Little White Lies magazine

I nominate Van Helsing as some of the worst CGI ever to grace the big screen. It’s not even like it was a small budget film either.

Everyone involved in it should be throughly ashamed.

Written by max on June 18th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

Of all of those, the Bond tidal wave stands out to me the most. A genuine “What the fuck?” moment and the final nail in the coffin of the Bond franchise until it was reborn in Casino Royale. The whole film was almost as embarrassing as Van Helsing.

Written by Bobby on June 19th, 2008 at 9:56 am

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG!) No wonder Alan Moore hates Hollywood.

Written by Adam on June 19th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

I’d have to put The Matrix at number one. For a movie whose whole premise involves a virtual world, it appeared to not bother rendering it properly. The result suggests the Junior artists did the work for senior artists pay cheque!

Written by prov on June 20th, 2008 at 1:00 pm

I don’t know about worst CGI but definetly the most annoying of all time has to be Jar Jar Binks from the 3 latest Star Wars films!

Who would possibly create a ridiculously annoying CGI character that challenges Chris Rock’s character in Fifth Element as most annoying character in a movie ever… why George ‘I can only use CGI’ Lucas that’s who!

P.s. did anyone else think the alien at the end of the new Indy was bloody awful too??

Written by Jenks on June 25th, 2008 at 11:49 pm

Two:

1) The new Indiana Jones film featured some truly mind-numbing and poorly done CG effects - notably the high-speed sword fight (with MONKEYS!) and the death scene of Cate Blanchett’s character. The spaceship taking off, though ludicrous in terms of plot, actually looked pretty amazing, though.

2) Alien 3. I originally disliked the third film in the series almost as much as everyone else, until I watched the extended version (as Fincher intended it), which lifted the whole thing out of the mire. It still couldn’t improve the truly dire early-CGI/blue screen effects of the alien, though, which apparently were rushed through at the last minute.

Generally, I loathe how laden with CG effects modern blocbusters have become - sitting watching the Summer trailers became a truly numbing experience, with all the emotion and impact sucked out of every scene by the same CG crap.

The best film to incorporate CG effects recently? Pirates of the Caribbean (1) - beautifully spare use of special effects, combined with some awesome real-world stunts.

Written by GMcG on June 26th, 2008 at 11:59 am

The infected in I Am Legend, in the book they had a bit of character, but in the film they are baldy and looked the same. Why didn’t they stay faithful to the book?

Written by Iain D on June 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm

“The best film to incorporate CG effects recently? Pirates of the Caribbean (1) - beautifully spare use of special effects, combined with some awesome real-world stunts.”

Shame the film was total cack.

Written by max on June 26th, 2008 at 1:34 pm

I liked the first Pirates of the Caribbean. So there you go.

Second one was humdrum, and haven’t seen the third.

Written by GMcG on June 26th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

In terms of summer releases, go and see Wanted. The point at which one car hops over another so the assassin can shoot the guy through the sunroof was the point at which I gouged my own eyes out.

Written by Matt on June 27th, 2008 at 8:05 am

Sounds like I’d be gouging my eyes out too, but not for the same, good reasons.

I’m so sick of CGI. Indy was pretty much the last straw - the only blockbuster I’ll see this summer is The Dark Knight.

Written by GMcG on June 27th, 2008 at 11:04 am

Profoundly disagree with your verdict on both Peter Jackson’s King Kong and its CGI. So, I might add, do my kids, who, for all the deficits in attention endemic in their age group (they’re both five), will happily sit through all 3+ hours of the film again… and again… and again. They are excited by the diplodocuses, terrified of the insects and spiders, and my daughter cries every time she sees the film’s ending - a sure sign (backed up by what she says about the scene) that she has no problem relating to CG Kong as a living, breathing subject deserving of her sympathy. I seem to recall when I saw the press screening, several fellow critics (traditionally a jaded, cynical bunch) were also audibly weeping during the climactic sequence…

You might well think all the insects and spiders were out of place in the film, and that is of course a matter of taste - but what exactly was wrong with the CGI that renders them? If anything, the part of the film that drags is the opening third, where the CG wizardry is largely absent (apart, of course, from the lovingly recreated ‘virtual’ version of Depression-era New York that forms the backdrop).

Written by Anton Bitel on July 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 am

I think you misunderstand my criticism of the CGI in King Kong. When I first saw King Kong I happened to be with my 9 year old nephew, and he loved it as much as I’m sure your kids do. Kong is rendered in believable detail, and I found myself feeling as much sympathy as anyone else. I didn’t suggest otherwise.

My criticism of KK is that it privileges CGI viscerality ,(i.e. the ridiculously fast and implausible sequences of insect attack or death-by-diplodocus) over motivated, believable, involving film-making. It’s interesting that you criticise the first third of the film as I felt that was the most effective part - playing due tribute to the brilliant, gradual development of suspense in the original. As you say, maybe it’s just a question of taste.

It’s easy to find examples of bad CGI, and will become easier as CGI develops and its earliest incarnations become even more outdated. But that to me is not the point. In my piece in White Lies on CGI I argued that CGI’s failures relate to it being too perfect, too good even. This has resulted in CGI being used, a la George Lucas, for its own sake rather than for the good of the film. The stop frame animation in the original King Kong, or even in Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films, or countless others, has dated - and yet it remains brilliant, exciting, thrilling, involving. Why is this? I don’t pretend to know why, but I know CGI doesn’t work for me.

Written by James Bramble on July 10th, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Hurrah, Mr Bramble. Too right. I’m looking fwd to picking up LWL to read your article.

The saturation of modern films with CGI is a regular focus of bitching for me and my girlfriend. There is ultimately something soulless about the over-use of CGI, that robs a film of emotional or visceral impact.

Part of the reason I’m looking fwd to The Dark Knight so much is that, based on the trailers (and the previous film), the CGI is used pretty sparingly.

Written by GMcG on July 11th, 2008 at 11:08 am

“My criticism of KK is that it privileges CGI viscerality (i.e. the ridiculously fast and implausible sequences of insect attack or death-by-diplodocus) over motivated, believable, involving film-making.”

Well, insect attacks and deaths-by-dinosaur are no more (or less) implausible than gigantic gorillas rampaging through jungle (not to mention urban) landscapes and engaging in inter-species romance with women about a tenth their size. It is, however, easy to imagine that such attacks would indeed be “ridiculously fast” – and they in fact serve a similar dramatic purpose (beyond their mere “viscerality”, not that there is anything wrong with that) to all the ape’s antics: i.e. to reduce overweening humankind to humbling scale. All the films in the Kong canon remind us of our place – and if the bug and dinosaur sequences show mankind overwhelmed not just by outsized creepy-crawlies or outdated reptiles but also by cutting-edge post-millennial technology, then that is all the better to make the point.

It seems odd to criticise any film falling within the King Kong mythology for privileging spectacle over plausibility. If CGI does not “work for” you period, then obviously a film as brimming with the stuff (and as long) as Jackson’s Kong is going to pose a problem – in much the same way that the original Kong is hardly going to please anyone who simply dislikes stop-motion effects (and no doubt in its time it had its fair share of detractors for that very reason). Both films are, in a way, celebrations of what it was possible to visualise in their time (as well, of course, as disquisitions on the evolving place of man in the face of modernity). The sheer spectacle of both films is part and parcel of what makes them so engaging and involving – but when it comes to motivation and credibility, I think Jackson’s film in fact has the jump on the original (sacrilege, I know) in terms of its development of more believable characters (in inherently unbelievable circumstances).

In any case, for some of us, the insect sequence, far from being “laughable”, represents an insertion of full-blown squeamishness and abjection into a film that is anyway always flirting (at least) with the tropes of horror. My children hide behind their hands in terror whenever that scene comes on. Is it visceral? Of course – how could being torn apart and devoured not be? But that hardly means that it fails to be “involving”…

Written by Anton Bitel on July 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am

It’s absolutely true that both King Kongs are in parts about showcasing spectacle. Where we disagree is in how enjoyable that spectacle is. We should probably leave that argument aside as unresolvable as otherwise we’re thrown into the hell of po-mo subjectivity. Why bother reading someone else’s opinion at all? What if you had indigestion when you watched the film? What if the particular shade of the Gorilla’s fur sub-consciously reminded you of the carpet mat in the footwell of the Ford Mustang you fantasised about buying as a child but later rejected as a symbol of American arrogance. How did that affect your reception of the Film?

As regards the plausibility of amorously inclined outsize gorillas, I think there’s a subtle distinction here. It is not totally unbelievable that on a sheltered island in the middle of nowhere there might be a species of enormous ape. And it’s not totally implausible that said ape might want to make sexy with a woman. I would need to watch Jackson’s KK again (and I’d rather not) to answer this in detail but I think even you might agree that there are many sequences in it which stretch plausibility to breaking point - the examples I chose being the shooting of the insects off peoples bodies again and again, or the dodging in and out of the feet of the diplodocuses for what seems like hours on end. These seem to me to be physically impossible rather than theoretically implausible.

I can accept theoretically unlikely things happening in films, this seems to me to be the crux of the ’suspension of disbelief’. But I think the physically unlikely, let alone the physically impossible, is harder to accept. We accept that it is possible that an archaeologist might risk life and limb to find precious artefacts, meanwhile dodging the Nazis and nearly falling foul of God himself. But when he is running to jump under a closing door very nearly closed, but then suddenly open again – we feel cheated. I feel the same about CGI. I want to suspend disbelief but (as I say in my piece in White Lies) it’s a bond of trust. Push it too far and that trust is broken. In my article, both the stuntmen and the psychologist I interview mention the importance of the physical, shock element as integral to film’s power. Perhaps I find the physically impossible disappointing because it fails to give me this sort of shock effect. I just don’t believe what I see.

Your kids, like my nephew, don’t have this problem. Carl Plantinga, the psychologist I interviewed, raised this as an interesting development - that there is a new generation of filmgoers for whom the rules for the reflection of reality on screen will be different. Those of us who don’t really like CGI will probably just appear more and more like Luddites.

When I was a child I used to enjoy playing in the sand-pit in our garden. It seems that the local cats used to enjoy the sand-pit as well, and would frequently use it as a toilet. In my innocent way, I used to take great pleasure in discovering cat faeces amidst the sand. This cat excretia would have become somewhat firm and tactile due to the dehydrating effect of the sand and I used to enjoy squeezing it between my little fingers. As an adult, I can subjectively say - I wouldn’t recommend squeezing cat shit.

Written by James Bramble on July 11th, 2008 at 5:16 pm

Like any other special effect (stop-motion, animatronics, miniature modelling, in-camera trickery, stuntwork pieced together through editing, whatever), CGI is just a tool. Ultimately it is down to the story to carry you along - the special effects ought just to serve the story by adding a visual component that could not be filmed without effects. If the story stinks, any and every effect will seem annoying and out of place - while, conversely, if the story is compelling, viewers will happily tolerate even overly conspicuous or inferior effects, accepting them as part of the film’s visual ’stylisation’. That is why so many people are so fond of stop-motion today - it’s the sort of compensatory viewing afforded by nostalgia, combined with teh fact that only the half-decent stop-motion films tend to be remembered, while the crud has in the meantime been convniently forgotten.

Whether Jackson’s King Kong is or is not worth watching will ultimately, as you say, come down to subjective judgement - and I have no problem with that. Indeed, it is always interesting to hear what others think about a film, regardless of your/my own view. I just wonder whether your fine distinctions between the “theoretically unlikely” (which you say you can accept), the “physically unlikely” (with which you are uncomfortable) and the “physically impossible” (which you reject out of hand) are any less subjective. Into which category does a fight between a dinosaur and a giant primate fall (a scene found in all three versions of Kong) - one of which creatures has never, to my knowledge, existed, and neither of which has ever co-existed? Or what about an island small enough to have remained undiscovered but big enough to accommodate many such creatures? Are these cinematic hypotheses merely “theoretically unlikely” (and therefore totally OK), whereas using a gun (after all else has failed) to kill an oversized insect is somehow more obviously “physically impossible” (and therefore thoroughly unacceptable)? Often what a viewer is prepared to accept is actually wrapped up closely in whether they are enjoying a film or not - and has little to do with normal standard of plausibility.

My point is that realism (not the same as ‘the real’) is a shifting category, acquiring different definitions in different genres (not to mention in individual films). Both a fantasy adventure (like the Kong films) and an intimate character drama can be fictions, but they are radically different kinds of fiction that call for us to “suspend disbelief” in rather different ways. Once one is prepared to make the leap of faith (for the sake of a potentially good story) that there might be an island with a large (in every sense) population of prehistoric creatures, then within that fantasy framework it is not so very implausible that a herd of diplodocus might stampede down a ravine when pursued by predators, and that humans caught in the onrush must do their best to weave between the charging dinosaurs’ legs in order to survive. It is notable that many of the men in this scene (and indeed in the insect sequence) do NOT survive - in a touch of what might be called the realism of fantasy. If, as an adult, I attended King Kong expecting a more ‘documentary’ kind of realism, you would surely question my sanity. None of this has much to do with CGI - but that is what I had been trying to say in my original post. Photorealism doesn’t make it real, any more than writing down a story makes it true.

At the risk of changing the subject, it should be stated that the sort of CGI that is used in most films today (and not just the fantasy stuff where normative notions of what is possible go out the window) is hardly ever noticed - discrete alterations of shopfront signs or number plates in the background, removal of anachronistic graffiti (or anachronistic car models), etc. This type of CGI is actually contributing to (rather than distracting from) cinema’s constructed notion of realism. As such, I would have thought it deserves to be celebrated - no matter what you make of the more overt end of the CGI spectrum.

Written by Anton Bitel on July 14th, 2008 at 8:27 pm