CGI having difficulty creating image of profit

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This article was published 28/07/2017 (3305 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the newest sci-fi extravaganza from French director Luc Besson, is packed full of fish-faced aliens, many-levelled space cities and shiny interdimensional baubles. With its elaborately gorgeous computer-generated artifice, the movie offers “a universe without boundaries,” according to its trailer.

Turns out, boundaries aren’t so bad. They keep things interesting. Thanks to the 21st-century wizardry of CGI effects, filmmakers now can do almost anything. But how do they make it all matter? It’s hard to get invested in characters and story when everything seems to be taking place inside a high-tech snow-globe.

Could we be hitting Peak Digital Spectacle?

Besson pulled off some flamboyant visual effects in The Fifth Element, released way back in 1997, when flying cabs and blue-tendrilled lyric sopranos and apocalyptic climaxes were still kicky novelties. Twenty years later, with the release of Valerian, that kind of visual overload has taken on a same-old, same-old quality. One reviewer calls the movie “dazzling but dull.” Another declares that “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is so constantly visually stunning that it actually makes you tired and a tiny bit nauseated.”

It’s not just the cranky critics who are bored. Audiences were also underwhelmed, and the hugely expensive Valerian looks like an intergalactic flop. In the wake of lousy weekend box office numbers, EuropaCorps, the studio behind the project, saw its stock prices drop.

As filmgoers studiously ignored Valerian, many were lining up to see Dunkirk, a sombre historical war movie that mostly — though not entirely — eschews CGI. It’s not just that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is dealing with a real-life subject. He is also bringing that subject to life through grounded practical effects rather than green screens and zippy digital add-ins.

Nolan sourced dozens of period warships and fighter planes. He hired thousands of extras rather than generating crowds with digital tricks. He shot on location along the beaches and coastlines of northern France. There’s a gritty, grainy texture to this cinematic world that gives viewers a you-are-there sense of urgency.

Labouring to bring deep-down realism to a film that depicts a crucial turning point in the Second World War makes sense. But even the pulpy genres are rethinking their extravagant use of visual effects.

Atomic Blonde, an action thriller nominally about spies in Cold War Berlin but really about Charlize Theron as a fearsome goddess of vengeance and violence and sex, has already become famous for “that stairwell scene.” In this bone-crunching extended fight sequence, the Academy Award-winning Theron takes on a bunch of beefy Russian guys in an old-fashioned knock-down drag-out brawl. Fans are just loving the scene’s back-to-basics brutality.

Most movie fights these days rely on slick digital enhancements and super-fast editing. These effects amp up the spectacle, but often at the cost of rendering the violence unconvincing and curiously consequence-free, like the flat, rote fisticuffs of a bad videogame.

Atomic Blonde’s stairwell sequence looks as if it were shot in one unbroken take. (It wasn’t, but still.) Compared with almost any post-Matrix action scene, it’s smaller and slower but also much nastier, with a palpable, grunting heft to each blow. The scene feels real, and so do the stakes.

The movie’s marketing buzz has made much of the fact that Theron does almost all her own fighting, rather than relying on a digitally disguised stunt double. She cracked two teeth while training for the role, a dental mishap that has become a badge of authenticity, building on Theron’s equally tough role in Mad Max: Fury Road and cementing her status as a kick-ass female action hero.

Of course, movie CGI isn’t necessarily bad. Like any technology, it depends on how it’s used. Digital effects can open up astonishing and immersive new movie worlds. There’s also the persuasive argument that the best CGI is the stuff we don’t even notice. In fact, what we take to be total visual truth is often subtly augmented by digital tweaking, with movie illusion cleverly deployed in the service of “realness.”

And sometime CGI is just handy. For example, Henry Cavill, who is currently contractually obligated to sport a luxuriant moustache for his role in Mission: Impossible 6, has been called back for Justice League reshoots. Warner Bros. will end up digitally erasing his facial hair in the Justice League footage, which is a pain in the neck but probably easier than having to explain Superman’s new ‘stache.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca