It has become popular in recent years to say that CGI has become impossibly bad in most movies and shows. Search YouTube and you’ll find dozens of essays on this subject. Arguably, a visual medium like YouTube is a better place to have this discussion, because you can see the bad CGI for yourselves. But I’ll stick to writing about it, at least on this blog. I’m sure you can conjure enough examples of bad CGI yourself.
CGI is getting worse, and it’s also not
It’s very easy to look back on films like Jurassic Park and the first Transformers and say that today’s CGI looks really bad compared to those films. You can construct an image in your mind of the period between about 1992 and 2008 when real CGI artists did their best work, and say we’ve gotten too far away from that.
Except, it isn’t true. There is good CGI today and there was bad CGI then. I would say that the difference is that around the turn of the century bad CGI was mostly forgivable. Computer processing power was so expensive at the time, and CGI was such a new art form. There were bound to be films that did it poorly. I think of The Lawnmower Man and The Mummy Returns as classic examples here. To see these films is to weep real tears for the desperate efforts of their creators to use the nascent technology.
Rose-colored VR goggles
We tend to look back at things in the past, whether they are movies, music, books, or practically anything else and think “those were the days.” This completely ignores how bad a lot of stuff was back then. It just hasn’t survived in our memories. We remember Jurassic Park but do you remember any other films from 1993? This list will help you jog your memory. In it you’ll find some surprisingly good films, but also some hilariously bad ones. And if you want to talk about bad CGI, try to watch Rising Sun, a film about how good computer imagery can be used to solve crimes. Except the imagery isn’t good and the premise is reductive, stupid, and its treatment is borderline inappropriate. If you must watch the film, and I recommend you do not, you can rent it or watch it for free on Cinemax.
Budgets are to blame, and they’re not
If you watch or read any of the dozens of pieces about why CGI is supposedly so bad now, you will read that most CGI houses do their work with insufficient budgets and sometimes lose money due to impossible deadlines. This is the most common criticism of flops like Cats, a movie so bad that its incredibly awful CGI isn’t even the worst part of it.
But wait. We like to say that movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park are actually better because of the constraints that technology and budget placed on them. Artists were forced to innovate because they didn’t have unlimited time or money. So which is it? Are constraints good or bad? Is a deadline a boon or a burden? You can’t have it both ways.
I certainly feel for beleaguered CGI artists whose attempts to please impossible directors go unnoticed. I think the work does suffer when the work environment is so stressful. But that’s really more about the CGI houses themselves and the workplaces they provide. It’s not a measure of the quality of the output. Great art can be produced from duress, and great art can be produced from inner peace. The argument about budgets doesn’t hold up.
Is “fix it in post” to blame?
Here’s another argument about why CGI is supposedly so much worse now. In the past, a director had to work with what was in front of them. There was no alternative. Today nearly every “mistake” can be fixed in post-production if you have the money. You don’t need to finish off your sets, let the CGI artists do it. Supposedly that’s why everything looks generically fake now.
Except, that doesn’t work either. The truth of it is that nearly every movie today uses CGI to help enhance sets or take care of small errors that would have made it into the film. When it’s done right, as it all too often is, you never know. I’d venture to say, in fact, that 90% of the CGI in films today is utterly unnoticed, and that’s its intention. You only notice the CGI when it’s so bad that it yanks you out of the experience.
That’s not a particular indictment of CGI either. Before CGI, there were practical effects that were so bad they pulled you out of the experience. There’s a huge amount to like about the Arnold Schwarzenegger version of Total Recall but the effects were laughable even then. They took a lot of effort to produce and looked utterly ridiculous. The slickly produced (and forgotten-for-a-good-reason) remake from a decade ago looks a lot better. It’s a shame it’s not a very good film, but the CGI isn’t the reason.
Will CGI get better?
Of course it will. And it will also become less obvious. We tend to idolize the CGI from a generation ago because it attempted to show us things we’d never seen before. We’re a jaded audience now. We expect to see things we’ve never seen. As we move forward, those things will just get more and more believable. And we’ll probably stop worrying so much about CGI or comparing it with practical effects or whatever.
And this will be a good thing, because it will let us adopt a more balanced viewpoint when we watch movies and shows. We’ll be able to more readily appreciate the whole picture, not just fixate on the effects.
Here’s why this is a Streaming Saturday article
Yeah, haters, I know you’ve been thinking it. The genesis of this article comes from me streaming an hour of the original 2000s Lord of the Rings, an hour of The Hobbit trilogy, and an hour of The Rings of Power. Here’s what I learned. LOTR has some amazing effects and every so often a total clunker. The same can be true of the other two. CGI hasn’t gotten worse, it hasn’t gotten laughable, but I’m not sure it’s gotten better. Perhaps that’s all that can be said.
