Yesterday I saw The Incredible Hulk. Unsurprisingly, it is filled to the brim with special effects. Lots of them. Just about every second of the film. In all honesty, I don't think there is a single frame that doesn't showase them.What's funny is that one of the chief complaints of the Ang Lee's Hulk was that there were far too many special effects and that none of them looked any better than what you'd find in a high-end video game. Considering this Edward Norton version of the signature Marvel comic book character has the exact same problems (although, admittedly, they are still better than those in Lee's film), I still can't help but wonder if people are going to be any more excited about the movie then they were back in 2003.
This all relates back to SIFF far more clearly than you'd probably imagine. Tonight I saw the delightful (if a bit too thin) The Island of Lost Souls out of Denmark and it has visual effects up the whazoo. This fantasy/adventure about a couple of teenagers (Sarah Langebæk Gaarmann, Lasse Borg) forced into battling an evil necromancer (Lars Mikkelsen) after the girl's little brother (Lucas Munk Billing) is possessed by the soul of a long-dead warlock who helped defeat him a century earlier, the movie is a sprightly and spunky good-natured surprise virtually impossible to resist.But that's not what got me thinking. There are CGI effects in this thing pretty much beginning to end and they are every bit as good as just about any Hollywood creation I've seen over the last couple of years with very few exceptions (Iron Man comes to mind, as do 2007's Zodiac, The Bourne Ultimatum and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Movies like this one, like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, can't help but make you wonder what the heck is going on. Studio movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars and they still look like video games. These ones are made for fractions of the cost and feature effects so good you almsot don't even notice they are there.
Lsiten, I'm not entirely sure what my point is here other than the Hollywood excuse for broken budgets has little to do with visual effects and everything to do with executives feeling the best way to fix a broken script is to throw money at the problem and hope it all works out. While I know this isn't exactly news (and while I'm just as unsure what I'm really trying to get at here by pointing it out) it is festivals like SIFF that really showcase just how glaring this idiotic reality really is. It's annoying, and for all The Incredible Hulk does tend to get right I'll take the unabashed thrills, chills and delightfully well-written spills of The Island of Lost Souls over that one again any day.
1 comment:
I still think a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of creating a photo-realistic human with CGI (and the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley as well)... In Iron Man, they don't try to recreate Downey Jr. with CGI, they are creating a flying metal man... much easier, and looks pretty damn cool.
It's a cliche, but with CGI so rampant there is little sense of danger in a lot of these big action sequences.. I think that's another problem they aren't even close to solving in Hollywood.
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