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In Reply to: Like Hilary's fictional account of history.... posted by Rod M on June 23, 2003 at 18:34:44:
Bring back animatronics!!! These CGI characters have none. Yuck. The artificiality is distracting. While I admire attempts to push beyond the confines of the current envelope, it's failure detracts from the movie. Isn't that what makes a FX movie a classic? Ignoring Chuck Heston's remarkable performance in "Ten Commandments" & "Planet of the Apes" for a second. How much worse would those movies have been if the director pushed the envelope? EG: The director knew he couldn't do a convincing space re-entry/crash scene so he filmed it from inside the vehicle. In "Ten Commandments", the director knew some of the FX were hokey so he attempted to portray them as a bad drop whenever possible to accentuate them. Then, OTOH we have "Jaws". "Jaws" IMHO is a classic precisely because the mechanical shark broke down so much in salt water. Thus, Spielberg had to be creative shooting the same scenes shark less. Otherwise, I suspect it was destined to be another slasher movie with a modern sea monster. Hollywood still doesn't comprehend that "The Matrix" worked because the FX didn't overstep their bounds. Of course some help was innate to the script. A viewer can dismiss some lame CGI FX because it was a CG world. However, most were proven technologies professionalized, like the "Lost in Space" movie. Then, add a bit of "Avengers" slickness & we have a showpiece. It wasn't revolutionary at all. It was a polished piece of concurrent film neuer carried by Laurence Fishburne & Joe Pantoliano. (end of rant)♪ moderate Mart £ ♫ ☺ Planar Asylum
Follow Ups:
With rare exception, whenever I think of Charltan Heston's acting an image of the world's biggest ham sandwich comes to mind, and how much better off we'd all be as vegitarians! ;^)FTR, I don't like badly done FX either, but animatronics? With rare exception animatronics draw attention to themselves by the very nature of their unnaturalness. I agree that what Spielberg did in "Jaws" was inspired, necessity being the mother of invention as the saying goes, but occasionally, whenever one gets a near field glimpse of that animatronic shark it still looks REAL hokey. I'd wager that, if Steven were filming many of those same shots today, he'd employ cutting edge CGI to great effect. Note: My all time favorite Spielberg movies are his Jurassic Park series, which do employ some animatronics, but in those films the effects shots which work the best are the CGI shots.
AuPh
Yes, Spielberg did use CGI on distant shots, because CGI looks really hideous in a close-up. Plus, I found animatronic hokiness is a direct function of the puppeteer more than technical limitations. At least manipulation is far more convincing than hi-tech gooing of actual creates like "Cats & Dogs", or pur CGI like the dead soldiers in "Mummy".
♪ moderate Mart £ ♫ ☺ Planar Asylum
That's also where animatronics tend to look more fake, even when in the hands of competant animatronic operators, but you're right about the degree of hokiness being directly proportional to the skill of the puppeteer.As far as Jaws is concerned, the few mid-range shots of the shark lurching up on the boat, etc., look pretty fake to me. The best stuff is always the brief glimpses of a fin, a shadow, surface agitation or those moving-in-for-the-kill shots taken from the shark's perspective.
AuPh
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