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Being old-enough to remember the live-action SpiderMan, and The Hulk TV shows; I was happy to see SUPERheros in multiple forms and mediums. One could argue that CGI is finally good enough to match with the imagination of the directors. And that's a very good thing.

I do however wish that other things were being produced. Heavy Sequel'ization of movies just leaves me bored.

The same can be said of the Star Trek franchises, and quite frankly anything more then "2" has grown tiring.

Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story. (In my heart Babylon5 pioneered grand-story telling.)

There are thousands of great books that would do well adapted to TV/Movies, I'd like to see some of these instead of another superhero flick.

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> I do however wish that other things were being produced

Here's a list of films produced in the US in 2020. I didn't count, but it looks to me like not much of it is superhero-based. And this is just the US, and ignores a lot of low budget / less notable films.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_films_of_2020

I get a bit frustrated by people complaining everything's a superhero movie or a sequel, when there are so many options they're ignoring.

Edit: If you only watch heavily advertised films, you're basically limiting yourself to films with mass, cross-continental appeal, which is inevitably going to be heavy on culturally-neutral stuff like big CGI fight scenes.

Whilst that is a useful list, that’s somewhat of a misnomer in isolation.

To provide a fuller comparison, you’d need to also incorporate: share of viewing (per title), average box office returns (per studio eg Marvel/Disney), number of articles in mainstream media, etc.

Why? Can we not assess the films produced by looking at the list of films produced? I'm not saying as many people watch or know about the other films. In fact that is precisely the reason I don't like it when people imply they don't exist.

You can, but the total output is not the same as that ‘consumed’ and the importance in this context is the influence, not the sheer output.

For example, it could be that 10% of the films on that list are produced but never released (studio dumps, legal issues between producers and creatives, etc).

Just look at the USA box office impact of Black Widow, and Shang-Chi. Only two films but a huge proportion of post-covid box office revenue.

It's obviously true that superhero films make a lot of money. I'm saying nevertheless, other films are produced, and it's possible to watch them, and thus "I wish other things were being produced" isn't a very reasonable complaint. Unless you're under some obligation to only watch high-earning movies. If people watched the non-superhero movies rather than complaining about their non-existence, maybe we'd get more of them.

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that money going to the mainstream is money denied to their preferences.

If Disney vanished from the world today, the dollars flowing to them wouldn't suddenly filter out to a bunch of niche and avant-garde media. There's some overlap, but people in that overlap are already into both things and funding them. The djent fans who also love a good radio-friendly bop are already buying djent albums on Bandcamp and listening to the radio-friendly bop on Spotify.

Many of those movies never make it out of the US or are locked up behind streaming portals. If a movie can't be found by its audience it might as well not exist.

I can't speak for every country but for me (in the UK) I think I'd run out of easily-watched superhero movies long before I ran out of easily-watched non-superhero movies, if my film-watching needs were that high.

Edit: Also the original complaint was about a supposed lack of non-superhero film production.

> Game of Thrones has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story.*

If you haven't already, check out The Expanse.

The book series is set to be finished with the final (9th) book being released this fall. The final (6th) season of the television series wrapped filming this past spring. (The discrepancy is because of a large time jump between the second and third 'sub-trilogies' in the novels.)

> One could argue that CGI is finally good enough to match with the imagination of the directors.

If anything the abuse of CGI leads to boring fighting scenes where you know everything is 100% fake. I'd rather they use much, much less of it.

That seems perfectly appropriate for superheros where the expectation is that no actor can even come close to what the character can do in-universe.

I hear ya but I agree with the comment above. I was a comic book kid, and love a lot of these characters. But I find these movies where the climax is just a bunch of cg puppets punching each other boring and formulaic.

If I had to pick a "uses superpowers action scene" from any of these movies over the years, it's probably still Magneto escaping the plastic prison. I like that scene because it shows the character isn't just powerful in a brute force way, but can do amazing things given even the slightest opportunity. Obviously they had an incredible actor in Ian MacKellen to sell it, but they also didn't need to turn him into some cg puppet to make a big impact scene. I feel like that more creative and subtle conception is missing from most of the more recent movies.

> But I find these movies where the climax is just a bunch of cg puppets punching each other boring and formulaic.

Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade said he liked the first Dr. Strange film because the ending was one in which things weren't resolved where one character punches another in face until submission/death. Dr. Strange negotiates.

Yeah, I'd totally agree with that. I liked that movie since Strange's arc was mostly about him conquering his inner turmoil, and because as powerful as Strange is, he has to use his brain to prevail.

Then I think about Tom Cruise's stunts especially in Mission: Impossible series. It got his own brand out of doing things more real. Similarly how Mad Max: Fury Road was received. Most also have very good writing (certainly not M:i-2).

It may be not superhuman by Marvel standards, but certainly are by real life standards. At the same time in superhero flicks they are often unable to do things they should be able to do, because they did something like it before. Also most humans, that do not posses super strength in those movies are fighting almost like equals with bunch of baddies.

Funny thing about Ethan Hunt from M:i is that his biggest super power is luck, like Rincewind from Discworld.

This is what makes some recent movies (like Mad Max Fury Road) so much more intense.

The director has intentionally decided to not use CGI for anything which can be done with real vehicles and real actors.

And unlike the Marvel superhero snore-fest, it actually looks and feels real, because it is real. And your mind can tell. This makes you actually care.

CGI is instead just used for matte painting, to touch up the scenes or scenery, rather than compose core of the shot. And the result looks brilliant.

So yeah. Less CGI please and more restraint.

It is a movie. It is all 100% fake whether it is CGI or involves real people fake fighting with the use of practical effects.

reminds me of Se7en, IIRC there's one gun shot in the movie, it's so surprising that it shocks way more than constant gun fights in other movies

I turned on Terminator Dark Fate today, and was totally bored with it. It was nothing more than hitting things, shooting things, blowing up things, and crashing things, without respite.

Should take away the graphics cards from the film crew.

I have a hard time distinguishing if the reason I find almost all new media content boring is because I am getting older and I have already seen a version of it, or if it is objectively overdone.

In an odd paradox, it seems to me that some of the best Marvel things are the ones that really lean into older tropes. Eg. Winter Soldier ('70s style conspiracy thriller), Logan (Classic western), Guardians of the Galaxy (jukebox musical).

Is that because those tropes are better or because the ones without recognizable tropes are just plain boring?

I suppose they're tried and tested formulas, that have become sufficiently unfamiliar that they stand out from their contemporaries. In 30 years maybe you could do the same with films about superheroes discovering their true inner strength and having a big CGI fight at the end.

> having a big CGI fight at the end

Before CGI, it was always the "climactic fight in the darkened warehouse" finale. It would go on and on, the machinery would get turned on at some point, the bad guy would have to be killed several times, etc. Oh, for a movie where people don't keep fighting after massive blows to their head, or are little affected by a shot in the shoulder, etc.

Free Fire is basically a whole film of that. To be honest it's great.

I've wondered that myself. But I have found some commonalities:

1. I like movies with witty dialog

2. I like movies with characters that are ambiguously good and bad, not good vs bad

3. I don't like movies that push an agenda, message, morals or propaganda

4. I don't want to sit through a movie about someone dying of some horrible disease

The good Vs bad thing is a point that I can't seem to get across to my friends who enjoy a certain type of movies. I want to be challenged and choose what is good or evil (preferably neither, reality is rarely so absolute) not just be dictated to.

Same with video games, in Fallout New Vegas you march into the bad guys (they are objectively bad people regardless) camp expecting some boss fight but if you listen he will make a reasoned and historically contextualised argument against democracy and liberalism.

Compare and contrast with a call of duty game where I run around in an "apolitical" simulation (read: simulacra) of war shooting anything that moves.

Much of my enjoyment of "Breaking Bad" and "The Shield" came from the moral ambiguity of the characters.

Upvoted for mentioning "The Shield" in this context.

That's why I really like Bourne movies vs the BS Marvel movies.

And let's not forget the obligatory scenes where you have the protagonist(s) beating up and killing hundreds of generic robot/alien/monster goons. Because you can't have graphic mass murder in a PG13 movie.

Hell, the Putty Patrollers had more character than these guys.

On a similar note, I recently decided to watch the Hobbit trilogy after rewatching LOTR for the 20th anniversary. Whereas everything had weight and tension in the original (up to a point), in the Hobbit everything is cranked up to 11 and it suffers from the exact same thing.

Every scene becomes a zergling rush vs 5 units with cheat mode turn on. There's an actual line in the last movie along the lines of "You go, there's only a 100 goblins, we can easily take them."

Legolas was a bit imba though.

There is no tension!

As an example, I remember how good the original Bourne Identity was!

One of the examples making that point is Star Wars. JJ's CGI heavy films almost killed the franchise, The Mandalorian, focusing on good story telling, using almost no CGI and having exactly the right amount of nostalgic moments (Clone Wars, the old extended universe) saved it. IMHO CGI is simply making film makers lazy, getting "epic" fight scenes is easy now, getting good story telling still is hard.

> The Mandalorian ... using almost no CGI

Um....

Edit: Just to elaborate, I'll note that when the first JJ film came out a lot of people's take was "thank God it's not an awful VFX fest like the prequels", despite it actually being vastly more VFX heavy. It's funny seeing this repeated.

The Mandalorian used CGI for sure. Background and a lot of other stuff was screens, as opposed to green screen, so. and it showed, the set was way more realistic than a pure CGI one. also, it had much less boom and bang for the effects only in it.

It's basically souped-up rear projection[1], which suits the "classic western" feel of the material really well. I'm not sure it's exactly "more realistic" - maybe we're just less used to seeing that look in 2021.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy68UCbcP3o&t=460s

Edit: To be clear this aspect is really about the way the elements are combined, rather than the way they're generated. The way they're generated is with vast amounts of CGI.

They apparently did a lot of the cgi in real time with an curved led wall and some version of unreal engine. They track the camera position so they can move the image on the screen to match properly and They only render high resolution what’s in the camera viewport and the other stuff just provides some nice realistic ambient light.

ILM video:

https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/the-mandalorian-was-s...

I simultaneously violently agree and violently disagree.

This is kind of my main beef with the Marvel stuff I've seen - they all end with these boring flying, shooting, punching VFX scenes, even if they started more interestingly (eg. WandaVision). But for me that's a writing choice, if they'd written something better we wouldn't have to sit through it, and if it'd been shot without VFX it'd still be boring. Complaining about the "CGI" is complaining about the wrong thing.

Nobody complained about the VFX in The Wolf of Wall Street. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocfRVAH9yU

But most fight scenes were fake, even before CGI. In fact, almost nobody ever gets hurt on set... and when people do get hurt, its in stunts (not the fight scenes).

The number of "realistic fight scenes" are incredibly slim. Chinese martial arts are mostly Wuxia: a branch of martial arts that was developed for stage performance (flips, spins, etc. etc.) that has very little practical relevance.

"Kung Fu" films (ie: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) reduce the number of filps... but even then, Jackie Chan's use of hilarious stage props is anything but realistic.

I mean: just imagine "Die Hard", no one can sustain that many injuries realistically and keep going. Its fake action, yes with practical effects / non-CGI (blood packs and stunts), but its still fantasy. And "Princess Bride" duel is fully ridiculous: with more flips and gymnastics than actual fighting (arguably the point: it was a comedy film making fun of tropes).

Anyone who has actually been in a fighting-sport (themselves mostly "fake", as duels took place centuries ago), will instantly recognize the bad form most of these older fight scenes had. Enemies charge the protagonist one at a time (yes: even in "practical" Kung Fu movies with few special effects)

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"Fake" is fine. But there's a lack of progression or understanding going on in a lot of the CGI-fight scenes. They're willing to spend tons of money on big explosions or special effects, but they don't always hit home with me.

The famous "Jackie Chan Ladder Fight" is a good example of a ridiculous fight scene, barely plausible. But its highly imaginative and has a great progression and rhythm. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4). I'm not here because I want to watch a realistic 4-person Bo-staff fight vs a single dude with a ladder (which would almost certainly result in the ladder-user in getting beaten up). I'm here to watch crazy stunts and imaginative fights.

The use of music / rhythm (notice how the fight is on beat to the soundtrack) increases the entertainment value. These little things should be easier in CGI, but somehow aren't being done.

The best part of Jackie Chan films is the blooper reel at the end where you get to see him handle real injury with grace and humor.

> But most fight scenes were fake, even before CGI.

There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.

We've broken new ground.

But I enjoy Dynasty Warriors / Wuxia / Dragonball Z!! (Or 300 if you prefer American)

Heck, I enjoy watching Yu-gi-oh with my nieces. It turns out that full fantasy fights with completely different sets of rules is certainly a genre. Sure, its a cartoon, but the entire point is that the fights progress by a completely different set of rules on purpose.

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> There's fake made with human actors, and there's "f--k it, just cut and paste 1000 zombies or robots in the next scene and make the heroes cut through them like butter" fake.

You mean like Star Wars stormtroopers? In something like 3 movies, they only ever land ~2 or 3-shots off on the main characters (R2D2 and Leia in the 3rd film IIRC).

I think about some older movies I've enjoyed: Star Trek, Flash Gordon, etc. etc. Plenty of "1000-to-1 odds" going on and yet I still enjoyed the film. Or Indiana Jones. The 1000-to-1 odds thing is basically an ancient trope: found in old epics / stories, and even movies from decades ago.

Im not in the film business, but it appears that cgi is a “resolved” problem. Quality storytelling and good screenwriting is not.

This! I am absolutely flabbergasted by the difference in the quality of the visual effects and acting when compared to the dialogue and storytelling.

I feel like the script is either intentionally dumbed down or that the script receives a disproportionately small part of the overall budget.

I think the reason is in theory. When you read movie analysis and contemporary writing advice, following them literally leads to those repetitive boring scripts.

They are not badly written, then are well written, but in tradition that is fundamentally stiff and don't allow complication.

If you are making a product that has an intended market of billions of people, it needs to have incredibly universal appeal. This is in direct opposition with producing a memorable piece of art.

That doesn't really make sense to me - a market of that size ought to have niches and market segmentation. After all, no matter how generic and broad-appealing the script is, I don't think my 60+ year old mother is going to get excited about the next Marvel movie.

Yes but if you're making a movie that costs $200m then it needs to target the average of the planets expectations for a movie to make money. Any divergence from that ends up confusing some of your target audience.

Sure this will end up turning off a bunch of people who have tastes that demand something more authentic, but you don't care about that because most peoples tastes are clustered around the mean.

Look at pop music for comparison. Or imagine the Apple of the 00s announcing Memoji as a feature.

A great example is Blade Runner 2049.

In my opinion, it is essentially a perfect movie. Fantastic music. Gorgeous sets. Great fight scenes. Good story. Interesting characters. Proper science fiction.

Most importantly, it stayed true to the original, while still having a novel story, that nonetheless touched on the theme of the original without being overly repetitive like the latest Disney-made Star Wars movies.

I thought the movie was basically genious, and I will now watch anything Dennis Villeneuve directs.

But if you listen to reviews by typical moviegoers, they panned the movie. "Too slow", "Boring", etc...

Interstellar similarly polarised viewers.

This is why most movies are made the way they are: to avoid negative reviews by the mass market viewers and hence to maximise profits.

Or to put it another way: Their only metric is ticket sales, not the level of your enjoyment. They don't get a cent more if the movie touches your soul.

It's a bell curve issue. Most of the audience is close to the centre. If you challenge them too hard and don't give them the roller coaster ride they're paying for and expecting, they get bored and tune out.

Subtlety and nuance are not the point. Big Dumb Movies are a theme park ride, and deliberately designed that way.

Precisely.

For example though, Interstellar is a convoluted mess, where the resolution depends on the unseen hand of the future humans (with the characters in the film having to take some risks to carry out the plan the future put into place...).

Nolan tends to do that though, wrapping science words around some magic thing that is needed to drive the plot.

Part of the problem is that writing a script is a logistical problem as well as a writing problem.

You have to account for actors maybe not being available, scenes getting cut, action scenes being shot early for various reasons which means you have to retrofit them into the story you're writing, some actors being so expensive that any retake you shoot with them has to be justified, etc.

In a book you can afford to write a plot where every little detail matters. In a big budget movie, you need to keep to the broad strokes, because course-correction is expensive.

I guess technology sucked the human budget, people couldn't write movies for the visual thrill only so they had to be creative on the scenario. In the last decade there were so many reboots and even reboots of reboots it was odd.

These movies exist because audiences keep paying money to see CGI explodium with cliched plots and writing. These are cash cow movies generated on a production line with fungible components where the cows are the audiences.

Hollywood can do better when it wants to. But visual SF is a nostalgic cliche-saturated form now, and original ideas are High Risk and unlikely to get the green light unless they're being pushed hard by a big name director. And sometimes not even then.

Big budget superhero movies are perfectly capable of failing because of bad writing and directing regardless of the CGI, and many of them have, particularly many DC movies. By your theory, Justice League should have made a fortune.

Wikipedia says it made $657.9m against a budget of £300m. I think the rule of thumb is movies need to make double their production budget to be profitable. So it seems like it did at least OK, financially

Batman vs. Superman and Justice League were both very much unjustly maligned superhero movies. They suffered from the same "big cgi fx" problem all modern superhero movies do, but the stories themselves were far better than the one-dimensional, flat dreck Marvel has been putting out the last decade. I mean, they're superhero movies, so they're about characters that are mostly one-dimensional anyway, but at least these two tried to push the boundaries a bit.

You can find great storytellers, they'll just take way too long to write the script and there's no certainty that having a great story will make bank anyway. In fact the only correlation the industry knows about films to box office is how much you spend in marketing. The more you spend in marketing, the more box office you tend to have.

Unfortunately I am not kidding. So as long as you have a "passable" story you win.

I've been a CGI head for a while, and IMO, Iron Man was the first movie to be reaching organic/transparent realistic fantasy level of details (geometric, texture, animation). It had weight and yet the superpower quality to moves and actions that people drew in comics or animations before.

Prior this, Transformers had a shot but it was overblown and used for extreme wow (apt for a monster-blockbuster movie).

Compare this to Star Wars prequels, which were a massive leap in tech (full blown CGI everything, planets, nature, armies) but was clearly still just a tad too cartoonish.

I'm fascinated by this because I'm beginning to suspect it's impossible to really escape uncanny valley, almost by definition.

The CGI "style" seems to rely on battering the viewer into submission by packing as much detail and movement into every frame. But it's exhausting to watch and even if everything is perfectly photorealistic it's still kind of jarring.

If what I'm seeing on the screen cannot exist physically then it doesn't matter how detailed it is - my brain responds with "That's just CGI" and it loses credibility.

My partner works on opera productions and it's been really interesting watching high quality theatrical effects create believable settings on a stage.

Physical objects have a weight and credibility that I suspect 2D CGI can never match. With skilled designers those physical objects can be made to do impossible things, but somehow they're still believable - which actually makes the experience more convincing and magical when they do something extraordinary or uncanny.

There's also an element of sketching and leaving elements to the imagination of the audience. A lot of staged work implies something, and it turns out this makes the experience more engaging. CGI tries to make everything as explicit and busy and huge and detailed and overwhelming as possible, which actually has a distancing effect.

We'll have immersive VR movies soon and we'll see if they work any better than 2D.

I too felt that the uncanny valley would never be closed. That said superhero movies don't need to close the gap, just to provide the amplified organic real life movements that we expected from comics and animation shows.

Also practical effects often have something else. Probably the fact that they live on atomic scale of complexity. Colors have more depth and diversity, particles too. Also it impacts actors around them a bit more than green screen studios which may influence the final result too.

A slight anecdote, the first time I lit an LED (noob electronics kit) it felt so utterly magical to me. I was 30, did advanced studies, interacted with LEDs all my life, but "creating" light was so soul sucking. Same goes for other experiences. The brain sense when something lies on the plane of "it affect your life, body" rather than "it's only advanced sensory input fooling you". Your gut gets involved I guess.

And I agree that modern tools push movie maker to explain too much, logify too much, show too much. A few 80s reboots were mostly trying to add a logical layer onto what was self sufficient already.

You’re absolutely right. My partner works in VFX and this is precisely his beef with Marvel movies and a lot of the other box-office-optimized schlock that’s out there these days: zero respect for the physical rules of reality. You can give scenes, objects, people and motion a weight and physicality that feels real, but the current style is to inexplicably ignore all that and make this unrealistic stuff we see today.

Given current technology it’s more a problem of how VFX is being used than anything.

But these are comics based movies, it's excepted of the genre to go hyper just a bit. Same for anime. It's not made for reality, and actually it was the value of these movies, the ability to take physics, bend them just enough to reach wooh and call it a day. Just like comics are amplifications of physics to match our fantasies.

True BUT the best fantasy obeys some laws of physics so things feel real and more exciting. It’s the execution of the shot, not the content of the shot that’s the problem.

Why even have live action if the show is going to be mostly CGI anyway? Just make the entire thing animated. I really enjoyed Spiderverse, the Castlevania show on Netflix, and the What If series. Animation seems like the ultimate medium for storytelling and possibly uproots the Hollywood model of top tier casting--voice work seems way easier than acting.

I stopped watching stuff, but full cgi movies (say after the avatar tech was built), often lack grounding. Since everything is possible, there's too much going on.

> Game of Thrones* has shown hollywood that there is an appetite for epic storytelling, and that people are willing to sit through 7 season of shows to be entertained by an engaging story.

I really want to believe this, but I’m afraid Hollywood understood GoT’s success as “people want to see dragons”. Even early TV reviews were focusing on the dragons part, and recommending other shows that had dragons (or Middle Ages fights).

A lot of Hollywood and TV reviewers apparently failed to appreciate that people may just have really like the epic story of a world, rather than a typical story of a couple of main characters. This is also apparent from the evolution the show went through, diverging into a more mainstream story focusing on main characters rather than the story/world itself.

100%

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I wish there was less "plastic" looking CGI though...

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