Recently I’ve been going back and watching a lot of must see films, a lot of which are older, and there’s something I’ve noticed that’s different when watching them: they’re pre-CGI. This has more of an effect on how I watch a movie than I thought it would.
If I’m watching a modern movie there’s always this little thing in the back of my head that’s trying to work out whether something is CG or not. I try and look at the lighting or the compositing to see if I can tell. Often I’ll think something’s CG when it actually isn’t just because I’m hyper-aware of it. The end result of this is that I can never trust what I’m seeing. I don’t know whether the thing I’m watching ever actually happened.
Not only can I not trust what I’m seeing but I find that often it has a negative impact on the look of the film. Not that the CGI just looks bad, although that can be the case when studios are rushed to finished, but that it often still looks to clean. I’m no VFX artist but I think it might have something to do with lighting? I don’t exactly know why but most of the time CG still ends up in the uncanny valley, at least for me. A some-what recent example of this that stands out to me is the new Star Wars films. Technically the CGI incredible, and far superior to that of the original or prequel trilogies, but it still just looks off.
Another negative impact CGI can have, less on the viewing experience but on the actual making of the film, is a kind of ‘fix it in post’ attitude. This isn’t really a direct effect of CGI, and most good directors aren’t guilty of this, but occasionally this is the reason a film may have turn out less than stellar.
This may sound like I’m a purist who thinks that CGI has ruined the art film making but that is definitely not the case. CGI has made possible so many things that wouldn’t been just a decade ago. However, for me at least, I have an extra appreciation for movies made before it mostly because I know that everything I’m seeing is real; it might be a matte painting, but it’s real. That space ship in Alien: that’s a model. Those explosions and helicopters in Apocalypse Now: they’re actual explosions and helicopters. That water buffalo being brutally sacrificed be tribesmen, also in Apocalypse Now: that actually happened.