Parcher

No, you are probably right, but it doesn't distract from the movie like much of today's CGI does.

I am pretty tired of watching characters that are100% cgi, it looks ridiculous.

t2 was good because 1. the cgi was kept to a minimum or atleast restricted and 2. the cgi that WAS in the movie wasn't over-done and it looks reasonably genuine. Hell I think t2 on the whole is technically better than muhc of the crap we see today.

milo bloom

Going back to the SW prequels, I'd have called you monkey-faced liar if you had told me almost every instance of clone trooper in AOTC and ROTS was CGI. I had to watch real hard to see any flaws in those.

caligulathegod

It costs about the same to see $200M Spider-man 2 as it does to see $7,000 El Mariachi. If you don't like CGI, then stop watching fantasy films. You'd rather they go back to taping a fin to the back of an iguana and calling it a dinosaur? We're 15 years into it. They aren't going to stop now.

caligulathegod

Any more original than complaining each and every time CGI appears? People like to say, "I only complain about bad CGI," but they don't. Everyone still brings out Jurrasic Park and Terminator 2 as the end-all-be-all of CGI. What do they have in common? It was the first time anyone had seen realistic CGI. Now, we've learned to spot CGI, and like someone who noticed the magician's misdirection, we nudge our buddy and tell him where the rabbit went. I watched both of those films recently and they aren't any better than today's CGI. They used tricks and misdirection mostly (dark scenes in the rain, and models/men in suits when we were sold at the time on it being mostly CGI). The first shot we see of the Brachiosaurs is not very good at all.

My point is that it wasn't like they went from some ultra-realistic special effect process and gave it up for CGI. Special effects in fantasy movies have ALWAYS sucked. If someone couldn't get past obvious miniatures, men in suits or giant foam rubber monsters, miniature collies with rubber fangs and fakefur coats, blue compositing fringe, restricted angles on obvious matte paintings, then they really don't need to be watching fantasy films. It is the same for CGI. It's a tool for telling a story. If the story involves a 30 foot dinosaur, then they are probably going to use CGI for it. Is this what we want to go back to?



If there's something inexcusably cruddy, like the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns, then sure. The CGI in King Kong was pretty damned good. The stampede was just badly conceived rather then bad CGI.

al_bundy

some directors want the comic book effect so they use CGI, especially in comic book or fantasy movies.

the original superman was good, but there was no way Richard Donner could have made it look like it was drawn. Same thing with every other comic book movie.

caligulathegod

I know it sounds like I'm making the old "like it or lump it" argument, but I'm not.
As much as I have an affection for Harryhausen's work, it was never realistic. The Colossus and the skeletons, cool as they are, still move with that stop-motion staccato and lack realistic motion blur. Special effects have ALWAYS sucked. ALWAYS. It's just that over the past few years people have decided that films are supposed to be absolutely realistic and, if they aren't, then they need to point it out to everyone. We've just grown into a generation of complainers. If a questionable special effect takes someone "out of the movie" then how did we ever manage to watch movies over the past 100 years? One of my alltime favorite movies is the 1933 King Kong and it doesn't bother me in the least that you can see the animators' fingerprints all over his fur. Why not just enjoy the films? As I was saying, if the occasional non-perfect effect is enough to make you not enjoy the movie, then you might as well stop watching fantasy, because they've always been that way and will always be that way. I'd rather praise the best effects than damn the less than perfect. There's nothing in Van Helsing as bad as the Scorpion King in the Mummy Returns.

KillerQ

Ok, time to chime in...

Whenever I am bothered by CGI, it always seems to be the same situation. There is an object that is "real" (not supposed to be fantasy, animated, etc) that is shown, and it is way smoother, way shinier, and way brighter than anything around it. That kills it instantly

I have seen many instances where it seems that if they just made it darker, and made it not move so irregularly that it would pass with no problem.


Happy Holidays,

Matt!

Panda Phil

Wonders how this discussion would sound if not for CG...

"Aww man what a crappy rubber suit! Fake!"

"It looked like a plastic model. I could almost see the wires!"

"Did you notice those awful backgrounds? The matte lines looked like they'd been drawn with a magic marker!"