Rockmjd23

The CGI croc in Eraser.

Snowmaker

Spider-Man.

They didn't need CGI in the TV movies of the late 70's.

Troy Stiffler

Deacon's demise in Blade. If they couldn't do it right, they should have tried some different angles. Or, heck, just have the action happen off-screen. Quite possibly the most ill-concieved effect ever.

James Cameron is the man when it comes to using (not abusing) CG. I mean, the T1000, in liquid form, IS CG. It's the perfect example of how the technology can be used. It's like, it really, really had a purpose. It's when they try to make *real* characters and effects that the shit hits the fan.

Anyways, I'm a sucker for set design and "trick-photography" (by God, I haven't used that terms for ten years. Stuff like Blade Runner. And physical effects integration (Michael Bay and James Cameron, for example).

Rockmjd23

There must have been a better way to make the scorpion king in The Mummy Returns. He ended up looking like a monster from first season Xena.

Artman

Those are hilarious, they're probably the same ones ILM used in Jumanji! Still it would've been hard getting a real gator to the things they do in that scene....



"You're luggage!"

dhmac

The CGI cat in Catwoman.

I mean, it's a cat! How tough would it be to use a real one???


(It probably wouldn't have made the movie suck any less, but maybe they would've saved enough from just this to spend more $$$ on a better script!)

GoldenJCJ

Any time they use CGI instead of models. Vehicles, buildings etc. I don't know which on is cheaper to create, but IMO, scale models look so much more realistic than CGI.

Doc MacGyver

Were the two of you who said LOTR and Spider-man kidding? I'll grant you in Spider-man that some of the CG models at times looked fake, well ok, almost all of the vilain stuff you can tell... but try to shoot some of that stuff blue screen and you'd see how much worse it would have looked.

And what in LOTR are you referring to? If it's gollum, then it's just snobbish cgi-bashing, as the character clearly could not have looked the way he did were an actor playing him. Anyone who knows about makeup effects knows that anytime you put prosthetics on an actor, no matter how good they are, they always ADD size and shape to that person. Look at something like the Terminator series. As cool as Arnold looks with his face shot to hell, the metal "underskeleton" is clearly protruding farther out from his face than the "synthetic skin" on top. Even if you took the most emaciated actor working today (nevermind the fact that he may not have been as good an acting choice as Andy Serkis), they would still have to do prosthetic work to make him look like gollum as described by Tolkien. The character could not have been done without cgi.

If you're talking literally about dummies (Boromir in the boat, for example, or Faramir on top of the pire), keep in mind that in Sean Bean's case, he wasn't able to be there for the entire shoot, which is understandable, considering he's only in film one for any substantial amount of time and the main shoot lasted fourteen months. for the fire scene, Peter Jackson says on the commentary that it took more than a day to shoot that scene and all that was required of David Wenham for the majority of it was to lay still on a pire of kindling. Jackson says that purely out of consideration for the actor (and since Weta proved with the Boromir double that they could create a "dummy" that could stand up to the closest scrutiny - indeed one of the PAs even brought coffee to the Dummy Faramir laying off-set since she thought he was asleep) he opted to have a fake faramir for the scene.

If you're talking about something other than these examples, I apologize, as they are the only things I could think of off-hand that you might be referring to in LOTR.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're referring to something else, please enlighten me. If you're referring to the above mentioned, you're wrong. ;p


Doc

Tarantino

I'd say the Burly Man fight in the Matrix as well. Not to mention the horrible sound effects in the scene...bowling pins? Are you kidding?

= J

Derrich

Catwoman used a bad CGI model during the final fight scene to do stuff that any decent gymnast could have pulled off.

D

Robert

There is no way anyone could train wolves to act that vicious and have any sort of control over them.

Terrell

I would say many of the clone troopers in AOTC and ROTS didn't need to be CG. Not all of them could be real, as there were too many. But Lucas could have put at least 100 in suits.

Giantrobo

The Japanese, at the very least TOHO studios, don't know how to use CGI. You would think they would have cutting edge CGI but this is simply not the case...

Godzilla 2000 - when G roars and blows out the crappy CGI windows in the SUV in the tunnel.

Gozilla against Mechagodzilla(recent one) - There was scene when this woman was talking about past monsters in Japan. Well, she talks about how they destroyed G back in '54 and so they cut to his crappy black and white CGI of that G being destroyed by the Oxygen Destroyer. It woulda been so much cooler if they had just taken the actual footage from the '54 movie. As a matter of fact, in the same scene they talk about the Green Gargantua and they show a couple scenes form the 60's movie.

Terrell

There are things in LOTR that can be referred to. But I don't want to start an argument over it.

I have to strongly disagree. They used a puppet in TPM and it turned out to be an abomination of the character. Absolute shit. The CG Yoda in AOTC and ROTS not only looked so far superior to the godawful puppet in TPM, but actually looked like Yoda.

There's no way the puppet in the OT was more emotive than the CG Yoda. The CG Yoda had far more facial movement and expression than the stiff puppet did. Oz's performance with Yoda in the original trilogy was brilliant. But more emotive, no way.

Besides, how do you think they can have Yoda do all the things he did in AOTC and ROTS as a puppet? It's an impossibility! If you try and mix and match them with CG and puppetry, then you'd have Yoda looking completely different in different shots.

caligulathegod

Are we implying that the Matrix should have hired a 100 Hugo Weavings? Otherwise how else could they have done it without CGI?

This is not supposed to be the usual bitch over the mere existance of CGI in a scene, nor even bad CGI. It's about unnecessary CGI, like, the CGI demon faces in the Exorcist (tvyns).

Rockmjd23

The movie isn't even out yet, but the 'demon faces' in Exorcism of Emily Rose look bad. They could have done those better, I'm sure.

Breakfast with Girls

The first that came to mind for me was the overuse of CGI in Star Wars Episode III when stunt doubles would have worked just as well. You may have better control over virtual characters, no re-shoots, etc., but the audience ALWAYS knows when a character is virtual.

dhmac

Another is The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen. This could've simply been the alternate cut of the movie preferred by William Peter Blatty, with the extra footage put back in and just left it at that.

But no! - there's also some lame CGI effects added into the finale as Father Karras sees his mother's face in the window, so as to make sure some cheesiness marred the ending of this version of the film.

outer-edge

The Blade II scene was the first that came to mind for me.

Giantrobo

I can see your point. I think the main problem with CGi people is that they look too rubbery. With that said the rubbery CGI Spider-man worked because he's portrayed that way in the comic. IN Spider-man II the story was so good it made the CGi stick out less.

Really?

According to the Blade II commentary, they did the fight scene in cgi because they wanted the fight to look like Supernatural beings fighting. There were simply some things that a real person couldn't while performing that scene.

Filmmaker

I already had this exact same argument with someone else in the STAR WARS subforum (perhaps it was you) and I hold firm that, yes, the puppet in the OT, IM never HO, was far more emotive and flat-out real looking than the cartoony, two-expressions (pensive and sad) Yoda from the PT. Having said that, I completely agree with you that the puppet in Episode I, which was obviously not taken from the same Yoda molds as the OT, looked like utter ass.

I had a feeling a careless reader would try to make this argument--remember, I said I hate the CGI close-ups of Yoda; certainly his combat sequences wouldn't have been as successful with a puppet. But even you, by mentioning shots that wouldn't align, seem willing to admit that CGI characters have a distinctly different visual quality than real things.

They should have filmed Hugo Weaving doing 100 different combat manuevers, then used CGI to layer those images; instead, they just made 100 cartoon Hugo Weavings, and it looks like cheap shit. I'm not arguing CGI, I'm arguing bad, cheap, unrefined CGI.

iggystar

Wow, I was just thinking about CGI when I watched Spiderman 2 this weekend. I think that CGI is now a necessary evil, but very flawed. I think I like it when it's used sparingly. Watching Doc Ock carry away MJ looks so completely fake that it completely takes you out of the movie.

Stand-ins, puppets, scaled models have less of that effect, but you can't do everything you need with them either.

spainlinx0

I remember Del Toro stating how unhappy he was at the results of that fight. He always felt it looked too unnatural or cheesy or something to that effect.

Michael Corvin

One that comes to my mind is that stupid jump scene in Gone in 60 Seconds(Nic Cage version). They couln't use a real car? Hell a detailed model would have been more believable.

Neeb

This is animals and not humans...

Ring 2: Why the need to CGI deer? Is there a short of deer? Have they all become venison? And where's mine?

Harry Potter 3: The CGI dog looks fake. A real dog would have looked much better.