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Why Blockbusters Aren’t as Good as They Used to Be
Every year I go to the movie theater less, only leaving the comforts of my La-Z-Boy for the latest “must-see” blockbuster. And each time I return home, I wonder why I bothered leaving my beloved La-Z-Boy in the first place. All I remember about the latest Avengers flick was fire, noise, and 72 actors zooming in and out of CGI backgrounds wearing shiny outfits. Add in the $362 I spent on popcorn, drinks and Red Vines for the kids, and it’s no wonder the industry is lagging.
I blamed my lukewarm reactions on Hollywood’s unoriginal storylines and the fact that I’m getting older. My kids are seeing this stuff for the first time, while I’m on my fourth Spiderman. (I hear the next Spiderman movie will reboot the franchise in the middle of the second act.) However, according to the movie addicts at StoryBrain, over-reliance on CGI might be to blame. And it isn’t just the computer-generated characters, but the too-perfect backgrounds.
Here’s their theory: Back in the ’90s, a CGI character would be placed onto a real backdrop — say, an actual city street — which added to the realism. Our brains saw something we recognized from personal experience, so we were willing to suspend our disbelief for the single CGI element strolling through the middle of it.
Once the technology advanced enough, Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital sought to better integrate the foreground and the background by making everything CGI. Today a digital Hulk walks on digital streets with digital buildings dappled with digital sunlight. Now that everything is fake, our brain no longer has a frame of reference to latch onto. Despite the pretty compositions and non-stop action, everything blends into a bland, generic falseness.
What do you think: Do the folks at StoryBrain have a point?
Published in Entertainment
I just finished reading Cary Elwes’ book about “The Princess Bride.” The book is called “As You Wish,” and it is a fascinating if light read. Since the film is one of my all-time favorites I was very interested in everything he had to say about it.
He described the special effects at some length. The rodents of unusual size were actually small men inside rubber suits. The fire swamp had actual fire that occasionally would, perhaps inadvertently, set Buttercup’s dress alight and causing Westley to have to come to her actual rescue.
Those effects, primitive by today’s standards, are so much more enjoyable to watch.
Of course, the story was one of the best ever. And the cast was terrific. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
Perhpas, but on the other hand all Pixar movies are 100% CGI and so far they are batting a very solid .800 (Cars and Planes kind of brought them down). The real problem with many big blockbusters is that they are overly long and and have way too much repetitive action. Action scenes are only exciting if one of two things is true. Either you really like the main character and feel like they are in danger, or the sequence of shooting, punching, and explosions is somehow original.
Many of the big movies have characters that are as interesting or engaging as wet toast. Then their fight scene are schizophrenic with excessive shaky camera and blurring fast shapes moving around so that you can’t tell up from down. Furthermore most action sequences are just too long. Either a hero is just fighting waves upon waves of non-threatening enemies or they are locked into a 30 minute slug fest with their nemesis.
Now a 30 minute fight could and should be exciting, but it is only exciting if there is some king of actual ebb and flow to it. Like a good sporting game. Most times it is just the villain and hero punching each other over and over with no seeming.
Less is more and you can’t use CGI to make up for bad writing and directing.
Forgive me for being tedious, but think about the sword fight in “The Princess Bride.” The two fighters (Elwes and Patinkin) trained for many months with some of the world’s best swordsmen to learn how to fight both left-handed and right handed. The fight went on for some time, but it was full of surprises (both fighters switched hands) and appeared absolutely real. During the fight they took turns discussing the techniques they were using, and commenting on the other’s abilities.
The best sword fight in cinematic history.
Agreed on all counts. Shaky cam has become so loathed by viewers that I wonder (continued below)
The tipping point was Titanic?
Agreed on all counts. Shaky cam has become so loathed by viewers that I wonder why any director still thinks it’s a good idea to use.
And there are plenty of overlong, not-innovative fight scenes too. As far as overlong goes, The Man of Steel’s ending fisticuffs between Zod and Supes was the worst offender to me. (continued below)
Man of Steel’s ending fight looked like it was going to be awesome in the trailers. They finally had the effects to pull off a fight between godlike beings.
And it was pretty cool, for a little while. Then it just became numbing to me and I couldn’t help but worry about all the skyscrapers they were toppling. There was nothing really clever to it, either- just “I punch you, you punch me, and so forth.”
While I did quite enjoy Age of Ultron (I do like and care about the characters in it), the ending fight scene did feel too reminiscent of Avengers 1 and, while I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon’s wit and humor, he relied on it too much, undercutting Ultron’s menace.
But while I think it’s true there’s been an over reliance on effects and not enough originality in many blockbusters, I think there’s still a lot of gems that have come out in recent years.
The Winter Soldier was a great thriller with perhaps the best action choreography I’ve seen yet in a superhero film. Inception had great concepts, visuals, and the gravity-shifting hallway fight was amazing. The last couple of Mission Impossible’s have been real fun (and the new one looks like it’ll be a blast as well), and the recent Apes movies have also been good at mixing real heart and action together, along with amazingly rendered apes.
I’m hopeful that The Force Awakens this December can restore Star Wars to its former glory.
And I think that after so many years of indulgence in digital effects more directors are finding the proper balance between digital and practical. Christopher Nolan always mixes them and keeps them seamless, and Mad Max: Fury Road this summer looked like it had a lot of insane practical stunts.
CGI is more of a problem with some movies than others. A contrast between The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels (which were made around the same time) is instructive in how CGI went complete amok in George Lucas’s hands.
I think the idea that blockbusters are no longer self-contained stories but open-ended franchises is a problem. E.T. has a resolution. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a resolution. Now there is stuff that is incomplete or sets up things in other movies or things that you would know if you were familiar with the source material. Beginning-middle-end. Thank you. They don’t need to keep the story going until the intellectual property has been strip mined.
I think animated movies belong in a different class than movies supposedly set in the real world. I saw a documentary about animators discussing the uncanny valley nightmare of Polar Express. Early on, Pixar discovered that too-realistic characters creeped out audiences, so they intentionally skewed toward a more cartoonish style. In, say, Up or The Incredibles, the animators avoid any attempt to look lifelike.
I agree with the other flaws you mention: The tedious fight scenes, the paint-by-numbers screenplays, and terrible character development. I enjoyed Thor, but what on Odin’s green earth did he see in the mousy, scatter-brained Natalie Portman character (I can’t even remember her name). He’s a warrior god, for crying out loud, and we’re supposed to believe he is insanely in love with this drab lady just because the screenwriter pronounces that he loves her.
Like you note, if you don’t care about the character, you aren’t worried about him getting out of a sticky situation.
Isn’t there a line about it indicating a problem for a play if the audience pays too much attention to the scenery? Or is it the quip about musicals “The audience never goes out humming the scenery” I’m thinking of?
Too close, but not close enough is an old problem for CGI realism.
Great sword fight, but it would be hard to match the sheer inventiveness of the warehouse fight scene in Jackie Chan’s “Rumble in the Bronx.” And the fight choreography is clear instead of the blurry, shaky stuff we suffer through today. This single scene is better than most action star’s highlight reels.
But like the scene in “The Princess Bride”, it is impressive to see someone actually doing something that requires skill.
Red Letter Media’s extended reviews of the Star Wars prequels touch on almost everything wrong with most blockbusters. Each movie gets a 90 minute review and it is definitely NSFW. The sequence entitled “Describe this Star Wars character WITHOUT saying what they look like, what costume they wear, or what their profession or role in the movie was” more than justifies the effort. It applies to Natalie Portman’s character in Thor as well.
Red Letter Media’s videos are AMAZING… and just a touch non-compliant to Ricochet’s CoC. :)
Over reliance on CGI? Confuse cause and effect much?
Yes, we know it’s CGI, just like we know the dinosaurs in King Kong weren’t dinosaurs. It’s not the suspension of disbelief, humans are quite capable of doing that, Exhibit A the current man in the White House. It’s story. When the technique and the technology support the story, nobody notices. When the story is weak or serves as the hook to hang the technique on, you notice right away. It’s my considered opinion that the best films are created by talented people who acknowledge the constraints they operate under. Who find a way to work around those constraints. That’s creativity. A classic example, Jaws. it wouldn’t have been nearly as scary if they showed the shark in the opening scene.
Personally, I find most fights or battles in contemporary movies exhausting. Too loud, too long and too many jump cuts. If it were up to me I would force anyone under 40 who wants to direct a movie to sit and watch John Ford’s entire output.
Raymond Chandler, in “The Simple Art of Murder”, wrote that “There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.” If cheap magazine detective stories can evolve into art, and I think that the best of Chandler is art, I suppose that wholly artificial movie worlds can too. The best of the Pixar movies seemed to get there because, in the Steve Jobs pre-Disney era, the projects were protected by a brilliant entrepreneur with flawless taste and not allowed to move forward until the story was great. That takes real passion which is in never-ending tension with the dictates of economics. I predict that great movies will be made again with the new technology. It will just take the right combination of individuals rebelling and conspiring against the Hollywood system to sneak some art in front of the teens in the movie theaters. I would sleep right through most of what is being made now if the sound weren’t so loud.
Spaceballs had the sense to parody all that came before. These new “blockbusters” are nothing but self referential self parodies. I mean, a realistic comic book movie?
I agree. The coolest thing with Jackie, at least before the more recent movies, is he and his team did all the stunts. Real people doing real stunts without trickery. With the CGI stuff, there is no “wonderment”, no “how did they do that?”. When the computer can create anything, nothing is special except bigger and louder and longer and crazier. Let’s see how many buildings we can destroy ala Transformers.
Would anyone go and watch a ballet that was all CGI?
I was just thinking about this flick, in the same context. Yep, there’s a ton of CGI, especially at the end, but the fights are down-scaled, realistic, as far as superhero fighting can be.
Compared to the lunacy that was Man of Steel, it’s obvious that this kind of thing can be done well, and it can be done awfully – and it’s not just the CGI component. It’s story, characters, pacing – if those things aren’t working, then no CGI can save it.
The most recent Superman killed CGI for me [as well as my jaded sons). The last 1/5th of the movie was just bodies crashing through buildings.
Zero emotion, zero awe.
One of these men was trained by Bob Anderson. The other is Bob Anderson.
He was also the sword master for LOTR, I believe. I watched an interview with Cary Elwes where he told of how, after training for a while for The Princess Bride duel, he was feeling a little cocky.
He challenged to Anderson to disarm him, except before he even finished his sentence Anderson knocked the sword out of his hand, then said, “You were saying?”
No.
Blockbusters aren’t as good as they used to be because you aren’t a teenager anymore.
Ask the teenagers, and today’s blockbusters are way better than the ones you grew up with. (“That puppet Yoda is so fake.”)
Deal with the pain.
OTOH, maybe the best one was in Scaramouche.
So terrific, in fact, that the story’s many plot holes don’t register until after multiple viewings. Why would Count Rugen not take the sword that Montoya senior had made for him? (Which if it was truly made for a six-fingered man, would have an off-balance for regular folks) Why would he leave Inigo alive? How does Wesley know that Vizzini has kidnapped Buttercup? How does Inigo know that Wesley’s true love was going to marry another? How can it be less work for a pirate to be known as one who never takes prisoners? Why does Buttercup instantly forgive Wesley for treating her horribly in his Dread Pirate Roberts persona?
The movie is the perfect example of suspension of disbelief, because we are so invested in the characters we don’t notice how sometimes what they are saying and doing just doesn’t make sense.
To me, it’s William Goldman very deftly playing with every trope in the book, very much on purpose. Just as people of my generation only knew Leslie Nielsen as the madcap Detective Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun movies and not as a serious dramatic actor in some 200 movies and TV shows from the ’40s to the ’60s, I think the people who know The Princess Bride might not know Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man… I think Goldman woke up one day, said “I want to write a romantic comedy,” knew exactly how to structure one, and did.
In short, the man’s a genius.
I think your basic scenario is flawed Jon. Rule #1: When the latest “blockbuster” comes out STAY IN YOUR CHAIR. Go to the movies that have actual acting and as close as possible to zero CGI . My opinion of movies has greatly increased (still don’t see many but that’s a function of rule #1.) Then you get to see great movies like Whiplash, and Love and Mercy instead of crap like Jurassic Park and Superman. Admittedly the rule has to be flexible when the family is determined to watch a big hit movie but that just confirms the wisdom of said rule when the movie proves to be drivel.
There’s definitely something to this. However, blockbusters like Back To The Future, Rambo, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Top Gun, Karate Kid, Jurassic Park, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Terminator, Men In Black, etc. are examples of movies that are good and were highly rated by viewers of all ages. They’re hardly without flaws, but they all certainly avoided the major flaws described in this thread:
I don’t think it is a age thing, entirely. Though nostalgia can skew our opinions greatly. For instance I loved “Guardians of the Galaxy”. I have now seen it maybe about 5 times total and I own the movie so I can keep watching it, and the thing is I do want to keep watching it, just like Indian Jones, or Star Wars. If I come across it on TV I stop and watch it usually, like I do with all my favorite action movies.
The past had many good movies, but in reality it also had many more bad ones. Now one remembers the bad ones though (unless they are supper bad, but that is another thing entirely).
I think we can make sand do make good action movies still, it is just that special effects are never a substitute for actual story telling, and simply making things bigger, louder, and more 3D isn’t going to make them better.
To be fair, Planes wasn’t Pixar. And while I’m no great fan of Cars 2, the first one was a lovely ode to the old American highway, and had a beautiful eye for styles of the post-war era.
I’m with Jon: I get tired of leaving a movie feeling as though I’ve been punched in the head for an hour, to say nothing of thinking “Who’s going to clean all this up? This will bankrupt the insurance industry.” Nothing is real, so nothing matters.