Keeping it unreal
Ok, I will happily hold my hands up in defense of my love of Transformers. An unpopular lifestyle choice in our office, but one that I remain unashamed of. Optimus Prime could read from the phone book into a camera, and I’d probably still pay to see it. I have no problem with the subject matter, however, watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the other day, I found myself pondering something.
Is the quest for ultra-realism in special effects killing the “magical quality” of cinema special effects?
I only ask, because, after 2 and a half hours of robots battling inches from my face in an IMAX cinema, I can honestly say that my brain probably only processed about 60% of what was going on. Part of my visual disorientation could possibly have come from the Bourne-Ultimatum direction style, but as the film reached the points I’d paid good money for (the robots battering each other), my eyes struggled to adjust to the frenetic visuals, I had to wonder how someone like Ray Harryhausen might have tackled the same subject matter.
I think it was the late Stan Winston who once said something along the lines of “Visual Effects should be used to blur the line between the reality and the fantasy in cinema…not simply because they are there to be used”. I agree wholeheartedly with this, but at what expense is does a movie suffer from striving to present reality? There’s so much motion blur and camera shake in the battles between Autobots and Decepticons that I defy anyone to see who’s hitting who.
What happened to the director using the camera to a more dramatic effect? I still get chills seeing Talos the Bronze God getting ready to teach the Argonauts a lesson. Mainly because I can SEE it. It’s a really simple, static shot, showing Harryhausen’s great effects to their full. This type of classic cinema reveal seems to have been replaced with a need to present everything in High-Definition, shaky-cam, motion-blur-o-vision. That may be apt if you’re going for an updated version of recognisable camera techniques, like this moment from the movie Signs, that was obviously based on this classic sasquatch clip, but when I pay to see big robots, I’d like to actually SEE them.
Or could it be that I’ve finally gotten old, and all this “fancy rubbish” is just for the kids?
I disagree. I don’t think that ultra-realism is killing the magical quality. I think bad direction is. The ease with which we can add big effects to a film might make for a lazy director but it’s not the quality which is at fault. From the advent of special effects they have helped us access the wonder of dreams and imagination. Think Pixar rather than Michael Bay and you can see how special, special effects can be.
But yes, you are getting old.
I think it was likely the IMAX – actions films are very difficult to follow on a screen that is larger than your range of vision! I always come out with motion sickness.