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ShareAt the risk of sounding like one of those grumpy old codgers who are always critically comparing their own idealized childhoods with those of modern kids, I have to say that I feel sorry for today’s young moviegoers.
Not just because today’s blockbusters seem to be dumber and more derivative than those of yore, but because the pixelization of the movie industry has robbed audiences of some basic thrills.
The ability of Hollywood to conjure up everything from dinosaurs to alien planets in computer bytes has placed just about anything within the visual reach of filmmakers. “That’s impossible” is no longer a drag on artistic vision.
I’m finding that far from enhancing the moviegoing experience, these computer-generated images detract from it.
Take your basic epic. One of the reasons David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” is so great is our knowledge that those gorgeous desert vistas were the real deal. Back in the early ‘60s, if you wanted a shot of an army of Bedouins on camels charging an enemy city, you had to actually assemble the army outside a city and stage the whole thing for the camera.
Last week I saw “Prince of Persia,” which, whatever its dramatic inadequacies, had plenty of opportunity for visual oomph.
And yet instead of feeling expansive and big, it felt constricted and claustrophobic. Much of the film takes place in a sprawling Middle Eastern city replete with palatial domes, minarets, slum districts and an encircling wall. These, of course, were rendered in a computer, since nobody was about to build such a structure in the real world.
And you know what? It didn’t convince me for a minute. It may have been photo realistic, but it still felt phony.
Parts of “Prince” were shot in Morocco in a real desert, but even that feels fake.
Take a look at the castle siege that opens the new “Robin Hood” (another movie that’s dramatically iffy). It was obvious that director Ridley Scott had an actual castle — or at least one side of it — built so that Russell Crowe and his buddies could storm it. Whatever the expense of raising such an edifice, it paid off. The opening siege may be the best thing in the film, one of the few moments when I felt involved.
Thinking back on the movies that impressed me deeply as a child, I realize that even if the movie were questionable (and it often was), I usually was deeply impressed at the filmmakers’ efforts.
The siege of an English castle that concludes the Kirk Douglas-Tony Curtis gloriously cheesy sword-banger “The Vikings” is as good today as it was back in 1958. We’re talking a huge cast, a gigantic set that covers acres and stunts performed by real people, not computer-enhanced dolls.
When Liz Taylor’s Queen of the Nile triumphantly enters Rome in “Cleopatra,” she’s accompanied by hundreds of musicians, dancers and warriors. They parade through a huge arch until we finally get a glimpse of Liz, perched atop a float shaped like a sphinx. The whole thing takes more than 10 minutes, and we’re spellbound because we know that all these people actually assembled on that gigantic set of the forum to entertain us. Also, we’re fretting about whether the approaching sphinx float can possibly fit through the arch — that dilemma provided the most gripping moment in an otherwise overcooked film.
The chariot race in “Ben-Hur” remains the best action sequence in movie history in large part because we realize that those men and horses were actually courting injury or death to bring us this re-creation of Roman excess. Seriously, there are stunts here (a fallen driver being kicked around the track like the ball in an equine soccer game) that I still can’t figure out. How did they do that and not kill the guy?
Here’s one problem: CGI can’t save a dramatically inept movie like “Prince of Persia.” That I found myself obsessing over landscapes and structures that clearly don’t exist anywhere but in a computer is an indicator of how much I wasn’t involved in the movie itself. You can overlook a lot of shaky detail if you’re caught up in the story.
CGI lets filmmakers do anything, but they’re still learning how to use it. One problem is that unless you have unlimited funds (as was the case with James Cameron’s “Avatar”), you’re probably not going to make computer-generated environments feel very real.
So maybe more films should go the way of the Spartans-vs.-Persians killfest “300,” which was, with the exception of the human actors, entirely fashioned on the computer. It works because it doesn’t try to be ultra-realistic. Its backgrounds look painterly and artificial, but we accept them because the entire movie has been so carefully stylized. There’s no jarring contrast between real and unreal if it’s all a bit unreal.
I’m not naive enough to think that the use of CGI in films is going to go away. It costs a lot less to have five guys on computers creating a medieval city than having 500 guys building a “real” one out of wood and plaster. In fact, “Cleopatra” cost so much and earned so little that it brought the whole ‘60s movie epic movement to a screeching halt.
Jon Turteltaub, director of the “National Treasures” movies, told The Kansas City Star a few years ago, “I think CGI should be used as a tool to fix a problem — to fill in the blanks, to make it look better and more dangerous and to make shooting safer.”
Filmmakers know they can do anything with this technology. But for the sake of the movies themselves, I hope they learn how to use it less.
