Is Hollywood too reliant on computers?

When Jurassic Park came out it blew everyone away. Rather than the slightly jerky go motion puppets - Phil Tippett of ILM’s version of stop motion but with motion blur to make model movements look more natural - audiences were suddenly face-to-face with smooth-moving, ultra-realistic (we presume) computer-generated dinosaurs. It was incredibly, and suddenly computers were propelled to the forefront of special effects, but was this a good move?

Special effects used to be incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce, so they were generally saved for big moments; nowadays, even the cheapest, low-budget sci-fi caper splurges stunning amounts of cheaply-generated effects across the screen. To me, it feels as if the magic has been lost along the way, as you can spot these effects a mile off. As everyone knows, the best special effect is the one that you don’t notice.

Computers should be there to help enhance a scene, not steal the lime-light and break your bond with the film. Too often film makers are simply using computers to replace what should be shot normally; what they should be doing is using a blend of techniques.

Take Jurassic Park, for example. A lot scenes actually used models, such as the shot where the T-Rex attacks the car in the rain. This means that everything you see on screen is actually happening, and the actors all have something to respond to. It’s brilliant, and it works. The film also has some subtle uses of CGI that you won’t and shouldn’t spot. The best example is when Lex (the girl in the film) is moving through the crawl space in the suspended ceiling. When a velociraptor jumps up and knocks a ceiling panel, she falls down, just saving herself by gripping the surrounding panels. When this scene was shot, Lex was played by the adult stunt double who, quite naturally, looked up as she fell. This, of course, ruined the shot, as you could clearly see that it wasn’t the same actress playing Lex. The solution, was to use a computer to take Lex’s face from the main actress and graft it onto the shot. The result is a more gripping scene and a brilliant use of computers. It’s a similar technique that makers of The Crow used to put Brandon Lee’s face in a smashed mirror for a scene filmed after he’d been tragically shot and killed on set.

Fast-forward a few years to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and things have gone downhill. There’s a lot that’s wrong with this film and its two sequels, but the main culprit is George Lucas’ over-reliance on CGI. Rather than use real locations and build real sets, actors had to stand in front of green screen, while everything else was dropped in later. The result is twofold: the actors had nothing to act against, so the performances aren’t as good as they could be, and every planet they visit looks like it’s been generated by computers. The climax of the film (if it can be called that) is the worst, as it ends up with computer-generated Gungans fighting computer-generated robots against a computer-generated backdrop: it’s like Toy Story only without the fun.

In the film’s defence (you won’t hear that sentence often from me) it can at least claim to be a science-fiction film that’s supposed to have all of these incredibly things going on. That’s not an excuse that can be used by action films, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The first films in the series were known for their incredible, but real, action scenes. The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones slips underneath the truck, cracks his whip to the underside and gets dragged behind is one of the most iconic scenes in films. It was also actually shot with real actors, a real truck and a real road. The scene in the latest film where Indiana Jones gets blown up by a computer-generated atom bomb and flung into the air in a computer-generated fridge is just stupid. There’s no sense of reality into the shot and the film suffers for it. Even worse, is the part when Mutt learns to swing through the trees, as he’s just seen some computer-generated chuckling monkeys (this has to be George Lucas’ fault) do the same thing.

There are some films that mostly get it right. Lord of the Rings is a prime example. The sets are all real, models are mostly used for the towers, castles and some other scenery, and the characters are primarily real actors. Computers are generally used to enhance scenes and fill in missing details. Where computer-generated characters are used, it mostly pulls them off - Gollum is one of the most-engaging and memorable characters. The main reason that he, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, works is because we have no frame of reference for how a creature like Gollum should move, look or react.

It’s a different story with human (or human-like characters) and where Lord of the Rings has one of its few special effects failings is with Legolas. Every time he does something super-human (or, I guess, normal for an elf), such as jumping onto the cave troll or climbing around the oliphant, Orlando Bloom is replaced with a computer-generated version of himself, and it shows. With our brains so used to recognising how people look and move, computer-generated people like this just stick out and look like video-games characters.

It’s a failing that’s plagued lots of films, such as the The Matrix Reloaded. Produce Joel Silver promised that you’d never be able to spot the difference between the real Agent Smith and computer-generated Agent Smiths in the big fight with Neo. Sadly, the fact that the computer-generated characters were all too smooth, too shiny and too obviously computer generated made that part of the film look like someone playing the latest version of Mortal Kombat.

This insistence on using computers for everything seems to be the main problem with effects in Hollywood films. The makers are so intent on making each scene look more and more impressive that they’ve lost track of what makes films so much fun in the first place: believing that what’s happening on screen could really happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against computer-generated effects, but they have to be used in moderation and to enhance what’s already there. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, such as the way that David Fincher used computer-generated camera movements in Fight Club to produce impossible shots. The key difference is that this was an artistic decision to use computers to produce a look to the film that you can’t get using normal shots.

So, with all of this in mind, here’s what I think film makers need to do:

• Build actual sets or use real locations. You can’t generate something that’s more real than something that actually is real.


• Don’t user computer animation for people. Either get actors or stunt-people that can do the stunt, or don’t bother.


• Ask, is the scene we’re currently about to generate remotely believable? If it isn’t, don’t bother. Rewrite the script and put in a stunt that you actually have to film.


• Finally, and most importantly, keep George Lucas away from computers. In fact, could someone rebuild the Star Wars Cantina, fill it full of the aliens again and take George for a drink there? Perhaps if he saw what he was missing, he’d make amends and bring out special editions of the new Star Wars films, replacing the computer effects with actual film footage.