by Sean Gannon
Well, maybe the title is a bit hyperbolic. But for the most part, it’s
true. An action or sci-fi movie cannot be made these days (with the exception
of those by James Cameron) without relying on digital effects as an integral,
if not the sole method of storytelling. But as has been demonstrated time and
again, the more moviemakers rely on digital visual effects to shoulder the burden
of storytelling, the more uninvolving and clumsy the story.
It’s ironic that better effects make for hoakier movies. But look at lemons
like Twister, Dante’s Peak and The Lost World. These
are not movies – they are amusement park rides. Characters exist to run
away from stuff. Plot is structured to put the characters in situations from
which to run away. And the whole thing is structured only to show a dizzying
load of computer mastery. Since digital effects are becoming so inexpensive
and are performed by so many companies there is no limit to how many “money
shots” a film can contain. But the “money shot” is so frequently
and poorly used that its currency has become devalued.
Steven Spielberg learned the upside to refraining from visual effects (before
unlearning it last year, apparently) during the disastrous shooting of Jaws.
Spielberg planned ambitious sequences full of shots where the shark was seen
attacking this, maiming that, and lunging at something else. Fortunately, the
mechanical shark was broken far more often than it was functional and by sheer
necessity Spielberg had to resort to other methods. And in the editing room
it became very clear that it isn’t what you see that scares you, it’s
what you don’t see. Knowing that ...somewhere ... down there ... there’s
a shark. Then a big splash of water. That’s scary. If we had seen shot
after shot of an attacking shark, the suspense and drama would’ve been
lost.
Twister provides a perfect example of this. Of the dozen or so tornadoes
in the film, the one that raises the most goose bumps and creates the most genuine
terror is the first one. The one you don’t even see. The family
runs to the shelter, we hear the approaching beast, they slam the door shut,
the wind becomes deafening, the door starts to rattle, the father reaches up,
tries to secure it, then BOOSH. Scared me to death. And in The Lost World,
the scariest scene in the movie by far is when Julianne Moore’s character
is suspended above a chasm by a slowly breaking piece of plate glass. No elaborate
effects. No dinosaurs.
Filmmakers seem bent on creating scenes that are wildly unrealistic and border
on self-parody for the sole reason that, thanks to effect technology, they can.
They apparently believe it is better filmmaking to make a bunch of tornadoes
into benign pseudo-threats that are incapable of hurting you unless you walk
up and touch one, instead of showing debris flying around from a tornado a half
mile away. In Dante’s Peak a wall behind the characters suddenly
melts away as a river of lava cascades into their living room. People standing
eight feet away from a huge river of tons of one-thousand-degree molten rock
suffer no burns. All this concentration on making realistic effects from a visual
standpoint, and absolutely no effort to be realistic on any other level. Writers
and directors seem content to sit back and rely on the digital wizards to do
all the work, and cynically believe the audience will be too busy oohing and
aahing at the eye candy to realize how vacuous the script is, and how absurd
their visualizations of it are.
Effects are nothing more than a tool to bring the writer’s and director’s
visions to the screen. If the actors are great but the story isn’t engaging,
the movie is bad. If it has beautiful sets and locations but the plot is incomprehensible,
the movie is bad. Same with effects. It is the responsibility of filmmakers
to reign in outlandish spectacles of digital overload. Until this happens, those
who thoughtlessly overindulge in effects, as Jeff Goldblum said of genetic tamperers
in Jurassic Park, “wield science like a boy who found his father’s
gun.”