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 Devin Faraci
THE OFFENDER: King Kong (2005)
THE
SCENE: The big dinosaur stampede. One of the things that we were most excited for in Peter Jackson’s remake of perhaps the most effective monster movie of all time was the increased presence of dinosaurs. All kids who grew up on King Kong had their imaginations fired by the amazing Skull Island dinosaur scenes, but like all kids we wanted more. Jackson was on the same wavelength and gave us more. Yet somehow he wasn’t able to trump the special effects of 1933.
WHERE IT
ALL GOES WRONG: This scene, to me, is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with CGI. It’s supposed to be a visceral and thrilling and fun moment, but it’s just hokey and fake and cheesy. It never looks like any of the human characters are even remotely near, around or interacting with the dinosaurs. And isn’t the whole point supposed to be that we’re excited because Adrien Brody could, at any moment, be stomped on by a brontosaurus?
The scene’s cruddy FX are only heightened by the fact that this comes right in the middle of a movie that had been sold to us as a revolution and that had cost so much money. We were supposed to be seamlessly drawn into the character of Kong thanks to Jackson’s use of advanced mocap techniques; I guess he saved all of his seams for right here.
BEEN DONE PRACTICALLY:
With all that money spent on FX they should have just cloned dinosaurs and had Brody et al run amongst them.
Barring that, how about figuring out the lighting of the scene? Or how about having the actors run between green-painted wooden models, so that there would be the feeling that there was physical interaction? This scene looks like Jackson filmed the guys running back and forth with no thought as to where the dinosaurs would go and then he tasked WETA to somehow make it all work.
Or better yet, just don’t have the scene in the movie. Fucking thing was long enough anyway. And this scene is just a long, boring mess that climaxes in a bronto pile-up that feels like it’s got a chip on its shoulder about physics. As if it’s not bad enough that we have to watch five minutes of live action humans poorly composited with running dinos, the end of the scene is all about throwing brontos around like they’re six pound rubber dolls.
HOW BAD
IS
IT?
I do believe this video sums it up perfectly. Sadly it’s not embeddable, so you’ll have to click.
IN
SUMMATION:
You can throw all the money in the world at the screen and you still can’t make an action scene with Jack Black in it work.
