Anyone else think that something was lost now that everything is pretty much cgi?
 

all the aliens for the most part and worlds look neat but they look so dull and lifeless. i dont know if its too much cgi or something but i think they lost the fun and magic. the creature Obi-Wan Kenobi rides etc. even the space battles arent really exciting. maybe the cgi not looking realistic, but something was lost when Lucas went nuts with the cgi.

Or, the cgi is overanalyzed and is blamed for differences caused by other factors ... ;)

I've never been a fan of CGI since Jurassic Park. I'll take puppets and mechanics over it any day.

CGI should be used in moderation. I've never been a fan of it but directors now a days use it in every scene. That's ridiculous. I look back to the 90's with movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 and ask why was the CGI better back then?

I only hate CGI in modern horror movies. Given fake computer images and fake prosthetics I prefer actual physical objects on screen. Computer blood is pretty terrible as well.

To me, it's definitely less realistic and pulls me out of a movie almost instantly.

By going from miniatures, real props, sets, and puppets to digital pixels everything kind of lost their "hardness" for lack of a better word. When something is real it does translate through the film. It probably has something to do with how real light reacts to real objects among other things. Also some of the background looked too colorful and too deeply saturated with color to look convincing. They looked more like the Maxfield Parrish paintings Lucas got inspiration from, than live action. A lot of the CGI in the Prequels do look great and things like thousands of clone soldiers is difficult to replicate. But LOTR mixed enough of their "Bigatures" and matte paintings along with CGI so it wasn't as noticeable compared to the SW Prequels. And the more things are computer generated the more chances they're gonna come up with things don't look very convincing.

the cg background in ep2 when anakin takes off on the speeder bike to get shmi looks bad. the coloration just isn't right
they should have driven/flown at low altitude through a real desert and blue screened him on a bike into the real footage instead of cg desert

see in Phantom Menace everything wasnt cgi and it made it more interesting and depth to look at. the cgi in the recent star wars has too much of a glossy look to it, its great that what ILM can do with visual effects but does it make the movie better?when all of the creatures and worlds are completely cgi it loses character and and i agree with IanH saying they lost eh "hardness" thats one thing i have hated in episode 2 and 3

yeah, it made Yoda look terrible.

I think CGI is the easy answer to blame when shit goes wrong in a film.

72 full-scale sets
More miniatures than the original SW trilogy combined
Many matte paintings
Background plates of live locations for Kashyyk(Jungle) and Alderaan(Swiss Alps)
On-location shooting for Tatooine

Everything is not CG in ROTS, not even close.

If you didn't like the movie, it wasn't because of CGI. The effects in this film were stunning, and it was a beautiful film to look at. Though I have to say, I wondered when someone would start whining about CG. It's become that cliche.

It wasn't better. In fact, it's better today by leaps and bounds. The only CG in Jurassic Park was the dinosaurs, and some of those weren't even CG. You don't have to use much CG when your story takes place on earth. Same goes for T2. The only CG in that was of the liquid metal T1000.

Some things really distracted me, such as Christopher Lee doing that back flip off the deck in the beginning of the movie. Why was that even needed?

I don't mind CG, but it seems that Lucas has gone way overboard and made the move look too busy. Like the OT there weren't so many aliens, Lucas has turned the new movies into the muppet show

I agree. I used to blame the CGI for the prequels and then I saw Sin City and realized I was wrong.

Ya there is a lot of stuff that is going on in the back ground during ROTS that I could have done without. A lot of droids and aliens trying to do humorous things. No place for it really.

Look at LOTR..things look more real..Unless they were doing really wide shots with hundreds or thousands of characters on screen, things like orcs and soldiers were real people in suits for the most part. In my head within the story I believed those things were 'real.' In the SW prequels, pretty much everything like the troopers and so on were CG. Weren't even all the wookies CG? All that pulled me right out and I noticed each time I was looking at something that was CG.

So what if the special effects don't always seem real? Movies have and always will use tricks and effects to bring us into the story. Look back at movies just 10 or 20 years ago, the special effects just aren't as good. Watching Empire and Return of the Jedi again I really do notice the difference, notably what appears to be stop-motion / scale models for the Imperial Walkers, just as an example. CG really is the best tool film-makers have for showing things that would be impossible in the real world, they probably won't get anything else either. It's the future of films; all thats required to enjoy a movie has always been suspension of disbelief.

"CG really is the best tool film-makers have for showing things that would be impossible in the real world,"

Yes but the problem as has been stated is when you use CG when it's NOT needed. Like for example when I said clone troopers and wookies. Would be more effective to use real people in those situations.

I'm not one to bash CGI, but I do agree with this. The big CGI rocks he was flying through were ridiculous. It was one of those "gee, look at the neat rocks we can put in here that we couldn't do in the original trilogy" things. It added nothing to the story and in fact made it confusing when he switched back to Genosis, because both planets looked almost the same.

So, they're supposed to hire thousands of extras to play storm troopers? That does get rather costly, same reason lots of movies use CG for crowd enhancement. I personally don't have the CG beef...I like the look, and a rubber puppet or stop motion never looked better imo. Sure they could've hired people to play the storm troopers, but IMO they looked fantastic. I doubt a lot of people even noticed they were CG. But, sometimes CG is used as a cost prohibitive tool...hiring thousands upon thousands of extras is, if you didn't know, very expensive.

So, no, I don't think anything is lost because of CG. It's just another tool, like paintings and blue screen and puppets and stop motion. And, quite frankly, it looks much better then any of those. If there are good artists behind these creations and a good filmmaker, then great. If not, then not. But the CG itself I don't think is to blame. Take for instance Van Helsing...many of the complaints regarding the film were about the CG. Whereas, imo, the problem with that film had nothing to do with the technical quality and everything to do with bad writing, bad direction and poorly conceived action sequences. So...no, it's not the CG.

Again..I'm not talking about large crowd shots..but up close stuff with 3 or 4 or even 10 or 15 people in a shot.

It wasn't better; technically, the CG in those movies were extremely primative. However, the SFX were better because they were more stylisticially tuned to the movie environment. When you think about it, it's not hard to make a creature made out of liquid metal look...like shiny metal. And no one's ever seen a living dinosaur before, so there's no real frame of reference. Keep in mind those movies also mixed in a healthy dose of puppets, animatronics, and real props as well.

I don't see why everyone complains about CGI. Really it's all about evolution in the SFX industry, and you have to give them some recognizance when you consider that the technology is so new and quite difficult to master. Most people say that movies that used puppets, models, and other hard props were much better looking, and that's true, but most of those movies - especially the OT - were made at the height of the technology. Think back to those really cheesy 50s sci-fi movies that used models which were homebrewed and the SFX industry was very new....and CGI doesn't look so bad.

I just couldn't agree with this more--to this date, I have yet to see a more convincing use of CGI than the two films you mentioned...even the JURASSIC PARK sequels fail to measure up to the first in terms of its seamlessness with reality, and they were made 12-14 years ago! It's just insane to me that CGI is used so carelessly and indiscriminately in everything these days. You want to digitally erase the wires holding Stallone to the mountainside in CLIFFHANGER? Rock on with that CGI. You want to fill up a giant movie screen with a blatantly fake and cartoony Yoda face when there's a perfectly believable puppet from 20 damn years ago that will work 1,000 times better? Now it's time to walk away from the fucking computer, cyber-geek filmmakers...

I think that when CGI is used properly it is a big plus no matter how often the director uses it. (i.e. CGI gives Sin City a certain tone through out) I do feel that Lucas is overreliant on CGI to acheive his goals. I felt distracted by certain scenes in ROTS by unneeded special effects. (i.e. Dooku's flipping entrance, all the droids whizzing by when Anakin & Obi-Wan duel on Mustafar etc.)

I feel that something is lost when CGI is misused. For me personally it's that feeling of "How'd they do that?". Now the answer is always CGI. Do I like CGI sure, when it's needed and used properly, but CGI just for the sake of CGI? That I can do without. I think this may have been what the OP was trying to get across.

I disagree. Puppet Yoda can not display any emotion at all.