Just got back from seeing Iron Man

[xiphias]

I did enjoy it quite a bit. But I'm finding that the part of superhero movies which I'm LEAST interested in is the superhero battles. They're, y'know, boring. Fight scenes which are done by stuntmen and martial artists -- those are cool. But fight scenes done by CGI? Well, if they've got good dialogue and one-liners, they're fine.
But CGI has gotten good enough that it's boring. I mean, I think I actually preferred the CGI in Babylon Five -- because they were always pushing the envelope and trying new things. Now, people can do the CGI well -- and it's boring.

So I find myself just sort of vaguely watching the battles, and waiting for them to get back to the bits where the people are talking to each other.

The bits where Tony is building and testing his suit, though -- those are CGI-heavy, AND fun. So it CAN be done -- CGI is hardly a scene-killer. It's just -- we're past the point where CGI is cool.

Comments

[dianavilliers.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking around about the time the LOTR movies came out that they're going to have to start to rely on plot, dialogue and artistry again, because anything you can imagine can be created on screen now.

[bandraoi.livejournal.com]

I agree with you...the fight scenes in superhero movies are the least interesting.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

Oh great! Next, you're going to tell me car chases and explosions aren't cool either.

[dianavilliers.livejournal.com]

Nah. Some things are timeless.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

They can be. I think the car chases in the Bourne movies -- at least, the first two; I haven't seen the third -- are amazing. But that's because they have a genuine visceral feel to them that you normally don't get.

[florafloraflora.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Bourne action is the only action for me. Most CGI still strikes me as ineffably crappy, but I think that has more to do with the weak aesthetics that tend to go along with it.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Also, explosions are cool. They just are. If they weren't, my friends wouldn't have accidentally set that field in Arlington Heights on fire that one time when they set it on fire at least four times a year for ten years.

[navrins]

Yeah. For me, The Phantom Menace was really the last opportunity for a movie to make me say "wow" about special effects. It did, and it was fun, and I'm glad it did... but it did so much that I then knew you could do ANYTHING with CGI, and therefore it's not exciting for itself.

On the bright side, it now means you can show ANY story, and that's pretty exciting. No serious movie studio will ever again need to scale back the author's vision based on what it's possible to do in a movie - and increasingly even low-budget movies can do it. But that does mean there has to be a good vision there to begin with.

On the other hand, I do miss the experience of just being so awed at "they put THAT on screen."

Sometimes I wish I'd been just a little older in 1977, and could have appreciated just how impressive the original Star Wars's special effects were.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wish I'd been just a little older in 1977, and could have appreciated just how impressive the original Star Wars's special effects were.

I was eight. The Star Destroyer in the opening scene is probably the main reason I'm a science fiction fan now. That totally blew my mind.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It just kept going. Yeah. It doesn't work on the small screen.

I liked the parody of that scene in Spaceballs -- but the parody wouldn't have meant anything if the original hadn't had such an amazing impact.

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

To be fair, a lot of envelope-pushing is still happening all the time. It's just happening on a really arcane level that the audience can't see. In fact, most of it seems to be happening in (a) the ZBrush engine and how many hojillion polygons it can handle at once and (b) figuring out how to animate a realistic human face without creating an on-time-on-Mars-on-budget situation, where Mars is 'any location outside the uncanny valley'. For the audience, this is like watching someone who can run a three minute, fifty-seven second mile run a three minute, fifty-six point eight second mile: yeah, good for you, whatever.

I've never cared about the envelope on the level you do -- the envelope is interesting to me, but my desire to see it pushed is academic and not related to my enjoyment of film; in fact, really envelope-pushing special effects will take me out of the film briefly, because I stop watching it to think about them (any film that provides me with anything to think about will create that effect several times -- Iron Man did it in at least two of its action sequences, with direction and acting choices that were good, but obstrusively so). So what the essentially flawless special effects of modern films mean for me is that I get to go straight to my 'yay! robots fighting!' place and stay there.