stuff has deeper impacts.
I always feel old movies have an extra "feel" to them because indeed everything is "real", I mean they use real things to create something they imagined. I dunno, it's just more "organic" or something. There's still a "link" to the real world while with CGI you can basically really do whatever you want.
I have a theory of how this, added to all the screens we have in our lives, plays a big role in us humans somehow moving away from the reality we live in. Won't get too much into it because it's not clear in my head
but I feel all this stuff has deeper impacts.6 Reasons Modern Movie CGI Looks Surprisingly Crappy
By David Christopher Bell | May 12, 2015 | 1,656,650 Views
It's been over two decades since CGI came careening through the silver screen to murder cops, lawyers, and other civil servants in Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Since then, both films have been praised for their inexplicably realistic effects, even though both movies have birthed a handful of sequels with much more powerful special effects technology at their disposal. Despite the fact that Terminator Genisys and Jurassic World are brimming with CGI that is objectively more realistic than the original films from the early '90s, so many people (myself included) seem to agree that the effects in the originals look better than the slick computer graphics of the modern sequels.
Why do a bunch of us find the photorealistic carnage of the Genisys and Jurassic World trailers so woefully unappealing? The answer isn't dumb nostalgia (well, not just dumb nostalgia) but rather that the best CGI in the world might as well be The Scorpion King if the filmmakers fail to realize a handful of fundamental things about special effects, such as ...
#6. Lack Of Visual Restraint Makes Gravity Act Like A Cartoon
New Line Cinema
There might be a time when CGI finally traverses the uncanny valley and becomes indistinguishable from the real world. Only none of that will matter as long as filmmakers continue to apply physics with a spongy fist. Even Viggo Mortensen said that as Lord Of The Rings progressed, Peter Jackson lost more and more restraint, like a fat kid at a rehab clinic because he's addicted to heroin, you insensitive monster. And speaking of insensitive monsters -- here's Orlando Bloom somehow piercing the hide of a titan elephant before sliding down its trunk like Fred Flintstone clocking out for the day:
New Line Cinema
Yabba dabba don't.
He just indifferently jumps from the final breath of a dying war beast like he's stepping out of a Geo Prizm. Even if the CGI was spotless, the audience has no frame of reference for what a grown man gleaming the cube off of a six-tusked safari animal looks like. So, in the end, this physics-defying stunt just turns Legolas into an immortal Looney Tunes character. The inexplicable Hobbit trilogy ramps this up even more when they have him pull an actual Wile E. Coyote moment in the final film:
New Line Cinema
No, I don't care how light he is; this looks stupid.
It's hard to blame someone for wanting to make something look as awesome as they imagine, but sometimes having that "sky's the limit" freedom means knowing when to keep it grounded. It's advice they needed to heed in Terminator Genisys, when the T-1000 slices off its own arm to then use as a javelin:
Paramount Pictures
Wait 'til you see the scene where it disguises itself as a mohel.
What seems like a fun little CGI flourish ends up opening a world of impossible character motivation and baffling physics. Why would a thoughtless killing machine waste precious murder-seconds dramatically lopping off his own spike and flipping it into the air like a futuristic baton twirler? How did it even manage to perfectly spin its amputated dagger arm like that? Is it wise for a liquid-metal robot to willingly javelin his body parts? What if he loses the piece? Won't he keep getting smaller with every new one he loses? The director probably didn't ask any of these questions, because he just wanted this shot to look cool. It's the exact same problem later in the trailer, when the T-800 goes tumbling into traffic:
Paramount Pictures
Just like Arnold's post-political career.
It took me forever to figure out why this shot looked so wrong, until realizing that the one-ton robot flying down the highway somehow manages to lightly flip and bounce like a two-pound puppy. The obvious explanation is that the director needed Arnold to end with his face through the windshield for the hilarious little gag that happens next, and accomplished this by throwing out everything we know about gravity and inertia in the process. It's yet another case of an object or person going where the director needed it to go, instead of where it naturally would. And while many movies these days actually hire physicists to tell them if they're punching Isaac Newton in the taint, that advice is meaningless if you're using CGI to pull off an entire stunt instead of trying to perform it in the real world.
It's like they're challenging us to think of the movie as anything but a cartoon. Especially now that every film is colored like one ...
#5. Color Grading Makes Everything Look Like A Fantasy
Universal Studios
Movies like Transformers and The Hunger Games are so aggressively teal and orange that they look like big-budget adaptations of a Spencer Gifts blacklight poster. As we've explained before, the reason for this is that those two colors are on opposite sides of the color wheel, and as such are immediately pleasing to human eyes. Since human skin best resembles orange more than anything else on that wheel, color graders had an easy starting point to completely ruin every film they work on.
If you're wondering what I mean by "color grading," take a look at this comparison between two similar scenes in Jurassic World and Jurassic Park:
Universal Studios
Top: Jurassic World; Bottom: Jurassic Park
Notice how everything in Jurassic World has a foggy layer of desaturated blue over it? It's subtle, and we've gotten used to it because every movie does it now, so just for shyts, I swapped the two styles for comparison ...
Universal Studios
Left: Before; Right: After
Then, because compulsion is a disease, I started removing the color grading from every shot in the trailer:
Universal Studios
Left: Before; Right: After
For the life of my family, I can't fukking figure out why anyone would want to watch a movie that's filtered to look like someone refusing to remove their Ray-Bans. The reason you don't see this in Jurassic Park or other '90s movies is because it hadn't been invented yet. Color grading was made popular by the Coen brothers after CGI became the go-to special effect, when they decided to use color grading to make O Brother, Where Art Thou? look like an old sepia-toned photograph. But their point was to detract realism from the finished product, whereas Jurassic Park was (originally) about creating larger-than-life creatures in a real-world setting.
This is why the effects in The Avengers and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes look so darn good in comparison. Along with dumping shyt-tons of money into the CGI, those movies didn't wash everything over with color grading to make it look like Middle-goddamn-earth. It's the actual world, with actualearth tones. Compare that to Godzilla, which looks beautiful but appears to take place in a gritty Pleasantville covered in volcano ash:
Warner Bros.
Basically it's Sin City, but with a less aggressive version of Mickey Rourke.
#4. CGI Was Originally Used As A Last Resort
TriStar Pictures
Except for four minutes of screen time, every special effect you see in Jurassic Park was either an animatronic or Jeff Goldblum's enchanting chest hair. And while it might have just been a budget issue or the technological limitations of CGI at the time, the system worked, goddammit. Look at the scene in The Lost World where the T-rex romps about San Diego like a drunk horse:
Universal Studios
Those gas prices are the most unrealistic-looking thing here.
The moment we need to see a close-up is when they switch to a robot, even though it in no way interacts with the surrounding environment. This is something the filmmakers went out of their way to do even though both the T-rex animatronics were such fatties that they actually built the sets aroundthem instead of trucking them from place to place.
And that's the thing about animatronics: Even though they're cheaper to make, they're really hard to use. It's basically a foam condom stuck over a Truckasaurus skeleton trying to emote, and the process eats into the workday faster than a modular wall and Internet pornography. But the result is an in-camera lighting reference for the digital artists and close-up shots that don't look like the movie Spawn. The only animatronic we've seen so far in Jurassic World has been obscured by leaves like they are embarrassed that it's even in the film. Meanwhile, it appears that Terminator Genisys has completely forgotten that, despite ushering in the age of CGI, Terminator 2 was like 80 percent surprised-face Robert Patrick puppets.
Stan Winston
"You call that an earlobe? Make it again!"
shyt, sons -- even Jurassic Park III knew to rely on head-to-toe animatronic raptors, even though that meant having one talk to Sam Neill like the goddamn Sinclair family.
Universal Studios
Meanwhile, in the Jurassic World trailer, every single dinosaur is CGI, no matter how close we are to them. When Chris Pratt is interacting with three Velociraptors that are right in front of his face, they might as well be cartoons, because they're right next to a living, breathing person constantly reminding us all what a living, breathing being actually looks like:
Universal Studios
"#SelfieSaturday #NoFilter"
Compare that to the "clever girl" scene from the original Jurassic Park, which was basically just Stan Winston throwing a robot at a dude.
Universal Studios
"Ten bucks if you hit him in the nuts."
That's always going to look more convincing, because we know that robot is physically there, biting Muldoon's head. But let's say Jurassic World does have amazing animatronics to match the CGI. They also better know how to film them, because ...
By David Christopher Bell | May 12, 2015 | 1,656,650 Views
It's been over two decades since CGI came careening through the silver screen to murder cops, lawyers, and other civil servants in Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Since then, both films have been praised for their inexplicably realistic effects, even though both movies have birthed a handful of sequels with much more powerful special effects technology at their disposal. Despite the fact that Terminator Genisys and Jurassic World are brimming with CGI that is objectively more realistic than the original films from the early '90s, so many people (myself included) seem to agree that the effects in the originals look better than the slick computer graphics of the modern sequels.
Why do a bunch of us find the photorealistic carnage of the Genisys and Jurassic World trailers so woefully unappealing? The answer isn't dumb nostalgia (well, not just dumb nostalgia) but rather that the best CGI in the world might as well be The Scorpion King if the filmmakers fail to realize a handful of fundamental things about special effects, such as ...
#6. Lack Of Visual Restraint Makes Gravity Act Like A Cartoon
New Line CinemaThere might be a time when CGI finally traverses the uncanny valley and becomes indistinguishable from the real world. Only none of that will matter as long as filmmakers continue to apply physics with a spongy fist. Even Viggo Mortensen said that as Lord Of The Rings progressed, Peter Jackson lost more and more restraint, like a fat kid at a rehab clinic because he's addicted to heroin, you insensitive monster. And speaking of insensitive monsters -- here's Orlando Bloom somehow piercing the hide of a titan elephant before sliding down its trunk like Fred Flintstone clocking out for the day:
Yabba dabba don't.
He just indifferently jumps from the final breath of a dying war beast like he's stepping out of a Geo Prizm. Even if the CGI was spotless, the audience has no frame of reference for what a grown man gleaming the cube off of a six-tusked safari animal looks like. So, in the end, this physics-defying stunt just turns Legolas into an immortal Looney Tunes character. The inexplicable Hobbit trilogy ramps this up even more when they have him pull an actual Wile E. Coyote moment in the final film:
No, I don't care how light he is; this looks stupid.
It's hard to blame someone for wanting to make something look as awesome as they imagine, but sometimes having that "sky's the limit" freedom means knowing when to keep it grounded. It's advice they needed to heed in Terminator Genisys, when the T-1000 slices off its own arm to then use as a javelin:
Wait 'til you see the scene where it disguises itself as a mohel.
What seems like a fun little CGI flourish ends up opening a world of impossible character motivation and baffling physics. Why would a thoughtless killing machine waste precious murder-seconds dramatically lopping off his own spike and flipping it into the air like a futuristic baton twirler? How did it even manage to perfectly spin its amputated dagger arm like that? Is it wise for a liquid-metal robot to willingly javelin his body parts? What if he loses the piece? Won't he keep getting smaller with every new one he loses? The director probably didn't ask any of these questions, because he just wanted this shot to look cool. It's the exact same problem later in the trailer, when the T-800 goes tumbling into traffic:
Just like Arnold's post-political career.
It took me forever to figure out why this shot looked so wrong, until realizing that the one-ton robot flying down the highway somehow manages to lightly flip and bounce like a two-pound puppy. The obvious explanation is that the director needed Arnold to end with his face through the windshield for the hilarious little gag that happens next, and accomplished this by throwing out everything we know about gravity and inertia in the process. It's yet another case of an object or person going where the director needed it to go, instead of where it naturally would. And while many movies these days actually hire physicists to tell them if they're punching Isaac Newton in the taint, that advice is meaningless if you're using CGI to pull off an entire stunt instead of trying to perform it in the real world.
It's like they're challenging us to think of the movie as anything but a cartoon. Especially now that every film is colored like one ...
#5. Color Grading Makes Everything Look Like A Fantasy
Movies like Transformers and The Hunger Games are so aggressively teal and orange that they look like big-budget adaptations of a Spencer Gifts blacklight poster. As we've explained before, the reason for this is that those two colors are on opposite sides of the color wheel, and as such are immediately pleasing to human eyes. Since human skin best resembles orange more than anything else on that wheel, color graders had an easy starting point to completely ruin every film they work on.
If you're wondering what I mean by "color grading," take a look at this comparison between two similar scenes in Jurassic World and Jurassic Park:
Top: Jurassic World; Bottom: Jurassic Park
Notice how everything in Jurassic World has a foggy layer of desaturated blue over it? It's subtle, and we've gotten used to it because every movie does it now, so just for shyts, I swapped the two styles for comparison ...
Left: Before; Right: After
Then, because compulsion is a disease, I started removing the color grading from every shot in the trailer:
Left: Before; Right: After
For the life of my family, I can't fukking figure out why anyone would want to watch a movie that's filtered to look like someone refusing to remove their Ray-Bans. The reason you don't see this in Jurassic Park or other '90s movies is because it hadn't been invented yet. Color grading was made popular by the Coen brothers after CGI became the go-to special effect, when they decided to use color grading to make O Brother, Where Art Thou? look like an old sepia-toned photograph. But their point was to detract realism from the finished product, whereas Jurassic Park was (originally) about creating larger-than-life creatures in a real-world setting.
This is why the effects in The Avengers and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes look so darn good in comparison. Along with dumping shyt-tons of money into the CGI, those movies didn't wash everything over with color grading to make it look like Middle-goddamn-earth. It's the actual world, with actualearth tones. Compare that to Godzilla, which looks beautiful but appears to take place in a gritty Pleasantville covered in volcano ash:
Basically it's Sin City, but with a less aggressive version of Mickey Rourke.
#4. CGI Was Originally Used As A Last Resort
Except for four minutes of screen time, every special effect you see in Jurassic Park was either an animatronic or Jeff Goldblum's enchanting chest hair. And while it might have just been a budget issue or the technological limitations of CGI at the time, the system worked, goddammit. Look at the scene in The Lost World where the T-rex romps about San Diego like a drunk horse:
Those gas prices are the most unrealistic-looking thing here.
The moment we need to see a close-up is when they switch to a robot, even though it in no way interacts with the surrounding environment. This is something the filmmakers went out of their way to do even though both the T-rex animatronics were such fatties that they actually built the sets aroundthem instead of trucking them from place to place.
And that's the thing about animatronics: Even though they're cheaper to make, they're really hard to use. It's basically a foam condom stuck over a Truckasaurus skeleton trying to emote, and the process eats into the workday faster than a modular wall and Internet pornography. But the result is an in-camera lighting reference for the digital artists and close-up shots that don't look like the movie Spawn. The only animatronic we've seen so far in Jurassic World has been obscured by leaves like they are embarrassed that it's even in the film. Meanwhile, it appears that Terminator Genisys has completely forgotten that, despite ushering in the age of CGI, Terminator 2 was like 80 percent surprised-face Robert Patrick puppets.
"You call that an earlobe? Make it again!"
shyt, sons -- even Jurassic Park III knew to rely on head-to-toe animatronic raptors, even though that meant having one talk to Sam Neill like the goddamn Sinclair family.
Meanwhile, in the Jurassic World trailer, every single dinosaur is CGI, no matter how close we are to them. When Chris Pratt is interacting with three Velociraptors that are right in front of his face, they might as well be cartoons, because they're right next to a living, breathing person constantly reminding us all what a living, breathing being actually looks like:
"#SelfieSaturday #NoFilter"
Compare that to the "clever girl" scene from the original Jurassic Park, which was basically just Stan Winston throwing a robot at a dude.
"Ten bucks if you hit him in the nuts."
That's always going to look more convincing, because we know that robot is physically there, biting Muldoon's head. But let's say Jurassic World does have amazing animatronics to match the CGI. They also better know how to film them, because ...
#3. Most Films Forget That A Camera Needs To Physically Exist
New Line Cinema
I'm not sure when, but somewhere down the line directors forgot that movies are still supposed to take place in real life, and they turned the camera into a coke-fueled Lakitu from Super Mario 64, just zooming around wherever the fukk it feels like. The audience needs the camera to physically occupy some kind of actual space for us to maintain a frame of reference, or else, once again, everything just looks like a freaking cartoon. For example, take a look at this scene from The A-Team, even though I'm like 70 percent certain that The A-Team was just a practical joke everyone played on Liam Neeson for his birthday:
20th Century Fox
Better than your screenwriting.
Soak up that Merrie Melodies, dikk-slapping nonsense. As Furious 7 so elegantly demonstrated, we love to see fancy vehicles plummet from the sky like God's forsaken Hot Wheels -- only Furious 7 knew that we need to see that shyt for real in order for it to have any kind of effect. Not only did The A-Teamuse CGI to phone in the madness, it made sure the cinematography was so cartoony that even people with catastrophic head trauma couldn't possibly mistake it for being real.
Then, there's the raptor chase scene from Jurassic Boogaloo, which has the camera zipping around like it's in an XFL game:
Universal Studios
There's no edge to shooting Velociraptors like a pod race. It doesn't serve any purpose beside making me disappointed in creatures I used to pretend to be when I was 10 and sometimes at 30. This is one of many situations where having a camera that can pass through any physical object on-screen detracts from anything on-screen having any kind of presence -- it's just another reminder that what you're seeing isn't real, like that cavernous goblin-shanty from The Hobbit:
New Line Cinema
You know, where they spent the last four hours of Part 1.
By sweeping the camera hundreds of feet through the environment, everything comes off like a model train set with tiny people composited in. The irony is that old-school miniatures were shot in a way to avoid looking tiny, something digital artists have completely forgotten about -- especially in Jurassic World, it seems:
Universal Studios
They won't be cheering once the Mosasaurus Blackfish documentary comes out.
In these cases it's not that the CGI is undetailed or shytty, but rather that it's all-encompassing. The creatures aren't bursting into the real world because there's no real world to penetrate. Instead they shot some extras over a green screen and stuck them at the bottom like a particularly bad episode of Mystery Science Theater. And as directors opt for more and more digital sets, suddenly every movie looks like regular people inserted into a computer-generated cartoon, instead of CGI elements dropped into a real world. Even Jurassic Park III knew that when you're putting a digital creature into a real environment, you don't just say "fukk it" and make everything CGI. And seriously -- how many times do I have to use Jurassic Park III as a positive example? That entire clown show of a movie was incited by a parasailing accident.
#2. Modern Movies Forget We Can Tell When Something Looks Fake
Paramount Pictures
I mentioned the uncanny valley earlier -- a term used by scientists and artists to describe the psychological gap between seeing an actual, living creature and eerie human facsimiles, like Japanese robots or Willem Dafoe. We've recently gotten around this with films like Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes -- but only through painstaking research into getting every little detail right (they even consulted an eye surgeon to figure out the exact amount of moisture to apply to the eyes of their CGI monkeys). The point is, getting past our natural instinct to fear things that look almost human but not quite is one of the hardest things an effects company can do, and it often results in big rubber men that invoke laughter over awe.
Paramount Pictures
"Make it like Arnold is his 30s, but if he was wearing a spray-painted Michael Myers mask."
However, it would be unfair to say that the Terminator series never made a giant rubber Arnold before:
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, TriStar Pictures
Or a rubber Arnold/Kurt Russell "if they mated" for the bottom one.
But here's the difference: Unlike Genisys, the first two Terminators seem to know that their rubber Arnolds didn't look convincing, because they used them only for very quick cuts. Hell, even McG's Terminator Salvation immediately hid their CGI Schwarzenegger with a purifying wave of cleansing fire:
Warner Bros.
This also solved a lot of dong-related issues.
While I haven't seen Terminator Genisys yet, it appears to think that its terrible CGI Arnold double is awesome enough to prominently feature it in the trailer. There's a lack of self-awareness to the fakery.
Now replace Schwarzenegger with a hulking CGI dinosaur (shouldn't be hard) and you see why people get so mad at Jurassic World. It's not that the original Jurassic Park looks better because the CGI is better, but rather that the original film knew to hide its effects. With the exception of the extremely dated Brachiosaurus scene, most of the effects in Jurassic Park are hidden by rain and darkness.
Universal Studios
"Whatever, he was totally ripping off the guy that did Jaws with that slow reveal."
Jurassic World, on the other hand, sticks the digital puppets right in our faces like it's a banana cream pie filled with teeth:
Universal Studios
Dentist-Cam doesn't need to be a thing.
They're literally shoving us down the CGI's throat as if to say "HEY LOOK! LOOK AT THIS!" so that we can't help but point out any and all imperfections. And since not even the freaking environment around those dinosaurs is real, it's comically easy for people to notice that the effects don't look right. I mean ... they couldn't spring an extra day to shoot real water? Even Lake Placid did that:
20th Century Fox
Lake. Placid.
Yeah ... remember that piece of shyt? The late 1990s effects of a horrifically bad giant crocodile movie should have the lasting power of a snowball in my pants -- and yet even this piece of hot garbage had the modesty to quickly cut away from what little CGI they used. And considering that it's not inexplicably tinted orange and blue, takes place in a real environment with real splashing water, and is aware of its visual limitations -- I actually prefer this shot to the Jurassic World orgy of Mosasauruseating a shark, if only because it understood that the presentation of the effect is just as important as the effect itself.
#1. Big Effects Sequences Are Supposed To Be Treated With Awe
Universal Studios
I didn't care for the new, ultra-serious take on the laser-breathing dinosaur we normally call Godzilla. But, to his credit, director Gareth Edwards clearly knew how to present larger-than-life monsters as having the gravity and consequence that 100-foot sea beasts trying to find a quiet place to bump nasties would have:
Warner Bros.
Godzilla, King Of The Cockblockers!
I get why people liked this film, even though it's not what I personally wanted from a Godzilla movie -- which until now was always about stupidly in-your-face, unobscured monster-on-monster violence. That said, Edwards' sense of buildup and dread is exactly what should have been in the new Jurassic World -- a film trying to follow up a classic prehistoric monster romp with only 14 minutes of actual romping.
Since having lumbering dinosaurs fighting world-fukking aliens inside a giant robot head has become so stupidly achievable, it's really easy for movies to forget how terror-shyt inducing those things would be in real life. And since we have a tendency to constantly shorthand pop culture staples, it's only natural to skip over the awe part of a special effect. The time it takes for Optimus Prime to transform for the first time in each Transformers film goes from 40 seconds in the first movie, to 10 seconds in the second, to five seconds in the third.
Paramount Pictures
Which coincidentally mirrors the exact time used for creating each plot.
By the new one, it's easy to completely forget the spatial absurdity and scale of watching a bright red semi explode into a giant bipedal robot. We just sort of gloss over this mind-bending space colossus' shapeshifting dance until the action is reduced to a flurry of colors narrated by racist catchphrases.
The original Jurassic Park spent minutes on the Tyrannosaurus' approach. When we finally see it, we spend another several minutes on the thunderous horror of a dinosaur tearing a jeep apart as it frantically tries to eat all of the characters on-screen. The Lost World repeated this in the scene where the Tyrannosaurs knock Jeff Goldblum's trailer off a cliff, and even dumb ol' Jurassic Park III spent a lot of time on showing us exactly how much of an airplane's ass a giant dinosaur would kick (answer: all of it). Now look at this ungodly shyt:
Universal Studios
"A Michael Bay-ing 65 Million Years In The Making."
Sure, that looks pretty awesome, but destruction on that scale should blow our fukking minds. The response to dinosaurs wrecking a helicopter should be nothing short of paralysis, but this scene has no sense of gravity or consequence. There's no scale to it. There's even going to be a scene where (minor spoilers) a Pteranodon picks up a woman and literally drops her into the mouth of the Mosasaurus. It doesn't matter how real the CGI looks, because that scene belongs in a fukking Sharknado movie. It's an absurd cartoon orgy.
And so that's why some people are saying that the new Jurassic World "looks fake": The CGI is powerful, but the people who made it clearly don't have enough respect for that power. I know I'm just quoting Malcolm at this point ... but shyt. They really were so preoccupied with whether or not they could have 88 dinosaurs throwing exploding helicopters at each other that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Dave can be found lurking aimlessly on Twitter if you're so inclined to say hello.
New Line CinemaI'm not sure when, but somewhere down the line directors forgot that movies are still supposed to take place in real life, and they turned the camera into a coke-fueled Lakitu from Super Mario 64, just zooming around wherever the fukk it feels like. The audience needs the camera to physically occupy some kind of actual space for us to maintain a frame of reference, or else, once again, everything just looks like a freaking cartoon. For example, take a look at this scene from The A-Team, even though I'm like 70 percent certain that The A-Team was just a practical joke everyone played on Liam Neeson for his birthday:
Better than your screenwriting.
Soak up that Merrie Melodies, dikk-slapping nonsense. As Furious 7 so elegantly demonstrated, we love to see fancy vehicles plummet from the sky like God's forsaken Hot Wheels -- only Furious 7 knew that we need to see that shyt for real in order for it to have any kind of effect. Not only did The A-Teamuse CGI to phone in the madness, it made sure the cinematography was so cartoony that even people with catastrophic head trauma couldn't possibly mistake it for being real.
Then, there's the raptor chase scene from Jurassic Boogaloo, which has the camera zipping around like it's in an XFL game:
There's no edge to shooting Velociraptors like a pod race. It doesn't serve any purpose beside making me disappointed in creatures I used to pretend to be when I was 10 and sometimes at 30. This is one of many situations where having a camera that can pass through any physical object on-screen detracts from anything on-screen having any kind of presence -- it's just another reminder that what you're seeing isn't real, like that cavernous goblin-shanty from The Hobbit:
You know, where they spent the last four hours of Part 1.
By sweeping the camera hundreds of feet through the environment, everything comes off like a model train set with tiny people composited in. The irony is that old-school miniatures were shot in a way to avoid looking tiny, something digital artists have completely forgotten about -- especially in Jurassic World, it seems:
They won't be cheering once the Mosasaurus Blackfish documentary comes out.
In these cases it's not that the CGI is undetailed or shytty, but rather that it's all-encompassing. The creatures aren't bursting into the real world because there's no real world to penetrate. Instead they shot some extras over a green screen and stuck them at the bottom like a particularly bad episode of Mystery Science Theater. And as directors opt for more and more digital sets, suddenly every movie looks like regular people inserted into a computer-generated cartoon, instead of CGI elements dropped into a real world. Even Jurassic Park III knew that when you're putting a digital creature into a real environment, you don't just say "fukk it" and make everything CGI. And seriously -- how many times do I have to use Jurassic Park III as a positive example? That entire clown show of a movie was incited by a parasailing accident.
#2. Modern Movies Forget We Can Tell When Something Looks Fake
I mentioned the uncanny valley earlier -- a term used by scientists and artists to describe the psychological gap between seeing an actual, living creature and eerie human facsimiles, like Japanese robots or Willem Dafoe. We've recently gotten around this with films like Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes -- but only through painstaking research into getting every little detail right (they even consulted an eye surgeon to figure out the exact amount of moisture to apply to the eyes of their CGI monkeys). The point is, getting past our natural instinct to fear things that look almost human but not quite is one of the hardest things an effects company can do, and it often results in big rubber men that invoke laughter over awe.
"Make it like Arnold is his 30s, but if he was wearing a spray-painted Michael Myers mask."
However, it would be unfair to say that the Terminator series never made a giant rubber Arnold before:
Or a rubber Arnold/Kurt Russell "if they mated" for the bottom one.
But here's the difference: Unlike Genisys, the first two Terminators seem to know that their rubber Arnolds didn't look convincing, because they used them only for very quick cuts. Hell, even McG's Terminator Salvation immediately hid their CGI Schwarzenegger with a purifying wave of cleansing fire:
This also solved a lot of dong-related issues.
While I haven't seen Terminator Genisys yet, it appears to think that its terrible CGI Arnold double is awesome enough to prominently feature it in the trailer. There's a lack of self-awareness to the fakery.
Now replace Schwarzenegger with a hulking CGI dinosaur (shouldn't be hard) and you see why people get so mad at Jurassic World. It's not that the original Jurassic Park looks better because the CGI is better, but rather that the original film knew to hide its effects. With the exception of the extremely dated Brachiosaurus scene, most of the effects in Jurassic Park are hidden by rain and darkness.
"Whatever, he was totally ripping off the guy that did Jaws with that slow reveal."
Jurassic World, on the other hand, sticks the digital puppets right in our faces like it's a banana cream pie filled with teeth:
Dentist-Cam doesn't need to be a thing.
They're literally shoving us down the CGI's throat as if to say "HEY LOOK! LOOK AT THIS!" so that we can't help but point out any and all imperfections. And since not even the freaking environment around those dinosaurs is real, it's comically easy for people to notice that the effects don't look right. I mean ... they couldn't spring an extra day to shoot real water? Even Lake Placid did that:
Lake. Placid.
Yeah ... remember that piece of shyt? The late 1990s effects of a horrifically bad giant crocodile movie should have the lasting power of a snowball in my pants -- and yet even this piece of hot garbage had the modesty to quickly cut away from what little CGI they used. And considering that it's not inexplicably tinted orange and blue, takes place in a real environment with real splashing water, and is aware of its visual limitations -- I actually prefer this shot to the Jurassic World orgy of Mosasauruseating a shark, if only because it understood that the presentation of the effect is just as important as the effect itself.
#1. Big Effects Sequences Are Supposed To Be Treated With Awe
I didn't care for the new, ultra-serious take on the laser-breathing dinosaur we normally call Godzilla. But, to his credit, director Gareth Edwards clearly knew how to present larger-than-life monsters as having the gravity and consequence that 100-foot sea beasts trying to find a quiet place to bump nasties would have:
Godzilla, King Of The Cockblockers!
I get why people liked this film, even though it's not what I personally wanted from a Godzilla movie -- which until now was always about stupidly in-your-face, unobscured monster-on-monster violence. That said, Edwards' sense of buildup and dread is exactly what should have been in the new Jurassic World -- a film trying to follow up a classic prehistoric monster romp with only 14 minutes of actual romping.
Since having lumbering dinosaurs fighting world-fukking aliens inside a giant robot head has become so stupidly achievable, it's really easy for movies to forget how terror-shyt inducing those things would be in real life. And since we have a tendency to constantly shorthand pop culture staples, it's only natural to skip over the awe part of a special effect. The time it takes for Optimus Prime to transform for the first time in each Transformers film goes from 40 seconds in the first movie, to 10 seconds in the second, to five seconds in the third.
Which coincidentally mirrors the exact time used for creating each plot.
By the new one, it's easy to completely forget the spatial absurdity and scale of watching a bright red semi explode into a giant bipedal robot. We just sort of gloss over this mind-bending space colossus' shapeshifting dance until the action is reduced to a flurry of colors narrated by racist catchphrases.
The original Jurassic Park spent minutes on the Tyrannosaurus' approach. When we finally see it, we spend another several minutes on the thunderous horror of a dinosaur tearing a jeep apart as it frantically tries to eat all of the characters on-screen. The Lost World repeated this in the scene where the Tyrannosaurs knock Jeff Goldblum's trailer off a cliff, and even dumb ol' Jurassic Park III spent a lot of time on showing us exactly how much of an airplane's ass a giant dinosaur would kick (answer: all of it). Now look at this ungodly shyt:
Universal Studios
"A Michael Bay-ing 65 Million Years In The Making."
Sure, that looks pretty awesome, but destruction on that scale should blow our fukking minds. The response to dinosaurs wrecking a helicopter should be nothing short of paralysis, but this scene has no sense of gravity or consequence. There's no scale to it. There's even going to be a scene where (minor spoilers) a Pteranodon picks up a woman and literally drops her into the mouth of the Mosasaurus. It doesn't matter how real the CGI looks, because that scene belongs in a fukking Sharknado movie. It's an absurd cartoon orgy.
And so that's why some people are saying that the new Jurassic World "looks fake": The CGI is powerful, but the people who made it clearly don't have enough respect for that power. I know I'm just quoting Malcolm at this point ... but shyt. They really were so preoccupied with whether or not they could have 88 dinosaurs throwing exploding helicopters at each other that they didn't stop to think if they should.
Dave can be found lurking aimlessly on Twitter if you're so inclined to say hello.
mbewane
Knicks: 93 til infinity
@Napoleon those two posts really put it clearer : since everything is possible with CGI, the most crazy stuff appears normal, so obviously after a few years of CGI we are all blasé . Basically, we've really seen it all.
Also, I always feel that lacking something forces creativity, in whatever field you're in. Like they say in the article, you had to mask the shytty special effects by working on other stuff : the script, and even more the atmosphere and the anticipation. These are the two elements that are severely lacking nowadays imo : I firmly believe that us humans need a part of mystery, we like it when we kind of have to guess, when everything isn't obviously blatant. That's why books are usually better than the adapted movied, because with books you can use your imagination. That's why some of the best horrors movies are those where you hardly even see blood or violence. I believe we have this part in us that needs to NOT SEE everything, but rather "feel it" or "anticipate it". It's really kind of like sex in a way : eroticism has been replaced by pornography. There's no guessing/imagination/build-up anymore.
I'll go even further : the fact that these movies (and culture in general) show us all and leave no place for the imagination means we don't use our imagination anymore. In turn, I believe that we are getting more and more scared of the unknown (since we believe that we can see/hear/read everything now, also "thanks" to social media, and what we don't is that much scarier, when it used to be the norm) and also have less and less original ideas, whether it be for the arts or even of imagining news ways of living together. Everything now is "perfecting" what already exists. Again, my theory is still not very clear but I believe there's something there.
I actually read a philosophy book on this, funny to see it applies to movies too.
Also, I always feel that lacking something forces creativity, in whatever field you're in. Like they say in the article, you had to mask the shytty special effects by working on other stuff : the script, and even more the atmosphere and the anticipation. These are the two elements that are severely lacking nowadays imo : I firmly believe that us humans need a part of mystery, we like it when we kind of have to guess, when everything isn't obviously blatant. That's why books are usually better than the adapted movied, because with books you can use your imagination. That's why some of the best horrors movies are those where you hardly even see blood or violence. I believe we have this part in us that needs to NOT SEE everything, but rather "feel it" or "anticipate it". It's really kind of like sex in a way : eroticism has been replaced by pornography. There's no guessing/imagination/build-up anymore.
I'll go even further : the fact that these movies (and culture in general) show us all and leave no place for the imagination means we don't use our imagination anymore. In turn, I believe that we are getting more and more scared of the unknown (since we believe that we can see/hear/read everything now, also "thanks" to social media, and what we don't is that much scarier, when it used to be the norm) and also have less and less original ideas, whether it be for the arts or even of imagining news ways of living together. Everything now is "perfecting" what already exists. Again, my theory is still not very clear but I believe there's something there.
I actually read a philosophy book on this, funny to see it applies to movies too.
Bruce LeRoy
All Star
It's not just action flicks.. it's horror flicks as well.
I don't think these directors today use practical effects anymore because they take up too much time and the studios don't have the patience or want to waste money on using up that time. Remember reading that the makeup for the werewolf scene in the OG Fright Night flick took up to 18 hours to do just for the makeup and the scene they used it for was less than 5 minutes. Same with a movie like Robocop that suit took hours to get done.
I don't think these directors today use practical effects anymore because they take up too much time and the studios don't have the patience or want to waste money on using up that time. Remember reading that the makeup for the werewolf scene in the OG Fright Night flick took up to 18 hours to do just for the makeup and the scene they used it for was less than 5 minutes. Same with a movie like Robocop that suit took hours to get done.
notPsychosiz
I started this gangsta sh-
It depends on what you are simulating.
Its way cheaper to use dye packs and syrups to simulate blood for a shooter flick, but it might be cheaper to go greenscreen on a dino flick instead of trying to build huge animatronic dinosaurs and hire teams of puppeteers.
Or it might be more cost effective to render a full cgi pegasus than tryna build a prosthetic wing suit to fit onto a horse which doesnt want to wear it and adds two weeks to filming to get it to cooperate. And you are screwed if the horse gets hurt or breaks it...
The real problem is studios just default to cgi now for stuff that could of been done with actual fabrication instead of even trying at all.
Some of the best effects to date were real props with no cgi, like from the films Alien and The Thing.
StraxStrax
I'm selling these fine leather jackets
This thread
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