CG Die!

A few weeks back I found myself being directed to YouTube to check out something that was, apparently, highly entertaining. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be an absolute desperate piece of shit. However, in the Related Videos sidebar there was a clip of the last ten minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Naughtily shot in a cinema, with a camcorder at a weird oblique angle to the screen, it was also dubbed into – I think – German, although other European languages are available. Granted that isn’t the best way to see any movie, but it was enough to show how bloody awful this film was.


There had been a narrow window when I had thought about going to see the movie. Being in two minds I waited until I heard the reactions from people who could not only express an informed opinion but were fans of the series and had followed, albeit from a distance, the making of this fourth instalment.

Interestingly, the one thing that really narked them, even more so than David Koepp’s apparently nonsensical screenplay, was that Mr Spielberg had promised fans that, keeping in the style of the previous films, there would be little or no CGI. And Mr Spielberg lied.


You only have to look at both Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the Last Crusade to see that photochemical effects work, on the whole, could be far inferior to digital effects. While something like The Mummy Returns certainly illustrates how appallingly bad CGI can also be. Aside from budget, schedule and talent, the big drawback with computer effects is a lack of restraint. That’s the thing to remember.

I may have mentioned this before but a commercial that has always stuck in my mind was one that came out in the mid- to late-1980s. It was, I think, for ICI. It may seem odd that I can’t remember what the spot was for, but I do know it wasn’t one product being promoted but a company. I would bet on good old Imperial Chemical Industries.

The reason I remember the commercial was, it was a complete clusterfuck of imagery slapped all over the screen. The reason it was a moving collage of crappery was because the start-up facilities houses were installing Quantel Paintbox. The agency “creatives”, who obviously had knowledge of what this piece of kit could do, sold the idea to the client. The client handed over the cheque; the creatives went down to the Paintbox suite, looked at the menu and asked for fucking everything.

A lack of restraint is a very bad thing. While cinemagoers blame Spielberg for the CGI, it may well be down to George Lucas who, over the past decade, goes about proving that he has completely forgotten how to make his previously adequate films that audiences once enjoyed. Especially given that what I’ve seen of the unnecessary Star Wars prequels, frenetic. computer-generated mayhem seems to be the standard replacement for actual story.


This shouldn’t be confused with special effects. For instance, this afternoon Channel 4 screened Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad this afternoon and that is just magical, even when it’s being shown at a stupid, inconvenient time. The effects in that, almost seventy years on, are just phenomenal. In the time since we’ve rightly applauded the work of Ray Harryhausen and Albert Whitlock and Derek Meddings and everyone who made magic with the most basic materials.

There’s also the non-shouty digital effects, like the helicopter crashes and dust storms created by the rotor downdrafts in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, which augment a film without getting in the way of the story. Even the work done by Weta Digital for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, while obviously necessary to create the fantasy elements, managed to create pure spectacle without elbowing the story off the screen.


The really great thing about Iron Man was that it used digital effects as far as it needed to and went no further. That combined with a good script and great performances has to be the reason that in America, eight weeks after it debuted, Jon Favreau’s film has passed the $300 million barrier and is still in the top ten. Meanwhile, other effects-heavy movies open big and plummet by their second weekend because they’re a number of computer generated effects-heavy sequences strung together and very little substance.

All of us can probably reel off the names of films from the last decade or so that prioritized CGI bells and whistles over story. How pointless did the two Matrix films become? How exciting is a car chase when it’s created in a controlled studio and software environment? Compare a digital chase to the visceral chase sequences in The French Connection or The Road Warrior.

Time, money and limitless ones and zeros are gradually beginning to create ultimately soulless and empty experiences. I think that’s why, of late, I’ve primarily been watching films from before the 1980s. Remember them, the films whose credits were either all upfront or a small scroll at the end? These would be films that employed a writer, director, actors and editor, but didn’t really have much need of digital lighting supervisors or compositors. At no point do any of them suffer from their omission from the crew.


I don’t know if you read the Being Ernest post or the comments that followed, but Tom, qrter, and Lee did a great job in putting forward suggestions for triple bills to watch. In fact, having watched Dr Strangelove before the week before, and The List of Adrian Messenger on Monday night, I finished off my George C. Scott triple by catching Patton last night, as Tom suggested.

Trying to think of older actors and the films they’ve been in, I dug out the Word document entitled Blank Video Contents. While it may be oxymoronic, it lists the eighty-nine tapes that films were recorded onto over the years. Now, I know in this digital age, the idea of watching something on magnetic tape is about as quaint as listening to old 78s, but here are some of the titles of films I had forgotten about...

Gunga Din, Cat People (1942), The Paleface, The Lost Weekend, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Save the Tiger, Seconds, Melvin & Howard, The Front Page, The Killers (1946), The Killers (1964), Stalag 17, The Underneath, Point Blank, The Haunting (1963), Whiskey Galore, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, The Naked Spur, Harvey, Kafka, Build My Gallows High, Laura, The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance, Carve Her Name With Pride, The Body Snatcher (1945), The Cat and the Canary (1939), Genevieve, plus nine of Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes adventures.


An eclectic mix, certainly, but I can’t see the necessity of going to the cinema for a while. Although before I make a start I should make clear the distinction between computer effects and computer animation. One of the films I’m really looking forward to in the coming months is Pixar’s Wall-E. Along with the trailers and Wall-E vignettes here, check out the ‘exclusive clip’. That is just beautiful.