Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t see this article make any mention of the most common criticism of this notion, which is that you’re comparing the films of the past which have stood the test of time and are widely considered among the greatest films ever made with just any old blockbuster film released today. The same thing comes up all the time with pop music. If you really want to do this analysis you should have some mechanism of selecting historical films randomly instead of just considering the masterpieces that you remember off the top of your head.

View on HN

The author is not saying that modern movies are artistically worse than old movies. He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion:

"Consider Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend, wherein Tim Curry’s onscreen presence as a horned devil is heavy, weighty—despite playing a fantastical devil, his clopping around in hooves comes across as ontologically solid. Your eyes are not deceived. And moreover, under the slathered makeup and prothestics, he is still acting—when his lip curls, that’s a real lip. Compare that to Steppenwolf, from the 2017 Justice League. After almost a quarter-century of “progress” in cinema he comes across as digital dust, a void where physicality should be. His superstrength is unthreatening, because deep in our occipital lobes we know Steppenwolf weighs nothing, impacts nothing. Therefore the entire movie has no stakes. Of course the bad guy will be defeated, he’s a hologram."

Yes, of course the article ignores the hundreds of old movies with terrible prosthetics and costumes. I think the author tries his best to compare similar things. For example, when he discusses the latest Dune with Lawrence of Arabia - both acclaimed movies. Specifically, he discusses how the desert scenes _look_ to our eyes:

"Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 looks so much more real than Dune, even when just comparing the shots of people in Bedouin costumes hanging out in a desert ... For instance, the shadows both characters cast to their right. In the 2021 Dune, it is a monochrome chunk, despite the billowing fabric around the character. In the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, the shadow of the fabric is actually see-through. It has dimensionality, thinness and thickness. Because it’s a real shadow. So despite both being filmed in similar locations, one scene unconsciously triggers more belief in the ontology of the fictional world—the directionality of the light, the blue above the dune—while the other comes across as an ersatz reality."

I felt this coming out of the latest Star Wars movies: the space battle scenes felt so... flat, despite being technically amazing. There's something to be said for actually shooting on location and using physical props.

I'd argue it's CGI's ambitions. A lot of old practical effect and green screen work doesn't hold up at all, either. CGI just made it easy to completely overdo it.

Agree very much, and that's really the triumph of a movie like Jurassic Park— judicious, minimal use of CGI supplemented by lots of practical puppet work, miniatures, etc.

minimal use of CGI? Have you looked into the netflix series "behind the scenes"?

It also holds up so well because it had some damn good compositors working it. An underappreciated realm in the VFX world.

Hmm, I will check it out, but I don't think my take is an uncommon one, for example:

"Spielberg and his effects teams succeeded in creating convincing visual effects because they didn't rely on CGI as their go-to tool. In fact, only four to five minutes of the 14-15 total minutes of dinosaur scenes were entirely computer generated. All the other visual effects were created using Stan Wintson's various physical dinosaur models. The legendary technician, responsible for creating practical models for Predator and Terminator, built everything from animatronic puppets, to to a full-size animatronic T-Rex, and even Velociraptor suits that could be worn by stuntmen. CGI was then used to build on top of what the production team had already created on-set. In other words, Jurassic Park's CGI still looks so good today because there isn't much of it in the film, which makes sense considering the limitations of the technology at the time.

...

But perhaps even more important than the breakthrough graphics was Spielberg's decision to still keep the CGI to a minimum. According to Dennis Murren, visual effects supervisor at ILM, once the director saw how convincing the digital dinosaurs looked, he actually rewrote the ending of the film to include the now-famous full-body shot of the T-Rex letting out a final roar in the Jurassic Park visitor center rotunda. But despite clearly being impressed by the capabilities of ILM, Spielberg still limited the CGI elements and retained the use of Stan Winston's puppets for much of the memorable dinosaur scenes viewers still love today. In fact, there's said to be a total of just 63 visual effects shots in the whole film, a tiny number compared to Jurassic World's more than 2,000 VFX shots."

https://screenrant.com/jurassic-park-cgi-still-good-how-expl...

You should check it out and watch the netflix series about it. Of course today movies have way more VFX shots than before. The technology isn't as expensive and is much more available to be used. They were just inventing it back then.

And the point is that perhaps CGI being a rarity back then, and in the hands of the best production studios, meant that it was used more judiciously and to higher quality.

This is an excellent point. There are films where the CGI was intentionally kept limited - the film equivalent to someone sticking to a healthy diet and not overeating.

I'm struggling to think of really recent examples but one I recall when CGI was starting to have this problem, that was pretty subtle (to the point that it's easy to watch it and not realise how many small CGI effects are used, along with some physical ones) is What Lies Beneath. It's mainly to cover up the impossible camera angles and you'd hardly know.

IMO, CGI is no different than any other effects: the purpose is to enhance “suspension of belief” to advance some plot line.

For example, look at the original Star Trek. The effects were very unrealistic, everyone knew they filmed planet scenes in the desert (not on a different planet), etc. But nobody cared, it’s still a cult classic.

Star Trek TNG is pretty much the same. Despite more advanced effects, everyone knows Data is just a guy with makeup, but it was much harder to think the Enterprise was not a real ship.

At the end of the day, suspension of belief depends on delivery of lines, acting, etc, and much less on CGI or “classic” effects. CGI just makes (arguably) easier to achieve the effects.

> the purpose is to enhance “suspension of belief” to advance some plot line.

I think that's overly restrictive. There's nothing inherently wrong with flashy CG environments, elaborate action sequences, etc. even if they're largely "for their own sake." When conceived and executed masterfully, I want to see the flashy stuff too! Of course, it's also true that sometimes very rudimentary effects can work great to advance themes or plots (like in the Star Trek series)!

The difference I see is that before, when they had to use practical effects, they had a more earnest appreciation of their limitations. The toy planes and ships in old movies appeared only for a few seconds since they knew they didn't fool anybody. On the first days of CGI they used to do the same, keeping the effects short. Then... somehow someone lost perspective and though scenes like this one didn't look like a joke[1].

What's worse, the abuse of retouching is making real things look fake. I remember watching the ending of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull at the cinema and thinking "why did they chose to make the top of the pyramid CGI? It's so cheap." Later I discovered it was a practical effect, color "corrected" to the point of removing any resemblance with reality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxzyARI2lPQ

Also, the only reason that we think of recent ambitious CGI attempts as "overdoing it" is because they are by definition at the bleeding edge of our abilities now. Old practical effects and green screen work was probably "overdoing it" at the time too, because it was also at the bleeding edge of our abilities then.

I think another great example is Jackson’s LotR vs. The Hobbit films. The first trilogy was way more immersive, primarily because of the different balance of practical and special effects.

What?! You should check your facts. It was way more immersive because they had way more time to do it and didn't had turmoil in the direction of the movie. LOTR is an example of great CGI done in almost every shot of the movie

To be fair, though, the Hobbit had a lot more issues than just that, chief among them being a ridiculously large and undifferentiated ensemble cast + the fact that there was nowhere near enough main story material to fill a 10 hour runtime.

The Critical Drinker has a good take on the failures of the Hobbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il-0pW6BNSs

Also, I think a lot of it was having to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) look younger instead of 10 years older (like in real life).

It seemed to give a certain fakeness to all the faces.

It would have been better to make one film, and treat it like the fantasy it was (more geared towards children). Have a framing sequence where Bilbo is telling a very young Frodo about his adventure "there and back again." But alas, that's not the world we live in.

I assume you're aware, but just in case: https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com/

Obviously doesn't fix tone issues, but does chop the runtime in half by eliminating much of the most-obviously-superfluous content.

I was not. Thank you.

This looks cool, I love fan edits. Kind of depressing it's DVD-quality, though.

I don't know how they compare but here's another edit that's 1080p and about 50gb: http://www.maple-films.com/downloads.html

That is really one of the best examples there is for this particular topic.

Same director, same setting and lore, presumably a lot of the same people worked on both sets of films. And yet for many people the Hobbit trilogy falls flat. The CGI often seems at fault here; for me the immersion was lost in the larger battle scenes, where the LOTR trilogy rarely interrupted the suspension of disbelieve.

For me, the writing sucked. That's it. Nothing to do with effects.

Also the latter films used abnormally high fps.

The weight of special effects is also lowered by just the sheer quantity of them. I would like to see a comparison of how much time is spent on battle scenes in star wars 4-6 vs 7-9. I turned 9 off because it felt like a 10 minute cgi fighting scene was needed between each sparse bit of plot forwarding dialogue. It may be a bit overdone when people fast forward through the action to try and find some kind of meaningful character interaction.

Interesting— I actually found Dune 2021 extremely immersive and weighty. Though that was without any knowledge of which parts were practical vs CGI. Hopefully it holds up to multiple viewings.

I had another experience. I had the experience that everything was there (checkbox style), but seemed to miss the gravitas. Or maybe I was just mad that they didn't include the dinner party scene...which was pivotal to the story because it gave the reader the sense that there WAS hope, that the game was just starting...and only THEN betrayal. but that's what you get for being a fan.

Yeah, I don’t think anybody except thr OP has ever complained about Dune not feeling visually weighty and powerful, so it almost comes off as a disingenuous criticism of the film. OP is comparing stills from two movies and essentially pointing out that one is obviously digitally color-graded and the other is obviously filmed on celluloid and not color-graded. The difference is obvious in a side-by-side comparison. However, if you actually watch Dune beginning to end, your brain accepts the color palette as part of the visual language, you don’t even notice it.

OP didn't complain about it not feeling "weighty and powerful", but feeling less real:

> digital post-processing seems to have ruined Villeuneve’s more realistic vision

> the complex colors of the world have been bleached out

And I agree – Dune definitely feels less real, less believable. Dreamy, in fact. And I think it plays into that, they use the blandness as a strength, creating a feeling of bleak otherness.

I don't know if it was just me or the theater I was in but I felt like some of the effects in Dune were second rate. Was a bit disappointed, especially during desert scenes. I wish I could think of a counterexample of good CGI from modern cinema. Actually, I remember certain parts of Interstellar, for example the black hole and the 5-dimensional book shelf, were really well done. I think I was able to suspend my disbelief and just have my mind blown by them.

I don't want to discount your experience, but this does seem like an unpopular opinion considering Dune won a lot of prizes for the special effects[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(2021_film)

I don't want to act all offended and everything, but I honestly don't understand why a list of rewards is a counterpoint to my personal opinion. I'm aware that everyone loved the movie. I don't care and I'm not just trying to be a troll.

Update: Actually, your response makes sense if you assumed, reasonably, that I actually wasn't sure how I felt and wanted expert opinions. Left some other similar comments further down in the thread. Sorry to snap back like I did.

> I don't know if it was just me or the theater I was in but I felt like some of the effects in Dune were second rate.

Your comment starts with a statement that seem to imply that you doubt your own assessment. The list of awards is a strong signal that the effects were not "second rate". Thus my comment confirming that seems to be an unpopular opinion.

[This was a bunch of needless snark so I voluntarily removed it]

Update: Actually, I think you're right. I misrepresented my opinion as weakly held as though I was asking for a more authoritative source on the matter. So your response was appropriate and appreciated. I'm realizing now that I feel more strongly about it; like it wasn't just a matter of the theater having a bad projector.

> but I honestly don't understand why a list of rewards is a counterpoint to my personal opinion

Because it's an opinion from people that supposedly understand the subject matter more than anyone, so caries more weight.

the strength of the new Dune was in its sound design. At least that was the decisive factor that gave me goosebumps (I think). But the CGI deserves a shoutout wrt the design of the flying vehicles.

On the whole I agree with the article, earlier movies (and Tarantino movies) felt more real due to them being filmed in real life.

I hope the sound design you're referring to doesn't include the dialogue, because me and the two other folks I watched it with in theaters couldn't understand half the dialogue. It was like the Dark Knight rises all over again.

The blue-eye effect looked to me like the first colourised movies where they hand-painted the actual film. It really put it me off. I don't know if they were meant to be "glowing" or if the colour just "bled" outside the contours of the eyes. Either way, I wasn't a fan.

The rest was fine though. I've often thought that it's silly to spend so much time creating a huge digital scene with lots of detail only to pan by it in less than a second. Dune got that part right. Linger!

> The blue-eye effect looked to me like the first colourised movies where they hand-painted the actual film.

That's how they did the blue-eye effect on David Lynch's 1984 version (with hand-painting, probably not drawing directly on the film). Don't know if that maybe influenced Villeneuve's version.

It is hard to think of a good example of CGI from modern films because good CGI is invisible. There are an incredible number of effects shots in modern films and TV, everything from removing backgrounds to replacing stuntpeoples faces with the stars. Most of it you will never even notice unless you look.

I don't disagree with the article entirely but I think the landscape of film has changed so much over the years that it is hard to make a comparison. The rise of superhero films has meant that blockbusters these days have to include comic-book style CGI characters, spaceships, and citywide destruction that is always going to look fake because it is literally incredible (as in non-credible) to our eyes.

Dune is an interesting case because we can directly compare Dune 2021 to Dune 1984. Both SFX powerhouses of their times. Dune 1984 does contain some very impressive shots but nobody is going to say that it looks better than 2021.

> It is hard to think of a good example of CGI from modern films because good CGI is invisible. There are an incredible number of effects shots in modern films and TV, everything from removing backgrounds to replacing stuntpeoples faces with the stars. Most of it you will never even notice unless you look.

But there is a distinction between CGI that is truly invisible to the average viewer, and CGI that is extremely photorealistic but is depicting events that very clearly could not be shot practically. I think there's a lot of scenes set in space, or in extremely bizarre environments, that simply must be CGI but which looks as photorealistic as I can imagine (but of course, there are plenty of funny quotes of people saying that about imagery from the 90s that looks laughable now).

Funnily enough, I felt some of the practical effects in Dune were lackluster relative to its acclaim and high production, as well. The orinthopter in the sandstorm looked too much like a child's toy. The aerial shots of Arrakeen City looked neat as a display model, but not enough like an actual city.

Having seen that movie and a bunch of similar movies with well-done effects a lot of color work, the quality of the theater is extremely important. It, like Mad Max, shines on high-quality projectors with lots of illumination, and both fall flat if you can't have the contrast levels high enough. In theaters with modern digital projectors, it's a feast.

> He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion

True, though many older movies without CGI also had terrible special effects the killed "suspension of disbelief". Comparing to just the best isn't really fair, unless the assumption is that all CGI is done poorly.

My favourite point of comparison is car chase scenes.

To this day, it's just so blatantly obvious when they're CGI cars that don't actually exist. Though action is pumped up to 11 (not to mention occasional Michael Bay syndrome of fast zooms,a whole separate gripe), it's not as believable and impactful than physical cars at their actual limit.

That being said, that's me, and a few fellow car chase geeks and possibly film nerds.

I know that at least one vehicle in this[1] car chase scene does not exist, but only because I've heard a director's commentary. I'm guessing most people wouldn't spot it either. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were others. I don't think it's a problem.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ARFyrM6gVs

I mean, it's a 6 min clip; and the red subaru definitely exists (they went on sale after production ended if I recall, a bit out of my price range:)... although why they took a canonical AWD rally car and made it RWD is beyond my understanding.

There are what - hundred or more individual shots linked in there? So we'd have to narrow on which one is CGI augmented and how much. But it's a lot more "Weighty" of a setup either way than most car chase scenes these days, and received praise at the time accordingly :). I just watched Red Notice last night, and beyond all the other horribleness, the car chase scenes had the classic shiny, unbelievable Star Trek Warp Space feel to them that's common in so many movies today - and with 5-6 times the budget of Baby Driver, it's not that it's a "cheap movie with cheap effects".

edit after a brief Google: Indeed Edgar Wright takes tremendous pride on the car stunts and practical effects in the movie:

https://www.inverse.com/article/33512-how-baby-driver-did-ca...

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/the-baby-driver-subaru-awd-rwd/

In fact, the Baby Driver stunt drivers are complaining wildly about CGI in other movies:

https://carbuzz.com/news/baby-driver-s-stunt-driver-condemns...

So I feel if anything, that movie proves my point :-)

I haven’t seen 2017 justice league, but I have seen enough modern day superhero films to be sceptical that’s why his strength is unthreatening.

Of course he’s going to be defeated, he’s the villain. Heroes don’t get injured. Every strength based character is infinite strong.

Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound, then fly, then fly in space, then lift a continent made of kryptonite which is “Superman’s Kryptonite”, if you will.

Tobey MacGuire Spider-Man hurt his knee trying to slow down a train, Tom Holland held a flying aircraft carrier together with his hands. Yesterday’s Doctor Octopus would be no match for today’s Spider-Man and his small scale plots no interest. Even so, Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc was a good and threatening character despite having CGI assisted arms.

Hulk used to throw tanks about, now he punches alien spaceships into the ground.

Iron man was a guy in a cyborg suite, with hulk buster he’s hulk strong.

Magneto was a strategist who could push away wolverine, now he can lift sunken battleships and stadiums.

Wolverine was an eternal soldier now he can survive a hit from a nuclear bomb(!)

Batman was a strategist who worked out, now he’s strong enough to fight superman hand to hand.

Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.

Of course people aren’t thinking it’s hush stakes, it isn’t. That’s not CGI fault, it’s poor story telling papered over with CGI, bad character writing with CGI energy beam weapons instead of personality.

I never noticed this, and now it seems obvioous: superpower inflation. Thanks!

The last of these recent years’ superhero movies I saw had the protagonist fly from the ground on earth into space and fly through a fleet of supposedly extremely advanced and capable and enormous spaceships in order to win the fight. Literally, simply flying through as if playing a connect the dots game.

One was left wondering how there could be any further movies with this person available to fly through anything.

They are typically just written out of the conflict. In this case I assume that you are talking about Captain Marvel whom I believe is always needed on other planets in other galaxies except for the rare occassion when the writers needs a deus ex machina.

Same for the Green Lantern Corps. They are always needed but there's far too few of them so 99.999% of the time the heroes in these stories kind of hold the front until a GL shows up and beats the threat relatively easily.

I quite enjoyed that universe for a bit of time but the ever-inflating (and absurd) power levels and lack of actual stakes eventually ruined it for me. As it did with most mainstream superhero movies.

I think the term for this is power creep and it also applies to games

I think the really interesting counterpart to this is the anime One Punch Man. The main character, Saitama, can defeat any opponent, typically with one punch. It's the title for a reason; you know he'll always win, and it'll be disappointingly easy pretty much all of the time.

The point of the series is that you can take such an uninteresting overpowered character, in a superheroes vs supervillains setting, and still end up with an interesting plot. Of course none of the plot hinges on the question of whether Saitama will be powerful enough to win, that'd be stupidly bad writing.

Mainstream US superhero movies are mostly plots about whether their equivalent of Saitama will win. The action & graphics are the point, the plot is an afterthought.

One Punch Man includes tons of close fights, however. It's just none of them involve Saitama.

I haven't seen any One Punch Man, but I don't doubt good writers can make any character interesting. Doctor Manhatten in Watchmen was basically a deity and didn't ruin the film with the snap of his fingers. Dr Who never loses and can still have good stories.

I was more going for: with Tobey Macguire's Spiderman, Doctor Octopus was holding Aunt May from a building and taunting Spiderman with dropping her; the world was not at stake, the city was not at stake, almost nobody else in the city knows or cares who she is. I didn't think Spiderman would lose, but I felt like it mattered and that it was in some way difficult for Peter Parker to deal with, he had to take a chance, risk something, "only just" caught her. CGI tentacles didn't look realistic because they aren't a real thing, and that wasn't a dealbreaker. Nowadays a cloud opens up into an interdimensional portal and a flood of metal-living-skeleton-alien invasion spaceships fly through and it couldn't matter less if it tried; they are a swarm of whocares for the Avengers to punch through, which they do easily and uninterestingly and they didn't miss out on anything happening really. CGI isn't ruining it, bad plot is ruining it. Building turns to dust as thing crashes and explodes, is so overdone that's not even interesting by itself.

Compare to early Hulk who was on his knees in a field against two(!) sonic beam tanks owned by the US Army, with only Banner's love of Liv Tyler to make him stand up and fight. Small scale and he was never going to lose, but this was the US Army against the unknown, Banner and the General's daughter, and it mattered. When Hulk threw the tanks, they were CGI and a bit unrealistic, but so what, that isn't immersion breaking. Watching Hulk fight now is like seeing Star Trek's Lt Worf punch a Romulan spaceship while it explodes over The Fonz jumping a shark on a surfboard. It's not the CGI which makes it bad.

On the YouTube Pitch Meetings channel, one of the recurring jokes critiquing films is the 'writer' describing the plot of a film and getting to a point where a character dies, and the 'executive' does a "who was that? Should I care, because I don't feel anything right now" reply. I don't need the hero to lose, or the CGI to be unnoticable. I want to feel like something is at stake which matters. CGI punchups may as well be watching a 2 hr demo of Street Fighter II.

I've been trying to figure out why I don't like the new Star Trek shows and I think your thoughts explain it. The old shows had plots. The new ones are just pretentious and try to get us to like them because "look, I mentioned Picard and Voyager, so I'm cool, right?".

I think we're sort of aggressively agreeing with each other. It's not the CGI (or lack thereof) that makes the modern superhero films bad (except as a sort of demoscene-with-infinite-budget visual spectacle where they're great). It's the writing. To a lesser extent the cinematography is poor, which makes it hard to really feel what's going on. There's lots of unnecessary camera movement, frenetic jump cuts during fights, and all the colors are dull and muted.

Every Frame a Painting has a good video on Kurosawa's use of movement in his films, and actually uses The Avengers as a contrasting example and how the cinematography & direction makes the scene in question feel meaningless.[1]

So I agree that it's not the CGI that's the problem. It's the writing, the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music[2] (though they improved since the linked video came out, directly in response to it), etc. The films are bad in many ways, but the CGI isn't really one of them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

Spiderman: Aunt May is at risk Avengers: New York is at risk Avengers 2: The Earth is at risk Avengers 3: The Universe is at risk (The Snap) Current Marvel era: The MULTIVERSE is at risk (ie all possible universes)

Where can you possibly go from here?

One Punch Man originated as a very poorly drawn web comic (as in, the author had no training in arts whatsoever[0]). Its claim to fame is that it's a parody of the superhero genre, in which most characters worry about status, except the overpowered-but-low-key main character.

I'd argue the plot of one punch man is about as predictable as it gets, (it's basically a series of boss arcs where side characters struggle and Saitama saves the day but somehow doesn't get the credit). Notably, Saitama has just about zero character development throughout the series. What makes it interesting is the comical relief provided by the constant social commentary on the notion of "strength = recognition".

Interestingly, among superhero movie fans, it is often said that DC movies are worse than Marvel movies, because DC movies lack character development. Infinity war notoriously doesn't even have a happy ending. So I think saying that american superhero movies lack substance isn't necessarily accurate.

[0] https://www.looper.com/img/gallery/the-untold-truth-of-one-p...

> Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.

This is probably the biggest thing. The biggest mistake of hero films is that characters who are strong are not very strong. They do big hits but its all clearly irrelevant. It doesn't really matter how strong they are absolutely. Getting thrown into walls is my particular pet peeve of damaging moves that never matter. There's an over reliance on suspense where its not really deserved. I feel Captain Marvel and Thor Ragnarok did this decently. They just shrugged and made it explicitly clear that the heroes were 100x stronger than the trash mobs and released any tension in the fights to just have a good time with them.

It reminds me of the old EE 'Doc' Smith (Science Fiction) set of seven Lensman books. The last is an outlier, but for the first six books each feels like it is a similar tale as the previous ones but with the scales, powers, and threat levels turned up a notch.

Almost like having used up the ideas available, the only place to go now is incrementally growing the constituent parts. And that's how I feel about most modern action/adventure/fantasy/scifi stuff - to quote another genre: "this one goes up to 11".

But I don't want it going to 11. Even for my SF/Fantasy I want it to feel real. For me (and I know it is subjective) the author makes a good point.

The term for this trope is “power spiral” and Gurren Lagaan is a fantastic satire of it. The main character’s power is literally “spiral power” (a drill) and the plot revolves around the fundamental danger of exponential growth. Spoilers: the series ends with the main character piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s throwing galaxies at the bad guy.

TIL. Thanks.

This is cherry-picking. There are countless characters from comic books who are so powerful that they would be considered laughable in modern superhero movies the same way you seem to think a few cherry-picked modern superhero movie characters are laughably overpowered compared to a few cherry-picked characters from older superhero movies.

That misses the point of what I was saying. I was replying to a claim "X character is so strong they should be threatening, and it's CGI's fault that they aren't" with a counter claim "they aren't threatening because so many characters are so strong and their strength is written to be meaningless and inconsequential, bad writing not CGI is why X character is unthreatening". Powerful characters are not what I objected to, as evidenced by my comment mentioning Dr Manhatten. Poorly written characters where their strength is incredible but also uninteresting are what I object to.

In Game of Thrones, The Hound outpowers all normal people and can take damage no ordinary human can, and is still threatening. He has his own demons and is outpowered by The Mountain. He is taken down by poison and becomes Cersei's slave, she uses him to demonstrate that strength isn't power, "power is power". The Hound sacrifices himself to kill The Mountain. What would be bad - and more like some of the stories I cherry pick from - is if The Hound had been blessed by the Lord of Light followers and was now borderline invincible, had taken out The Mountain in a 2 minute flashy punch up, then one-man-army'd his way through Ramsay Bolton's army, then Daenerys flies in and inexplicably Hound is now immune to dragon fire and punches a dragon to death, then goes to the thousand foot high magically reinforced Ice Wall and pushes it over, and then is inexplicably immune to the zombies and...

In one of Christian Bale's Batman films, there is a setup of two passenger ferries full of civilians who are stranded and rigged with explosives. Each boat has the detonator to the other boat. The civilians are put into a Prisoner's Dilemma situation by The Joker. The options are: do nothing, Joker kills everyone. Blow up the other boat, Joker lets your boat live. Both groups rush to do that, everyone dies. We don't know these people, neither Joker nor Batman is enormously strong, but the scene is good. Now Affleck's Batman fights and guns down a stream of generic villains like any scene from The Matrix or John Wick or a Jason Statham movie, and then fights Superman, and the scenes aren't good. It's not his increased strength which makes them bad. Dr Strange is hugely powerful, I've only seen one movie with him in it but it was decent - he was struggling against his demons of losing his great surgeon skills, humbling himself, rising to the challenge, etc. etc. and he defeats Dormammu in a way that is more clever than forceful (yet requires a high power level to even try it).

Speaking of The Matrix, Morpheus vs Agent Smith, Neo vs Agent Smith, were good scenes with inhumanly powerful characters and CGI. Later on, a zillion CGI Neos fighting a zillion CGI Agent Smiths were dreadful scenes with boringly powerful characters where nothing felt tense, nothing mattered, and CGI.*

I will grant some of what you've said, and so I will take a different tack.

I have not seen a Daniel Craig Bond film that didn't have noticably CGI elements bringing me out of the moment. Some of the old (especially Roger Moore) bond films had pretty dire effects where it is obviously a man in front of a video screen, but I don't remember finding them as immersion breaking at the time.

But, hard to say what is recency bias. I will say that Bourne stands out as having no such issues where CGI was obviously used... but maybe it was done better

There's so much CGI nowadays that even things you don't think are CGI, are actually CGI. Like buildings, glasses, doors, the most mundane things are done with CGI in many TV shows and movies.

Jon Favreau was a person who was very much against CGI, until he was reviewing some of the first iron man work and couldn't actually differentiate CGI from non CGI shots, he gave up on that.

There's bad cgi and good cgi, but 99% of the movies nowadays have a lot of cgi that you don't even notice, because it's good cgi :)

Yep. Basically any time you think "it must have been difficult or expensive to shoot in that location," you're probably right, and it's probably CG. And I'm not just talking about obvious examples like "abandoned Times Square." I mean pretty much any public area (especially a popular recognizable public area) where it would be logistically tricky to shoot.

I enjoy this example from television, a name change for a popular baking show when it was brought to the USA led to editing the logo on a glass plate in many shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OEwbocwYF8

Lawrence of Arabia is also one of the most expensive and most insanely massively epic films ever shot - I am not sure it is a fair comparison. Dune is a massive massive movie today but I am not sure I agree the comparison.

Realistically yes we should just be doing more practical SFX but you have to realize it is not just some big hollywood exec deciding they want to ONLY do VFX - the available skill market for these things has drastically changed. In the 1980s there were lots of very skilled SFX people and studios that could do some incredible things. The amount of people with those skills has dwindled.

I think the best example of this sort of thing is the OG Jurassic Park. Everyone has an armchair evaluation of why it holds up so well and many are correct but there is a subtle difference most people never bring up. Years ago I worked with a guy much more experienced than me who had originally been a talented stop motion artist and then as the industry progressed moved on to doing animation for VFX. He did a lot of animation for the CGI dinosaurs - imagine the scene where the T-Rex is chasing the jeep for example. The big difference is that because his back story was in stop motion he had a much more direct and real world experience of how things and people move and how their weight is thrown around. One of the underappreciated things in Jurassic Park and why it seems to hold up so well today is simply that the dinosaurs move like they should as huge, lumbering creatures - it ends up a subtle difference that ends up making a huge impact on what we unconsciously accept as "real".

Also, Dune is a science fiction movie. Looking as real as possible was not necessarily the goal, but rather to maintain a stylized glean appropriate for a movie with hunter-seekers, force-fields, and sand worms.

I think the VFX approach worked well for the movie, and movie critics seem to universally agree that the cinematography and effects were magnificent.

A better comparison would be a modern period epic like Dunkirk.

There is a great YouTube video breaking down how Dune's special effects were created to look as real as possible, as opposed to what you get in the average Marvel movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIKupTibxKQ

Thanks for the link! I didn't mean Dune looked intentionally fake, but I think there was some cohesiveness in the creative decisions behind the VFX, the cinematography, the set and costumes designs, the editing, etc. that intentionally creates an enhanced dramatic aesthetic, along the lines of what you might see in a Baz Luhrmann movie.

As per the original author's point, the shot included from Dune looks like something out of a fantasy world, whereas the shot from Lawrence of Arabia just looks like a dude walking around in the desert. But I think this difference was intentional and goes deeper than just CGI

Another series that I've enjoyed watching is the Corridor Crew. Their take on Dune (both versions) is https://youtu.be/OHPkdMGI6D4

Anyone who's interested in this topic should be watching Corridor Crew. They spend a lot of time analyzing why good CGI is good and bad CGI is bad, how great CGI can be invisible, and how, yes, practical effects are grounded in a way that can be difficult (but not impossible) to replicate with computer imaging.

Re: practical effects...

The video "Boston Dynamics Robots Can't be Faked - VFX Artists Explain Why" https://youtu.be/HQ1WEiMwV7Y is also really interesting to watch.

I definitely agree - Dune VFX was awesome

Not sure how much VFX Dunkirk had though - I have not looked into it - I know they did a ton of it practical with an imax camera on the actual planes. Impressive as well but maybe not the best comparison for VFX heavy vs SFX heavy

Lawrence of Arabia is also one of the most expensive and most insanely massively epic films ever shot

Yes, Lawrence of Arabia was one of the most expensive at the time. The budget was $15 million, which adjusted for inflation would be $138 million today. The most expensive movie was released the same year, Mutiny on the Bounty, which had a budget of $17 million.

Cleopatra blew that away the following year, with an estimated cost of $35-44 million. Which goes to show you money doesn't buy you a great looking movie.

Probably a lot of modern standards and innovations like "basic safety" might have also shot up the cost of Lawrence of Arabia today however :-)

A common and worthwhile counterpoint to that is that people only notice bad or rushed CGI. Properly good CGI is never criticized because nobody can tell its CGI. The digital artists have the same problem as IT staff. People only notice you when something goes wrong. When everything is going right, you might as well not exist.

A timely example is Disney's Book of Boba Fett. The show is almost entirely CGI except for the actors. There have been some criticisms about particular assets like the biker gang's speeder bikes. But I've yet to hear anyone complain about the environments looking fake. Mos Espa is almost 100% CGI and it looks like a real set.

When it works your brain just accepts it. CGI is incredibly good at environments. I'd go as far to say that it has been indistinguishable from reality for the better part of a decade now. Where its gets noticed is in places where it doesn't do so well or when there were time or budget limitations. Fully CGI humans are still not believable and will probably be the last thing to get right. CGI non-human creatures have varying success. Compositing can still be difficult. Often its better to replace an actors entire body, save for the face, and create a CGI version in a fully CGI environment. Compositing a real person in a CGI scene is prone to floating body syndrome and lighting issues.

The real answer isn't necessarily that one is better than the other. But these are tools which should be used together to make a better product. And I think you'll find that modern films with the best overall effects do blend the two. Mad Max Fury Road is a good example, the vehicles are real with real stuntmen climbing on them but the environment is artificial. Shooting a film in the middle of a desert with nothing in sight is not practical. But shooting the scene on a sandy path and compositing in the CGI desert is.

Yes! I remember a Game Of Thrones CGI breakdown reel, can't find it now, which showed the Lannister camp and it was very interesting how much of it was actually real but at the same time how much was augmented by CGI. You absolutely couldn't tell.

> A common and worthwhile counterpoint to that is that people only notice bad or rushed CGI.

And similarly, people don't bring up the vast amounts of bad or rushed practical effects being produced at the same time films like Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia were produced.

You don’t have to not notice it for the cgi to make the film worse.

You could certainly for example, film ‘once upon a time in the west’ in a green room and overlay the actors upon a western themed cgi environment, and have it look believably realistic.

But are the actors going to act as if they were under the burning sun as believably ? Will they avoid looking at the sun ? Will they tend to seek the shadows ? Will they sweat ? Probably not, and the feeling you’ll get from the film will be different, without you being able to know why

I do think the Dune film suffered from this problem. I didn't really believe the actors were actually in an environment like Arrakis.

Arrakis was mostly filmed in a desert, how did it not feel real? The CGI in Dune was pretty decent IMO and the highlight for me was the ornithopters wing flapping. The motion blur of the wings was simply amazing.

From the making of I can see online it seems most of it is actually filmed in studio, especially when actors are involved up close.

It is noticable that it’s not filmed in a hot place because the actors are never sweating, they move too fast, their skin doesn’t have the color and texture of a strong tan, they don’t seem affected by transitioning from hot to cold, they touch sand with naked hands, etc. Compare with western movies that are actually filmed on location, they somehow feel like they’re filmed on a hotter planet than arakis

EDIT: seems that most of the scenes in the desert filmed in situ were also in relatively cold deserts as the filming crew is wearing down jackets

I can't imagine not using on Arrakis any head cover and sunglasses.

Would you sweat on Arrakis? I've never been to a dry desert, but I've heard that sweat can evaporate there very quickly and it's very hard to become sweaty.

As someone who grew up in the United Arab Emirates, being sweaty is your default state of being for most of the year.

Not to defend the practice of "CGI everything," but there's a new-ish technique which I first became aware of from the Mandalorian, where the actors actually see the rendered CGI on massive screens around them - think the holodeck from Star Trek TNG. The physical props exist between the characters and the huge display, and the projection is even bright enough to (partially) light the scene. You can see this technique in the "Making of the Mandalorian" documentary series.

I do think CGI is often overutilized, much to the detriment of many shows and films, especially in genres where practical effects get the job done (i.e. - not sci-fi). However, these techniques are evolving, and the actors can at least start to see visual cues and interact with the same digital elements that the viewer will ultimately be shown.

It's called "The Volume" and it's a true game-changer.

Because the environment projects its own lights, reflections are automatically correct and don't need to be added in post. It also gives huge freedom to the DP for shots because they don't really have to light anything specifically.

And the best thing is that it's comparatively cheap so they can punch way over their budget effects-wise.

To be fair, the volume looks extremely goofy if you're there. The perspective shifts with the camera, and apparently can be close to nauseating if the camera moves too fast, and doesn't feel like a holodeck but instead a room covered in screens. It's game changing for being able to integrate vfx, but it's arguably more distracting for actors than a green screen.

Does that mean they have to do a take per camera? Or have every shot pre planned rather than editing them together I suppose.

Yeah, it's a fundamentally single camera operation.

I think you are confusing CGI with post effects. You can have CGI "in camera" as they call it. The Mandalorian pioneered this. The system uses massive LED displays and Unreal engine. They call it "The Volume". https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian

On the other hand you can do non-CGI effects in post as well. In fact its super common. Bluescreens, compositing, rotoscoping, etc were all common techniques well before computers had anything to do with film making and can all introduce the problems you describe. It was actually a common problem. People would spend a lot of time tryng to get lighting to match and to line up composited elements.

So its not a CGI problem at all. Its an in-camera versus post effects problem.

There are also far less obvious examples of CGI not being noticeable. These days a filmmaker, especially a highly opinionated one like David Fincher with the necessary resources, can decide that they want something like an extra car parked on a street and add it in post with CGI. The audience never even considers the car wasn't there the day of filming.

So, you're saying that there is tons and tons of CGI that never gets noticed. I can totally see that. Something like replacing a missing button on a characters coat, or adding a clock on a wall in the background. As CGI gets better, bad CGI stands out more.

That's not necessarily a counterpoint: it doesn't matter how much great CGI doesn't destroy the reality of a film, so long as there is any bad CGI which does. It's like how nobody talks about all the oysters that didn't make them sick.

I don't really think that bad CGI ruins films in most cases, but I think the author of this article does.

Most non-fantasy, non-sci-fi is CGI and has been for over a decade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k

There is a difference between CGI and using a green screen. I didn't watch the whole video but I didn't see any Computer Generated Imagery.

> I felt this coming out of the latest Star Wars movies: the space battle scenes felt so... flat, despite being technically amazing. There's something to be said for actually shooting on location and using physical props.

Calling Elon Musk, you know what you have to do.

They are in fact building a film studio in space as we speak[1].

[1] https://nofilmschool.com/space-station-movie-studio

> He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion

Because he choses to use bad CGI in comparisons and completely ignores all the cases where CGI is invisible.

See Why CG Sucks (Except It Doesn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL6hp8BKB24

"I think that CG looks bad is because we only see bad CG. Amazing, wonderfully executed CG is everywhere, we just don't know it"

I don't necessarily disagree with any of the few specific comparisons the author makes. Maybe Tim Curry's Steppenwolf does look better. But this small set of specific comparisons, even if they're uncontroversial, don't provide evidence that a CGI effect on average will look worse than a practical effect. I can think of plenty of examples of practical effects that looks terrible and CGI effects that look great (and, crucially, aren't even noticeably CGI to most viewers).

> He's saying that CGI, despite decades of progress, seem _fake_ in a way that subtly destroys our sense of immersion

Other than Black Panther, I can't think of any Marvel movie that destroyed my sense of immersion. Maybe I have become used to it so I don't even see it anymore unless it's really really bad (like Blank Panther)?

> For example, when he discusses the latest Dune with Lawrence of Arabia - both acclaimed movies.

But Dune is barely out for a few months - it's a blockbuster, for sure, with enormous production budget, lots of public interest, etc. But so was Jurassic World, the Star Wars sequels or the Hobbit trilogy. Whether Dune will become an all-time classic like Laurence of Arabia remains to be seen.

Maybe a fairer comparison would be something like Lord of the Rings vs Dragonheart or Conan the Barbarian or whatever else iconic fantasy movie there was before the CGI era?

Or for Scifi, maybe the old Star Trek movies vs Avatar? (Blue cat people, not the other Avatar)

Or Star Trek TOS vs Deep Space Nine vs Discovery.

> But Dune is barely out for a few months - it's a blockbuster, for sure, with enormous production budget, lots of public interest, etc. But so was Jurassic World, the Star Wars sequels or the Hobbit trilogy. Whether Dune will become an all-time classic like Laurence of Arabia remains to be seen.

Those movies have worse visuals than Dune imo.

Viewers never even notice good CGI, only bad.

Another example.

I recently watched Knowing (2009) based on Ebert's review. One of the things he wrote in that review was: "The film has sensational special effects, which again I won't describe."

I found myself wondering if we watched the same movie. I thought the special effects were pretty awful. Comparing the scene the subway crash to say, the train crash in Silver Streak (1976)[1] or Speed subway crash (1994)[2], I thought Knowing[3] was inferior and just looks terribly fake to me.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qPAOarQxaU

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US2bcpW7KFU

3. https://vimeo.com/117341659

Then there's the insane French Connection (1971) chase scene which they could never film today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzEloJ5venk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Connection_(film)#C...

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/entertainment/video...

https://nypost.com/2021/10/04/secrets-of-the-french-connecti...

From the comments:

>Fun fact: this car scene was kinda an actual car chase. The director made the stunt man drive the car in the middle of street of Brooklyn without any acknowledge from the people and drivers there so they can capture real reactions. (It's illegal but apparently nothing happened to them)

(!) If that's true that's definitely why that scene is so good but hard to replicate. Though there are some props getting destroyed so maybe it's only true for part of the scene.

It was shot illegally (er, without permits). It really could not be done today:

“The car chase was filmed without obtaining the proper permits from the city. Members of the NYPD's tactical force helped control traffic. But most of the control was achieved by the assistant directors with the help of off-duty NYPD officers, many of whom had been involved in the actual case. The assistant directors, under the supervision of Terence A. Donnelly, cleared traffic for approximately five blocks in each direction. Permission was given to literally control the traffic signals on those streets where they ran the chase car. Even so, in many instances, they illegally continued the chase into sections with no traffic control, where they actually had to evade real traffic and pedestrians. Many of the (near) collisions in the movie were therefore real and not planned (with the exception of the near-miss of the lady with the baby carriage, which was carefully rehearsed). A flashing police light was placed on top of the car to warn bystanders. A camera was mounted on the car's bumper for the shots from the car's point-of-view. Hackman did some of the driving but the extremely dangerous stunts were performed by Bill Hickman, with Friedkin filming from the backseat. Friedkin operated the camera himself because the other camera operators were married with children and he was not.”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/trivia

The director recently said he regrets the shot:

“As successful as the film was, I wouldn’t do that now. I had put people’s lives in danger.”

https://screenrant.com/french-connection-william-friedkin-ca...

> . Comparing the scene the subway crash to say, the train crash in Silver Streak (1976)[1] or Speed subway crash (1994)[2], I thought Knowing[3] was inferior and just looks terribly fake to me.

Speed probably looks best of the three. Knowing's train doesn't look real - maybe too fast, over blurred, missing reflections, whatever. Silver Streak looks terrible though, and is poorly directed.

Effects that looked amazing in the past often no longer look amazing. I remember thinking the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park looked real. Now they look like bad CGI with bad compositing. Part of that is the first time I see something, especially in the theater, if the story is good, I get sucked in and am not looking for flaws. Where as, years later when it's no longer exciting, because I already know the story or because someone said "go watch these effects", then those issues stick out. Knowing's effects were good when it came out and good enough if you were into the story and not trying to look for flaws. I agree though that watching them now they look subpar, especially the subway.

Note that Ebert might be using "sensational" with either the first definition ("causing great surprise or excitement") or second definition ("presenting information with the intent to provoke intense excitement at the expense of other goals") given in most English dictionaries, rather than the third definition ("very good").

> Lawrence of Arabia from 1962 looks so much more real than Dune, even when just comparing the shots of people in Bedouin costumes hanging out in a desert

I don't quite feel that's a like-for-like comparison. All of the Denis Villeneuve's films I have watched have a surreal/unreal quality to them: from the top of my head Sicario, Arrival, and especially the one with the weird deer, whose name escapes me. That's just his "style" - I suppose it's how scenes are framed, color grading, and how his shots tend to linger; there's a dream-like quality to it, even for the "grittier" scenes - Sicario has a lot of those.

These are still not fair comparisons.

Legend and Justice League are both mediocre movies, but Legend won a ton of technical awards, including being nominated for Oscars for Makeup, BAFTAs for visual effects, and won an award for cinematography [0]. Justice League's list of awards is much more meager, and nothing for technical achievements. [1]

The Dune and Lawrence of Arabia comparison is also flawed. Sure they're both "acclaimed", But Dune is acclaimed as "One of the best films of the year", and Lawrence of Arabia is acclaimed as "One of the best films OF ALL TIME."

Also, Lawrence of Arabia is a real story of a real person set in the real world. So realism is bound to be important. Dune is a fictional story set thousands of years in the future in a different part of the universe. And specifically deals with a bit of mysticism and fantastical elements closer to fantasy than science fiction. Comparing the "reality" of their effects is apples and oranges.

I'll give you Star Wars for sure. Star Wars most assuredly did NOT benefit from "improved" technology.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089469/awards/?ref_=tt_awd [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974015/awards/

I think that's a fair criticism for music where there is so much of it that the filtering of time makes a real difference to our perception of past music.

But cinema is a smaller world. Yes, there are plenty of independent films, but most audience attention has always been focused on the small number of tentpole films. And if you look at just those over time, everything the author says here still holds up.

Watch some of the top ten box office grossing films from 30, 20, 10 years ago, and today. The change in style, tone, and quality is enormous.

Pick any random comedy or drama from the 80s or 90s and it will have more realness, more sense of being there than movies made today for 10x the budget. This being despite the fact that the older films were shot literally on film and the grain is visible.

Digital color, an obsession with CGI, and a fixation on storytelling that plays well across an internation audience (which means violence, action, physical comedy, and simplistic morality tales) has made today's movies a shadow of what they used to be.

I watched Voyage of the Rock Aliens the other day which didn't stand the test of 1984, let alone the test of time. It's a great example of practical effects that can stand up to modern scrutiny... and those that can't. The flying V spaceship looks better than CGI in B-movies today, and the talking fire-hydrant robot had more character than BB-8 in the most recent Star Wars films.

But the sheet of plexiglass used as a "force field" was comically terrible, even for 1984

Agreed, but to be fair, the comparison is also with high profile "modern" movies.

"The Thing" to most people today is not "one of the greatest movies" but a horror classic and -- visual quality wise -- on par with "Phantom Menace" or "Jurassic Park", if not worse.

I think the criticism is valid: that the physicality of classic SFX is still mostly unmatched by CGI, and the eye and mind notice this.

> Agreed, but to be fair, the comparison is also with high profile "modern" movies.

Mostly sequels, remakes, reboots or nth installments of a franchise.

Carpenter's The Thing is also a remake. So?

I don't think this matters much.

You're not under the impression that most big budget movies nowadays are just attempts at milking the same character or universe to the maximum possible extent?

I am, but at the same time I'm reminded it's always been like this.

But isn't it an entirely separate conversation? Of course CGI hasn't "ruined the movies", that part of the title is hyperbole. But the actual conversation about practical SFX vs CGI doesn't have much to do with originality, I think.

'The Thing' wasn't greenlit because it used existing IP with a guaranteed audience. It's just a short story that recieved two very different adaptations 30 years apart.

One thing practical effects shots have going for them is that at their worst it still looks like something physically there with the actors.

CGI looks at it's worst like it's painted on top of the scene.

Pick the top sci-fi movie rating-wise from every year, going back 50 years. Then rank them.

Would the past be over-represented? My hunch is yes, but I think it's a fair metric.

Sci-fi is a weird genre because there was arguably more interest in it during the space race--Star Trek happened at the same time as early Apollo missions. There was just a lot more content and a lot more imaginative content.

I mean, maybe? But I don't really think so. Here's a list from IMDB:

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls009003184/

Let's take a look at a few of the entry's from the 1970's that actually had practical effects:

Logan's Run - Here's Logan fighting a robot: https://youtu.be/USADM5Gk9Gs?t=106 Star Wars - : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k Soylent Green - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z2txLk0ybo Invasion of the Body Snatchers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc_0dlmSq7I Alien - here's the chest buster scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQ7om598OM

I don't think these hold up as well as nostalgia would suggest, the exception being the alien chest buster scene, which is amazing. The others are much less ambitious and simply don't look as good as modern movies. Many of the practical effects look small or toy like. Maybe there's a sweet spot in the 90's?

The chest burster scene holds up, up until the baby alien scurries off at the end. But there's a hilariously terrible effect later on where it cuts from a model of John Hurt's head to the real thing.

Edit: Ian Holm, not John Hurt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA8jv1M6Y2g

Using the low quality trailer for Star Wars is pretty disingenuous since it was intended to be viewed on small TV at 480i compared to 35mm (or 70mm) in the theater.

> Logan's Run

Oh god. I can't imagine anyone ever thought Box (the robot) didn't look completely awful.

It may lack good practical effects, but some of the matte paintings in that movie are gorgeous. I love when they get to the overgrown Washington D.C.

Are you controlling for things like, say, the age you were when you first saw a certain movie? It's kinda unfair to rank a brand new movie against the older movie that you watched a hundred times because it was one of the few VHS tapes at your house when you were growing up. There could be thousands of kids now watching that brand new movie hundreds of times on their iPads who are going to have similar attachments to that movie. Some of those kids will grow up to be filmmakers, movie critics, pop culture writers, etc.

I think that’s missing the point. Most movies are mostly forgotten, and the merits of the story and storytelling carry the movie as a thing.

If you pick a mediocre movie in 2019 and compare to a mediocre movie in 1959, the garbage storyline will be the thing you will turn the movie off for.

In my mind, the weakness with CGI overuse is it enables lazy/sloppy practices that don’t scale. Similar to in graphics work where Photoshop is abused to create impossible edits for expediency.

My family has a tradition of watching Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” every holiday season. It’s quaint how you can see the painted backgrounds and stages… the opening scenes feature cardboard bricks and cheesy props. The point of the article is that this era of filming is bland and will look cheesy in the future because of the reliance on tools. You can already see it today - compare the Sony Spider-Man movies to the last iteration - the age is apparent.

An easy litmus test to show its not the test of time is to plot the number of exceptional quality films made per year.

In any form of art, there have always been pieces motivated by artistic drive (i.e. a work of art like seven samurai or loan's run) and pieces motivated by profit (i.e. a product like all of the capeshit movies or the transformer movies). What we're seeing in film and other similar industries is a cabal of gatekeepers who don't fund things unless it fits the mold of proven, profit driven products. Remove the Larry Finks of the world from power, and you remove the powerwhore gatekeepers that have no concept of beauty.

The problem with that is that you also need to consider how much time has passed since each film was released. In many cases, if it’s been 10 years since a film is released it would be difficult to know how people will view that film after another 10 years have passed.

You make an interesting point - the article is not comparing apples to apples - but I think that the issue is different. It's not that CGI looks fake. The latest Dune is impressive in every sense and I don't think the CGI looks fake.

I think the toughest thing about VFX facing a director is the temptation to abuse it. They have to remember the effects are there to tell the story. They should resist to making everything spectacular/shiny/tridimensional/hectic where not everything needs to be. Compare the dark Los Angeles of Blade Runner with the lower levels of Coruscant.

And yes. Darkseid is a ridiculous villain, with a lazy design and even lazier lines. No amount of CGI could save it. Not even if he were blue and lived in a Roger Dean album cover.

I think the other thing that is missing from this conversation is the bar of entry has lowered so much with modern CGI. Look at a YouTube channel like Dust[0], which has literally hundreds of sci-fi short films using CGI to tell stories. Sure, they aren't 2022 blockbuster level, but they are 2010 TV level. There is simply no way practical effects would be able to scale the way that CGI has.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/watchdust

Even selecting randomly wouldn't be good enough: there are much more movies made nowdays. But if you look at only movies rated 8+ on IMDB, it's the same amount.

It's also significantly easier (and cheaper) to make films these days.

Indeed. An easy fix would be to compare, say, the year's biggest crossing action movies from 1980-1990 and 2010-2020 or similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com