You can screw up plenty in your superhero movie… but not the CGI.
I have a bit of curiosity about the art of CGI (see previous posts here, here, and here) and so, naturally, any post on the same showing up on my Twitter feed is an automatic click for me.
When you decide to bring in CGI to your project, you should have one of two main objectives in mind. The first, and best, is to completely fool your viewers’ minds. To do this, you enhance real-world shots with background art or characters, adding details to existing characters and objects. This was the Game of Thrones method for just about everything besides dragons, which worked spectacularly well (and we’re only talking CGI here, not comparing the writing of the early seasons with the, uh… later ones.) For instance, their obsession with costuming remains legendary, comparable to very much non-CGI-centered period dramas like Gilded Age or the various Pride and Prejudice revivals, or the most fondly remembered of last century’s Westerns. GoT’s crew poured the same meticulous, unforgiving standards into the manufacturing of props and the scouting of film locations. Yes, film locations — green rooms were only a last-ditch option. So when filming the army of the Unsullied, say, the first few rows were actual extras in actual costume; only the back ranks were computer-generated ghosts.
Sometimes, this is not possible. Sometimes, your main characters, monsters, or locations will have to be products of software. If Benioff and Weiss could have used real, tamed dragons, I’m sure they would have; for those scenes, they were forced to settle for CGI’s second-best offer: not to fool the brain, but to wow it. Your brain did not think Emilia Clarke was actually riding anything real; but Drogon looked so cool that you were willing to suspend your disbelief. Similarly, nobody really bought that Frodo and Sam were traveling into Mordor with anything but a cartoon. But since that cartoon was so finely crafted, rotoscoping as it did the man who would become the final word in CGI creatures, Andy Serkis, we didn’t complain.
The most legendary film to successfully meet this second objective was the original Avatar. No, the blue-skinned alien space babes could never look as real as Miles Quaritch did. But because they and their paradise of a world were so extravagant, bordering on sensory overload, nobody had a problem parking their brain’s normal skepticism of such things at the theater door. Another in the Hall of Fame was Jurassic Park; given the stone-age computer hardware at hand, they put on a master show of concealing their dinos’ unavoidable flaws with dark lighting, jungle foilage, putting them out of focus while zooming on the kids’ terrified faces, and all kinds of old-school tricks that are nowadays mostly forgotten.
By contrast, you have the Star Wars prequels. And, as writer Drew Magary notes here, the latter-day MCU movies.
The unbelievable CGI really made the last Spider-Man movie hard to watch. Maybe it’s because I often drive across the very bridge where Spidey had his initial fight with Doc Ock; or maybe it’s because due to the weird anti-aging filter they used on Alfred Molina; Ock kept tripping my uncanny-valley sensor in a way not even William Dafoe at his most manic did.
Keep in mind, Marvel has not always been like this. In fact, I doubt they could have been successful to begin with if they had. For instance, consider the Skrulls of Captain Marvel:
This is clearly an actual dude in a mask and, while of course they used CGI to enhance the appearance of him and of the titular character, they started with the basics of actual filming.
Sloppy CGI was also an issue in the Black Widow movie, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and most other Phase IV entries set on planet Earth. (I think we viewers gave Loki a pass because the whole setting was so otherworldly; Thor IV will likely also work for this reason.) I mean, just… just look at this. Is this a Power Rangers episode?
Also bothersome: Korg, from Thor III and Avengers: Endgame. He’s the rock dude most notable for being voiced by director Taika Waititi; but unlike Gollum from two decades ago, no real attempt was made to make him anything but a cartoon.
Magary argues that it’s like this because Marvel stopped giving a shit. Not about CGI, but about the meat-and-potato aspects of filmmaking that CGI is supposed to enhance, not supplant. Location shooting; physical costumes; actual stunts, not green-room gymnastics. You know, all that oh-so-20th-century passé stuff. We understand that Asgard, the Guardians’ ship, the time cops’ offices of Loki, and other such locations are strange to begin with, so they get greater leeway.
But when you CGI a New York bridge just several blocks away from me into something barely recognizable, with a colorful building I can see from my window actually scrubbed out? I now know why that bridge never got closed down for shooting (and we’re quite used to shit getting closed for filming around here). It’s because they never filmed on that bridge to begin with!
They weren’t too lazy or dismissive to shoot scenes of the original Avengers in NYC. What changed?
Maybe Kevin Feige has been spoiled by success. Maybe he didn’t have that Spidey vs. Ock scene shot on location because it was just simpler to do it in a green room. Packing all your shit and flying it across the country is a pain in the ass, after all.
Maybe, when you’re almost guaranteed the #1 slot for the weekend just as long as your script and lead actor aren’t violations against society as with Morbius, you’re no longer scared of failure and now are just trying to see what bullcrap you can run past your credulous audience. I’m pretty sure that’s how it got with Donald Trump — half the outrages he pulled probably started with “Hey Jared, check this shit out” — and that seems to be how it is now with the MCU. “Eh, let’s just shoot it on a green screen and see if the rubes in Ohio even notice.” I haven’t seen the new Dr. Strange movie because I’m tired of rewarding bad CGI, and I’m convinced this problem will only get worse until one of their movies finally bombs so badly that Feige is shocked to his senses… or out of his job.
