Holy shit, CGI has changed the way we
look at the world around us. Back in the 70’s if you were waiting for
the movie to start and the bucket of popcorn grew eyes and started
dancing around the counter top assisted by a reanimated bag of Skittles
you’d puke in your hat and call a ventriloquist, a priest, and a burly
cop six weeks from retirement to come deal with it. Now we can’t flip
through the channels without seeing a seemingly living 2,000 foot robot
whipping up a lather in his 17,000 foot shower or a muffin writhing out
of some bitch’s grasp as she does a walk-and-talk about menopause being a
real pisser. Superman
made us believe a man could fly but it wasn’t until The Revenge of the Sith
that we could believe that Christopher Lee had both Jedi Powers and
Phase-Shift Parkinsons.
CGI is an amazing tool that many
filmmakers wield like a digital Mjolnir,
creating worlds and creatures that take our breath away. Unfortunately
through the years some have used it as a scythe, slashing our dreams and
severing that muscle that connects our sexual pleasure organs to the
muscle that tells our mind we’re really good at using our sexual
pleasure organs. The result is oblivion.
So with that we bring you CHUD’s
latest glorious list. The twenty worst instances of CGI in movie
history. In no order. Well, except the order we decide to do them.
Brought to you by Nick Nunziata
THE OFFENDER:
Star Wars: A New Hope: SE
Fat fuck.
THE
SCENE: The infamous “Jabba’s a fucked up Irishman but we cut him out and down the line I found a way to use the character in a later film and it makes my universe seem really well planned out even though it isn’t and now I’m old and can’t stop revisiting my triumphs so let me use old footage that doesn’t apply just to make my universe seemed really planned out even though it isn’t and to allow me additional revenue possibilities for my Boba Fett character that was totally perfect with his seven minutes of screentime and make him a really nice half-dimensional major character in the saga even though he isn’t and while I’m at it let me use CGI to awkwardly tell my story even though there are zero people in the world who don’t already know this information and by golly I can also build on that amazing idea of Greedo shooting first so that a parent in Provo doesn’t get offended by Allie Fox proactively killing an evil alien even though he shot a dude with a sword from far away in that other franchise we did and you know what aliens are some so if I ever get around to making another film in that other series way after the actor’s old enough to pull it off I should change the aliens to beings that travel interdimensionally because aliens are cheesy, and where is that mask of baby Greedo I had commissioned” scene.
WHERE IT
ALL GOES WRONG: Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s when George Lucas forgot about his vision of being an artist.
HOW IT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE PRACTICALLY: Newsflash – The Jabba in Return of the Jedi wasn’t CGI. Or a dude who got caught up in the soaps and eventually had to be cut out of his house. He’s a big puppet, and one who Jeff Healey [RIP: Pulling out necks in Heaven with Pat Swayze] could see was fake. I’m not an apologist. Jabba in 1983 looked like rubber asshole. And it was fine. Star Wars and its sequels were a product of a different era. It’s dangerous to tinker, a lesson that’s been learned with nearly every special edition ever made. How it could have been done practically? A new insert scene where the Irish dude watches Falcon fly off and does some space drug whose side effects include nausea and becoming a thousand pounds of swampy trouble. Solved.
You want the definition of a lose/lose proposition. This:
HOW BAD
IS IT? In the original, Han Solo walks behind the Irishman [Lucas has since stated he always planned to replace the dude with a stop-motion creature, which is almost surely dogshit], because that’s what you sometimes have to do with Irishmen. In the special edition, he steps on Jabba’s tail and hurts his feelings. The CGI is rather abysmal and jarring in most of the scenes in the Special Editions, from things that take the “lived in” look and shit it out the window to blatant changes to cantina creatures [unforgivable]. This is the worst. It’s a businessman in a filmmaker’s plaid shirt looking down his nose at his fans and coughing a big fat glob of phlegm on their eyes.
IN
SUMMATION: Your childhood sat on Uncle George’s lap. Then his face. Then his dick.
