How Computers Make Movie Miracles Cheap
Sunday Morning movie critic David Edelstein reviews the box-office smash, "300," and finds its computer-intensive look, while impressive, is less muscular than the brawn of real warriors.
Critics have called the new Spartan war picture "300" "groundbreaking," which is funny because no ground was broken! It has real actors, but computers added the scenery. They might have added the muscles, too. It's a movie with a cast of hundreds of thousands that could have been shot in a walk-in closet in Burbank.
Now, I don't care for the picture itself. Even though it's based on a vivid Frank Miller graphic novel, it plays like a campy homoerotic video game (and, mind you, I have nothing against homoerotic video games); I just think it's a weird time to be celebrating the pictorial beauty of lopping off Persian limbs.
But most of all, I'm bored by CGI, a.k.a. computer generated imagery. Or, "Computers Gone Insane."
I don't want to get all doctrinaire. I don't hate computer animation. Another Frank Miller picture, "Sin City," has a luminous black-and-white palette, with breathtaking splashes of crimson. The images seem dredged up from the collective unconscious of graphic-novel freaks. And the film doesn't try to be ennobling like "300." It's happy to be a sick puppy.
Brilliant computer artistry and the acting of Andy Serkis make Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" the most fascinating gargoyle in all movies.
I don't begrudge Clint Eastwood for using computers to enhance the fleet in "Flags of Our Fathers"; I wouldn't have wanted all those battleships pulled from places in the world where we need them.
And, of course, the way computers create the illusion of moving around the suspended Carrie Ann Moss in "The Matrix" drives home that you're in a virtual-reality universe.
But when the "Matrix" guys upped the stakes for the so-called Bully Brawl in the sequel, "The Matrix Reloaded," we lost all connection with gravity. And without the texture of reality, there is no real threat.
How many times did George Lucas take visually-dead scenes in the new "Star Wars" pictures and sprinkle in effects like cyber-MSG? It doesn't help.
In "Spider Man," director Sam Raimi and actor Tobey MacGuire give us a wonderfully down-to-earth superhero whose powers seem an outgrowth of his adolescent confusion. Then he turns into a little videogame man swinging through a videogame cityscape.
Here's the real point: When it's all done with computers, miracles are cheap. You miss the mixture of athleticism and sharp editing you get in the battle scenes in "Braveheart."
You miss the scary, real-time feats of Jackie Chan and stunt guys who trained for years at places like the Beijing Opera.
You miss, well, Hollywood greats like Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor in "Singin' in the Rain."
That's when I look at the screen and say, "Ah: The magic of movies."