Why Special Effects No Longer Impress

brumgrunt writes "When an advert for toilet roll now has a CG dog in it, have we come to the point where special effects have no lasting impact whatsoever? As Den of Geek argues, 'Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic.'"

Comments

Cars?

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you gasped at a car driving next to you? Yeah, people get used to technology.

Re:Cars?

[FooAtWFU]

I posit that special effects are like other kinds of art, now. No one is really "amazed" that you can put together some oil paints and come up with a picture. However, Starry Night is still widely recognized as some mighty fine artwork. It's what you do with it.

The folding city in Inception looked cool. No one was surprised that they could get it to look cool. For that you'll still need to look at things like Avatar et cetera. (Also very shiny, by the way. Total eye candy.)

Re:Cars?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Special effects aren't special when they're in every scene.

Re:Cars?

[theIsovist]

I'd also argue that inception was impressive because several of the special effects rely on physical techniques. The spinning hallway really was spinning during filming, which might not seem that important, but it means that we have a real system in place for rules. Gravity is never lost during that shot, which often happens in pure CG special effects. everyone's movements happen as naturally as we'd expect them to in that situation. When you replace with CG, you're likely to forget to add small details that the audience will notice consciously or subconsciously, breaking the experience.

Re:Cars?

[gknoy]

More importantly, often the best special effects are the ones that are NOT visually glamorous. For example, in Forrest Gump, they did some awesome stuff to make Gary Sinise look like he'd had his leg(s?) amputated. It was amazing. It was nearly invisible in the movie. If I hadn't known that Gary Sinise had both his legs, I'd have thought they had hired an actor without legs.

Re:Cars?

[PopeRatzo]

That you use a horror film in a discussion of CGI effects demonstrates just how thoroughly fooled most people are.

CGI appears in far more than horror and sci-fi genres. It shows up in dramas, comedies and everything in between. It's used to take age lines off a thirty-something actress. It's used to brighten daylight and make rain look real. It's used to enhance the look of water and it's used in practically every shot that takes place inside a car. It's used to change scenery and to add or remove extras from a crowd scene.

I still maintain that you miss most of the CGI effects that you see.

Poor Michael Bay

[dominion]

Does this mean that directors actually have to focus instead on character development, plot, and pacing?

Re:Poor Michael Bay

[maxwell demon]

No, it means directors have to focus on 3D. That's still new enough.

Good

[Sarten-X]

Now filmmakers will focus on compelling stories, complex characters, and complete worlds, right? Right? Please?

Re:Good

[camperdave]

That's the thing with 3D. It keeps popping up.

Actually, I'd say it's worse than that

[0123456]

I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?

Re:Actually, I'd say it's worse than that

[TooMuchToDo]

"but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound"

Sir, I do think I'd pay to see that.

Re:Actually, I'd say it's worse than that

[MBCook]

I've been modding in this thread, but forget it. I want to post on this.

This is my big problem. I recently saw Indiana Jones & The Crystal Skull. I knew it wasn't going to be very good, but I was still amazed at two parts of the movie.

The first is when he was first being lead into the warehouse where all the artifacts are being stored. They have a show showing him walking in through the big doors, and in the background is a 20-30ft piles of boxes, made in CGI. Did you not have the budget in your $100m movie to buy boxes? Wait! You did. You piles of them 5 minutes later. I get you don't want to recreate the whole warehouse, but a single pile of boxes? It was pathetic.

At the same time the 'crystal skull' in the movie not only does not look like the real crystal skull but in fact looks like someone balled up palstic wrap and then poured resin around it. You couldn't have a few pieces of high quality glass blown? You couldn't have used the CGI for the skulls?

The CGI is applied in so many of the wrong places. The final scenes are very well done, as were the ants, but why keep spending the budget on making groundhogs look at Indy or troupes of monkeys playing Tarzan in a scene that TOTALLY breaks any suspension of disbelief.

I'm used to CGI. It takes a ton to impress me. But a good motorcycle chase that isn't all CGI and blue-screen will go a lot farther because I can tell they actually did it.

Heck, I suppose I'm lucky the quicksand in KotCS wasn't pure CGI. Stupid Lucas.

Technological Improvements Taken for Granted

[eldavojohn]

"Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic."

Right and we also used to sit and stare in awe as a person used a phone from their car to make a phonecall. Now if a call is dropped we curse whatever carrier we have even though the sheer concept of what that signal is going through is borderline witchcraft. And so help me god if that signal drops to one bar. I act as if that communication capability is some inalienable right.

Any technology developed for one generation can now be taken for granted almost instantly instead of taking several generations for gratitude to ebb. Seriously, you could build a machine that extends life indefinitely through five minutes of use each day and people will complain that one model tingles more than another. And if it stops working, they'll flock to the internet to complain that their life was shortened. And if their internet isn't working, some company just violated the Geneva Conventions.

As computers (both general and special) become more powerful, you'll see this is in movies more and more. It's going to be like sound recording. Decent recording equipment is so cheap you can record a passable album in your basement. We expect decent CGI now that it's relatively cheap. Terminator 2 was the most expensive movie to make when it came out. Wouldn't be the same price today. I could sit here thinking of comparisons all day.

I guess I would question the author with simply: "Where did you draw the line and why?" He talks about 30 years of special effects but, yeah, 30 years in any lucrative field or market would see some drastic progressive changes like this.

Re:Technological Improvements Taken for Granted

[DoofusOfDeath]

Right and we also used to sit and stare in awe as a person used a phone from their car to make a phonecall.

I still do! These days I expect to see drivers texting.

All the time! STOP

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm from 1890, you insensitive clod! STOP

FULL STOP

Re:All the time! STOP

[M. Baranczak]

The invisible baby horses under the hood love sugar. You can feed them through that special tube on the side of the car, just behind the doors.

Biggest problem is photography and edits

[gilesjuk]

My biggest problem is not the masses of CGI, it is the insistence of directors or photography directors that the camera has to fly around all over the place.

I would much rather have nice composed shots, nice panning shots. I don't want millions of different angles and machine gun edits (lots of edits per second).

So many films seem the same due to the above.

Re:Biggest problem is photography and edits

[andyr86]

The only really impressive technique in film making these days is the 'long take' where a whole scene is shot from end to end without a tone of edits. Hard Boiled has a great long take right at the end. Personally i think photography has gone down hill in the last decade, no one seems to care about colour, light and shade anymore. Why bother when you are going to screw it all up in post anyway.

Ubiquity

[eepok]

It's called ubiquity. Once something, ANYTHING, is ubiquitous, it is then assumed to be normal, common, and easy.

And science fiction got there first.

[sehlat]

Robert A. Heinlein, in his 1950 essay "Where to?" mentioned as a law of nature that a nine-day wonder is taken as a matter of course on the tenth day, and Frederic Brown, in his 1954 story "Preposterous" told of a man who lives in a future so advanced even we haven't gotten there, and that man took for granted things like the "Fourth Martian War" and the "Immortality Center" who ridiculed science fiction and at the end of the story, "he quirtled."

Consider this: I was born in 1949, the year the transistor was invented. A few years ago, I realized I had on my person 1. a cell phone. 2. A PalmPilot and 3: a 60Gigabyte iPod. I suddenly realized that all of that represented more transistors, more raw digital storage, and more raw computer processing power put together than existed on all Earth the year I was born, and probably for several years after that.

What surprised me wasn't that I took these items for granted, but that, essentially, I was wearing them as part of my clothing.

crapy movies

[cuby]

Lately, movies seem like an excuse to show special effects with no regard for plot.

Re: Mod parent up

[vlm]

how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?

Allocating all the funds towards "yet another explosion" instead of ... well virtually all other expenses.

Realistic vs pretty

[Dan East]

There are two levels to visual effects. One is what you see. The detail, the quality, the lighting, texturing, etc. In other words, how realistic it merely looks, which is more art than anything. The second is the physics and mechanics of whatever is being portrayed. That is where most movies screw it all up.

Everyone keeps mentioning Avatar, but it's not just how pretty it looks, but the physics and mechanics are all at least superficially realistic. Machines are bulky and slow moving, animals are organic and subtle, etc.

I'll name a few movies that totally screw up the special effects. Oh, they look nice, but the physics are so over the top that it destroys the movie.
One is Van Helsing. Tons of potential in that movie, but they screwed up the mechanics of the effects horribly. One scene shows the heroine being carried up in the air by a winged vampire and dropped. She flops around like a rag doll in such a ridiculous way that it literally insulted the parts of my brain hardwired to process physics.
Another is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Again, wonderful visuals and attention to detail, but the part where buildings in Venice fell like dominoes, and the method they used to stop it was to fire a guided missile (in the year 1899) to knock down even more buildings? Jumped the shark right then and there.
Transformers was yet another. Somehow the robot's mass and bulk would quadruple when converting from a vehicle into a robot. Just didn't feel right, although it was intricate and detailed.

So I think that's why special effects typically don't impress, because they lack the engineering (in a literal sense!) required to underpin effects to at least a token level of realism.

Re:Yes they do Impress

[Locke2005]

Avatar was a good story, a compelling story that drew you into it, even without the effects. That despite the fact that with the exception of the biologically evolved 'net, there really weren't and new ideas in the entire plot line. The ideas were unoriginal, but put together exceedingly well.

This is why I like Jackie Chan movies...

[tompaulco]

I am much more impressed watching Jackie Chan do nearly superhuman stunts than watching other actors on wires doing actual superhuman stunts. I cannot stand watching martial artists flying hundreds of feet into the air while kicking the crap out of each other or swordfighting. I'd much rather watch Jackie Chan scale a 12 foot fence using only his own power.

Forrest Gump

[Stele]

As others have pointed out, good stories seem much harder to come by these days.

I think back fondly to Forrest Gump - a movie CHOCK FULL of "special effects", none of them "visible". Every one added something to the story or visual style of the movie in a totally realistic way.

I think Transformers 2 finally confirmed for me that stuff blowing up wasn't enough. Why someone bothered to make The Expendables I have no idea.

Re: Mod parent up

[Chris Burke]

I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?

In the same way vodka ruins Bob's personality. Of course it's actually Bob's problem, and vodka is just a neutral tool that can be used for bad or for awesome, but it would still miss part of the point to ignore the vodka's role in enabling Bob to start sucking. Before vodka came along, Bob was okay most of the time. Well, some of the time.

Just to be clear, when we (or I) say "VFX are ruining movies", we are blaming it on the lack of creativity of Hollywood. It's just unfortunate yet true that the existence of affordable and good VFX allows that lack of creativity to flourish.

There's a lot to be said for limitations and how it can make movies better.

Look at Jaws, Spielberg's breakout movie. Think of how horrifying the opening scene is, when you never even see the shark as the woman is (you presume, under the water) being torn apart. How often that movie is positively compared to Hitchcock, the master of suspense. Yet that's not the movie Spielberg set out to make! Originally, it was going to be a crappy monster movie in the ocean with Jaws front and center the whole time literally chewing up the scenery. But because they couldn't get their giant hydraulic-powered animatronic shark to work in salt water (the ocean's just a big wavy lake, right?), he had to make adjustments and go for a much subtler, and ultimately more effective, style.

Or the biggest example of something "ruined by VFX": Star Wars. Lucas luurved his effects even back then and Star Wars had the best around. But nevertheless, they couldn't afford to do endless lightsaber effects so we only had a few instances of them being used heavily in dramatically important moments, and so they were more awesome. He couldn't have a million jedi and robots and lasers to make them all stupid and boring. He had to have real locations and sets that looked real and that actors could interact with. He had to have character moments because he couldn't fill the entire movie with action sequences to make you forget that you didn't care about anyone on screen. Hell, maybe the only reason we didn't have a bouncing spinning light saber Yoda in Empire was because there was no way for him to do that on the end of Jim Henson's hand. Well, that and Lucas had little to do with that movie...

Anyway.

I know it's not the VFX studio's fault that so much VFX is used in place of actual good ideas and story and character. It would be completely ridiculous to blame you for doing your work better, faster, cheaper. But uh, that's exactly what enabled a lot of this crap. It would be completely ridiculous to say VFX companies shouldn't accept checks from the producers of crappy movies, but uh, that's exactly what you'll have to start doing if you don't want to hear "VFX are ruining movies" anymore.

Hey, actually, I never thought to ask that... Do effects companies ever turn down work? Good actors will turn down work, because they don't want their name associated with some piece of crap. Maybe if only the directors with talent or just good ideas got to work with the best VFX, maybe something positive would happen. *shrug* I don't know.

I must be confused

[fyngyrz]

I don't watch movies to "be impressed by special effects." I watch them to enjoy the story. The better the effects get, and the more they can use them whenever they need them, the more latitude they'll have in telling stories. I've seen the insides of huge spaceships (starship troopers, various treks, star wars), ancient cities (various movies have shown Egypt as she might have been), whole planets (avatar)... dragons, aliens, and who knows what I've seen that I didn't even know were CGI... geez, what's not to like? If I never see another TV-show class "alien" with an obviously glued on nose and caked-on makup, that'll be just fine with me. And when the time comes, as I hope it will, to put Niven's Ringworld on the big screen -- or even just a General Products spacecraft hull (or a Puppeteer!) -- I'll be expecting some faaaaabulous CGI. Likewise the next time someone seriously does a WWII naval or air battle, or a martian landscape, or magic, or... Why *would* you use real stuff these days, even presuming "real stuff" applies to the story at hand?

If people are watching movies to be impressed, I guess they must have some motivation really different than mine. Not to say that sometimes I'm not actually impressed - but that's not what I lay money down for, that's for certain. Tell me a story. Do it well. Convince my eyes; convince my ears; do it so well that I don't have to suspend my disbelief, just go around it and immerse me in what, as best I can tell, is some kind of reality, Please sir, may I have another?

Bitching because CGI is too good, or widespread? Incomprehensible to me.