A common meme seems to be that CGI special effects are ruining modern films. This seems to have received a recent boost with Jackson’s CGI extravaganza of The Battle of the Five Armies getting panned and J.J. Abrams promising that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going back to basics with more models and practical effects.
Laying aside the fact that the former assertion is often confidently proffered by Middle Earth fans who have apparently forgotten that Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings films were also laden with CGI effects, I feel compelled to point out that this meme is bullshit: The reasons the Star Wars prequels and Jackson’s Hobbit movies were mediocre films is primarily because their scripts are badly flawed. And, I’m going to be frank with you, the CGI didn’t write the scripts.
A related meme is that practical effects are somehow “timeless” while CGI effects age badly.
Bad special effects always look dated. Great special effects are always timeless.
People watch crappy 1950’s films and say, “Wow, these special effects look super-dated.” But nobody watches Citizen Kane or The Day the Earth Stood Still and says that.
The xenomorph in Alien looks fantastic… but it’s just a guy in a rubber suit. And there are plenty of examples of guys in rubber suits that look ridiculous.
The same is true of CGI: When it’s done well, it’s great. When it’s done poorly, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Beowulf sticks in my head as an example of CGI aging well. Because it was entirely CG it doesn’t jar like many other films. Other examples would be LoTR and District 9. Though possibly these films are just not old enough for it to be noticeable yet.
Case in point: first Jurassic Park movie.
Agreed the Hobbit scripts leave a lot to be desired, but there are many CGI shots throughout the trilogy that really could have done with some more work.
Plants and trees are particularly bad – and not just the final shading and modelling: the distribution of the vegetation on the ground very often looked somehow unnatural – see the fir trees before the doors of Erebor, or the silly little swamp/pond/reeds at the borders of Mirkwood.
Too many green-screen close-ups with CGI sky (and sometimes, action) backgrounds being very obvious due to lighting/comping mismatch: the flashback battle at the gates of Moria in the first film really looks bad, way too ‘300’-looking (as bad as the extended Fellowship of the Ring shot with Isildur putting on the ring before diving into the river).
Dol Goldur: more CG trees with horribly ‘smooth’ polygonal branches, and just not enough grit anywhere: the tracking shots looking down on orcs scurrying into the fortress show foot-paths and terrain that could be simple texture+bumpmap, with not a 3D pebble to be seen.
Nonetheless, full of sins though the movies are, I happily inject the places and imagery they reveal into my own head-canon, and Tolkien’s original written words are magnified by it, rather than tainted.
A note on commenting, I’ve discovered that this blog will refuse to accept comments if the browsers’ referer setting is disabled, with a misleading notice about caching. I can accept the limitation in terms of fighting spam, but maybe a warning along with the ‘Turing test’ checkbox?
Otherwise, I’m eagerly awaiting more of the UrbanCrawl series!
The Hobbit scripts aren’t the real issue. It’s the editing. Stretching out a modest-sized book until three movies guarantees you’ll have padding, and the most obvious way to pad is to have moar effectz!@!@!
Come to think of it, the editing is a big issue with the Star Wars prequels as well. George lost more than money when Marcia split. Jedi has a downright awful script, but she edited it well, so only the second half of the movie sucked.
On the heavy use of CGI in the Star Wars prequels, it should be noted here that the prequels made heavy use of practical effects throughout, rather than CGI – so much so that “extraordinary” doesn’t quite cut it – “incredible” seems more appropriate. See this thread on theforce.net for a vast amount of detail: http://boards.theforce.net/threads/practical-effects-in-the-prequels-sets-pictures-models-etc.50017310/
With that in mind, I get very suspicious about the talk about practical effects in Episode VII – I will eat my hat if that movie doesn’t contain more CGI than the entire Prequel Trilogy put together. What Abrams is putting out there smacks very much to me of nerd-baiting, making a smokescreen of carefully crafted and targeted publicity to build hype amongst the internet fan crowd who have whipped themselves into a rage over the prequels. In that vein I question also the degree to which Lawrence Kasdan is really involved in the script – I figure it’s not more than the bare minimum to be able to namedrop him to the same crowd.
Which I suppose I should be fair, none of which is remotely close to an actual condemnation of a film eleven months from release, just that I feel that so far I have little confidence that the hype Abrams is trying to build has real substance behind it.
(A quick thought on the prequels; I think that while the PT was deeply flawed, much of Lucas’s underlying ideas were strong – particularly in the collapse of the authority of the Jedi Order, as engineered by one S. Palpatine, tied together with the political strength of the Republic and the character of Anakin Skywalker.)
That said, from the teaser so far, I don’t think I have anything to complain about yet with regards to how the movie looks – and I fully expect JJ Abrams to keep up to the standards of the last two Star Trek movies and I think those have held up pretty damn well in my eyes, visually at least – there are loads of shots that I love out of both films. I’m certainly not skeptical that the movie will look bad.
Writing, well, especially with the recent news that Disney mostly tossed Lucas’s story ideas for The Force Awakens – we’ll see, I suppose.
For me, at least, a lot of the difference between Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit just comes down to the source material.
I really liked the Hobbit growing up and, on reread, still think it’s pretty fun. The Lord of the Rings is something I was always supposed to like as a budding gamer, but were an unenjoyable slog to read.
The Hobbit movies are a pretty good adaptation that fixes some legitimate problems with the original. Actually giving Bard characterization and foreshadowing so the death of Smaug has some weight, for example.
The Lord of the Rings movies, on the other hand, were freeing the world Tolkien had created from the prose it had been trapped in. We should be thankful for that, rather than ragging on the Hobbit for not needing the same treatment.
All that said, there were a few points during the Hobbit moves that they used effects that jolted me out of the movie. But it wasn’t a question of CGI vs. practical, so much as “why did you do that?”
Cheers!
Kinak
Kinak wrote: “The Lord of the Rings movies, on the other hand, were freeing the world Tolkien had created from the prose it had been trapped in.”
Eh. I’m fairly skeptical that much was gained by “freeing” it from some of the best prose writing of the 20th century and moving it into some fairly mediocre movies.
I think many recent movies forget that special effects work best when the audience does not get an opportunity to study the effect in detail. An illusion that works on the first look does not hold up well on the second and falls apart at the third or fourth.
The Alien movies look amazing because you either see the aliens very briefly, conceiled by shadows, or so close that you see only a very small part of the whole creature.
It also helps to distract the audience by concentrating on the real footage. Too many recent movies are all “look at this effect! Here, look at it! Take a close look at all these little details we added. Look how good they look.” And then you see that it’s obviously CGI unless it’s extremely well made. The “boss monsters” in the Lord of the Rings movies were such high quality. The masses of soldiers tended to always look pretty cheap and blurry.
I’m more than willing to accept that I’m the weird one here, because I’ve spent decades being told that I’m supposed to love the Lord of the Rings.
But, while I’ll nostalgically reread the Hobbit and I think the Silmarillion is amazing on a lot of levels, I’ll take the movies we got over the Lord of the Rings novels. Which I don’t say lightly and would not say about many book-movies.
If I had to describe my problem with the Lord of the Rings prose, I’d say that it’s “numbing.” After a few dozen pages, I don’t care about the characters, their world, or their plight. Then I set the book down for whatever reason and don’t even realize I’ve stopped reading it.
Obviously, other people have had very different experiences, but there was stuff I’d much rather read even back in the 1950s.
Cheers!
Kinak
I’m going to side with the meme but not because the effects are worse in CGI than practical effects. Rather, they allow the creators to become too lazy with their story writing, film editing, and scene composition. When they had to rely on models and other non-CGI technology, as Martin Kallies points out, shots were brief and suggestive – leaving it to the human brain to complete the image. With CGI, directors set out to wow the audience and sometimes they succeed, but often it just becomes self indulgent. The discipline they had to develop to make a practical effect seem real gets soft when the tools can accomplish anything.
My biggest disappointment with the Hobbit movies (I’ve only seen the first 2) was the reduced role Bilbo is given. In the books there is a huge amount of character development, but in the movies he seems to be an almost inconsequential character. The dwarves seem to suddenly be acrobats (as opposed to the gruff little hardy fellows they are usually made out to be). Overall it felt like an action movie borrowing the Hobbit’s name to boost its sales and really stretched to make three movies (I’m pretty sure 2 would have been more than adequate).