How special are special effects
Filed under: Newsstand
Peter Hartlaub has a piece on special effects in the San Francisco Chronicle. Hartlaub feels that too many special effects-laden movies are the cinematic equivalent of watching a friend play a video game for two hours. He is right, but he derides films like The Matrix Revolutions while praising films like Spider-Man 2 as if one use of CGI was better than the other. The truth is, CGI looks just as fake today as stop-motion did back in the day. In fact, special effects have always looked fake, or at least "unreal," but that's not why people enjoy them. I doubt anyone seeing Jason and the Argonauts for the first time thought, 'sweet lord, real skeletons!' Rather they were thinking, 'those skeletons LOOK real!' He makes a valid point about the saturation of CGI in all visual media, including television and commercials and how filmmakers are now essentially trying to "out-effects" one another. They just need to remember what a younger, smarter George Lucas once said: "A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-08-2005 @ 8:46PM
Michael Byrnes said...
And how ironic is it that George Lucas forgot his own declaration that "A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing" while making Star Wars Episode I and II?
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8-09-2005 @ 1:40AM
Tan The Man said...
Seriously.
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8-09-2005 @ 2:43AM
David said...
As an antithesis, and in proof of the young George Lucas' point, may I suggest the new movie "Must Love Dogs" as an example. Not much in the way of special effects there, but just on old-fashioned story. Everyone in the theater cheered after the ending!
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