The Wrath of Tron

How CGI Is Ruining Movies

BY MOLLY LAMBERT

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Illustration by
Fruitcake Lady

AS CHILDREN OF the digital revolution, we've grown up alongside computer animation. Computer Generated Imagery, better known as CGI, has now rendered old-school effects virtually obsolete. When used sparingly, CGI can be an asset. But we're in a pretty Baroque age right now, and the "more is more" philosophy has brought CGI into every corner of film. And not necessarily for the better.

Rosario Dawson's Career Is The Best Special Effect Of All.

I recently saw two films that demonstrated the enormous effect CGI has had on film in the past twenty years. The first one was Return to Oz, a big-budget Disney live-action relic from the '80s, full of old fashioned special effects. The other was Sin City, where everything but the actors is a special effect, despite the fact that the film is rooted in the usually explosions-lite and dialogue-heavy noir genre. Neither one of these movies is particularly great, but as historical documents they both show what I will take as my inarguable stand: CGI does not yet look as believable as traditional special effects.

Sin City will be remembered not for its plot or characters (which are as thin as Jessica Alba's ass is round) but for the way its CGI creates the entire visual aesthetic of the movie. The gorgeous digital images, taken as much as possible directly from Frank Miller's castration-obsessed comic novellas, lends it a German Expressionist tone that fits perfectly with its noir look. Yet director Robert Rodriguez wastes all this visual potential by exactly replicating the witless and misogynistic comic down to the last detail. Using the latest in computer artistry, Sin City succeeds in creating a world so visually stunning and absorbing, you almost don't notice that although the landscapes are now 3-D, the plot, character, and dialogue are as one-dimensional as it gets.

In 1985's "Return to Oz," another dark fantasy fable (and yes, Sin City, where mind-bendingly hot chicks clamber to fuck old psychopaths, is a fantasy film) combines the plots of Frank L. Baum's first two sequels to his children's tome The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A costly failure for Disney, the film pulls out all the stops in an effort to inspire shock and awe. Puppets, stop-motion animations, miniatures, and bluescreens are all trotted out. The hokey imagineering stands up to modern viewing. An animatronic chicken is particularly lifelike. Impressively detailed sets and matte background paintings add to the film's lavish look. Jim Henson's creature shop made all the puppets, during their string of poorly-received and later-revived films such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. The most dated effects in the film are the make-up and a few animated explosions that don't look quite right. The claymation and stop-motion looks jerky, as it always does, and it is here that I realized the mistake studios are making. While a sequence that would traditionally require claymation or stop-motion generally benefits from being in CGI, it's when CGI attempts to substitute for what could be done as a "live" effect that it flounders. As traditional animation is phased out of American studios in favor of computer animation, and traditionally time-consuming fantasy special effects are swapped for faster and cheaper CGI, the question has to be asked, is CGI really any better than traditional effects? When it comes to fabricating realism, CGI appears to have gotten worse even as the technology gets better.

The Bi-Polar Express

Until 1981's forgotten dud Looker, which featured the first computer animated character in a feature film, CGI was used only for computerized sequences that occurred on monitors or for titles. In 1982, Disney brought us the jean-creaming snuff for pock-marked lonely-hearts, Tron. Supposed to herald the arrival of computer graphics in film, it did a huge belly flop and killed computer animation's mainstream prospects for another decade. Tron has since found a cult audience with modern viewers who don't really mind that their movie looks like a video game, having grown up playing them. As per usual, studios were afraid to experiment with production formulas that they believed wouldn't make money, and if they thought audiences didn't want to see computer graphics, they sure as hell weren't going to pour cash into the then very costly technology. CGI sequences trickled out of films throughout the following years.

And then in 1993 came Jurassic Park, which changed all the rules that studios had learned from Tron. With Jurassic Park, CGI became a prestige element. Combining the latest in CGI with old-fashioned animatronics, Steven Spielberg brought us a spectacle that actually lived up to its hype. The biggest innovation in special effects since King Kong, audiences couldn't get enough of the movie's heavily touted velociraptors. So much fuss was made about how realistic the dinosaurs looked that hardly any fuss was made at all about how very unrealistic the CGI looked when compared with the animatronics. You can still tell what is computer-animated and what is a puppet but it is edited so well that you can just accept that there are fucking DINOSAURS man and they are PISSED. It seemed so exciting. In 1995, Pixar created the first perfect computer animated feature, Toy Story, showing how well CGI could be used when it was used to reflect an invented reality rather than simulate the actual world. The closer to realism it attempts to venture, the clearer this becomes. The new technology was going to make all sorts of crazy things possible. It was going to change film forever. And it did. But not like I'd hoped.

In 1999, the atrocity known as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was released. Because I've never been an anemic and frangible 14-year-old boy, I can't imagine the sort of heartbreak one might feel seeing their memories of Star Wars past so thoroughly raped and laundered for cash. The Phantom Menace signaled that CGI films had entered an age of excess, and The Lost World Jurassic Park II demonstrated that more CGI was not necessarily better (even though it still made a trillion dollars). Jurassic Park II boasted more dinosaurs, but the thrill was already wearing off, and like most special effects, the more often you were shown CGI, the less astounding it became. Films like Godzilla and Armageddon showed that CGI, when used as a major plot element, just couldn't stand in for reality, even the simulated reality of miniatures and blue-screens. And then there's Pearl Harbor, Jurassic Park III and that Planet of The Apes remake. The conventional wisdom had somehow become that it was the CGI that sold tickets, not a well developed plot or convincing characters.

George Lucas, for one, seems to agree that more CGI is better. But the effects of his filming techniques, using bluescreen exclusively with the occasional live actor or prop, are truly alienating to viewers. When we see CGI over and over again in a film, its fakeness completely overrides any sense of "reality" in the movie. CGI works best when it's invisible. The longer it's exposed, the more it starts to look like Pete's Dragon. Jar Jar Binks, who was created solely for the purpose of having an all CGI character, doesn't register as existing in the same plane of reality as the other characters. Simply put, animation does not look like reality enough to substitute for a reality in a film, even when that reality is part of a fantasy world. At this point in CGI's development, it doesn't simulate realism as well as an animatronic puppet. Promising fantasy films like Harry Potter suffer from the CGI glut. Computer effects are piled on in every frame when they should have been used as a seasoning.

And I Haven't Even Mentioned The Cat In The Hat

There's the occasional beautiful exception like Pirates of the Carribean, which made a gorgeous argument for CGI by seamlessly combining it with traditional stunts and special effects (not to mention storytelling and script). Limiting CGI to the ghost pirates, they perfected the animated element of the film, and gave each pirate skeleton a discernible personality and look (as opposed to the generic CGI armies seen in practically every movie these days). The desire to outpace the technology is strong, but as CGI becomes more and more common, it's become a lazy stand-in for non-virtual effects. Films that combine the new technology with the old (like other successful examples The Matrix and Lord of the Rings), rather than eschewing it completely, could advance special effects to a level more fantastical and believable. There's still hope for the future. The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy looks promising, and War of the Worlds, a Steven Spielberg joint, drops this summer. And despite the plethora of shitty comic book movies with bad CGI (see: Daredevil, The Hulk, Constantine), sometimes, if you're the X-Men, it looks okay.

Since it's a sure bet that CGI is sticking around, here's hoping either the technology gets better soon or filmmakers learn to integrate old-fashioned effects into the new methods. CGI dates incredibly fast because the technology is constantly improving. Even Spider-Man, a pretty good film bested by its much better sequel, has the basic problem that the CGI Spider-Man will never look as real as a stuntman would. The way the character is animated is embarrassingly bad for a film that has such otherwise high production values. The split-second Spidey becomes a guy in a suit is still so glaring. On a more basic level, CGI simply invokes less wonder than traditional effects because there is no question of how the effects were done. We always know how they were done: in a computer.

I'm not sure CGI will ever get to a point where it's indistinguishable from reality. It's here to stay, and we'll surely slog through some more terrible CGI (Fantastic Four, I'm looking at you) before studios realize that it's the storytelling in the blockbusters that use CGI, not the CGI itself, that sells films-if they ever do. If not, I'll see you all in line for Revenge of the Sith.

Molly Lambert B'05 wants your skull, you fucking nerd

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