When did CGI go bad?

     I for one am not a fan of using CGI in movies or television. There are hardly any movies that I watch and say, “Oh wait, THAT was CGI?”. I can always tell, especially when it’s a pasted-in background. I wasn’t always so down on CGI. I was like many people when it first started coming out. The best word to describe it was “awestruck”. But when did it go bad? At least for me? Well, let me start with when it was at it’s best.

Awesomeness

     The Jurassic Park films will always be the best movies using CGI. Ever since I was a little kid and saw those dinosaurs stomping around, I was hooked. But the thing was, those dinosaurs looked as real as they could get. I would say that it was the CGI work in general, but it was actually the CGI being used as just a part in the machine of special effects. Puppets were still being used in this movie, which melded well with the digital aspects of the film. This use of puppeteering with the CGI created a realistic portrayal that I really don’t think is seen anywhere else in Hollywood. And to think, Steven Speilberg originally wanted to use stop-motion. It was a good call by Speilberg to switch over to CGI, but this would lead to many ramifications in Hollywood.

Jar Jar Binks where he should be: In chains...

     So let’s bring it a bit forward now. Star Wars Episode I came out, and almost everything in it was CGI. It looked fake to me, even back then. But the technology was still so new that it didn’t bother me. Plus I was only a kid. Looking back on it now, having characters that were fully CGI was a mistake. They looked weird, and weren’t easy to connect with. Jar Jar Binks was already frustrating, but being an “imaginary” character probably didn’t help many people. Two more prequels were to be made, and each was filled with more CGI trash. My disenchantment was starting to come a little closer.

Humans! Now with 100% more CGI!

     Cue I Am Legend. I was really excited for this movie when it was announced. I had just read the original novella by Richard Matheson and was psyched to see it on the big screen. But before the movie came out, I read about how the “vampires” being played by actual actors were replaced by CGI characters. It was a breaking point for me. Why change something that was so close to being human into a digital being? I tried not to be stuck in my beliefs, but after seeing the movie, my nightmares were true. The vampires looked so horrible that my anger was beyond words. Everyone I saw the movie with loved it, so I kept my true feelings hidden for a while. It was just dumbfounding. I think using real actors would have been much more effective in putting forth the idea that Will Smith was the real monster in the film (but really, you can’t have that now, can you?). How awesome would it have been to never actually show the vampires until he had one sitting on a table in front of him? Make it so he keeps making them out to be so inhuman in the beginning that when you get your first glimpse of one actually being human it was a shock to the system. That would have helped the movie for me. But of course, Hollywood ruined it.

"You're too late, Dr. Jones. We have already replaced your world with something called 'digital imagery'."

     The last straw was Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull (nice name). The original Indiana Jones films are my favorite movies, so I was excited to see the newest one. I was worried about George Lucas being at the helm after his craptastic  Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. I read an article a few months before the film came out detailing how George Lucas said only a small portion of the movie was CGI. This cooled my jets quite a bit, and I became even more excited for the film to come out. Well George Lucas is a liar. EVERYTHING was CGI. Even the desert in the background at the beginning of the film was CGI. The whole film may as well have just been green screen to me. I had had it. CGI was the worst thing to ever happen to movies (well there is also 3D, but I’ll get to that another time). 

Where did this go? :'(

     So now it seems like everything has to be CGI. Movies have lost the luster they once had. Whatever happened to practical effects? Epic stories were able to be made in the past before CGI, why not anymore? Trash like Transformers, Clash of the Titans (not the original, that one was awesome), and Avatar dance across screens around the world. People have forgotten the classics that looked good and told a good story. CGI should be used as a tool along with other special effects to create something as close to "reality" as possible. Real-life is what should be used in films that have real actors. A film may be fake, but I shouldn’t feel like everything in it is as well.