Being picky about bad CGI has run its course now and is likely a toxic urge in film culture ATM. I’m a bit of a broken record on this already (see prior posts here, here and here, all driven by the “No CGI is really just invisible CGI” series on YT. Is this actually helping us enjoy cinema or priming us to be sensitive to something that prevents us from enjoying something we easily could? All I’m going to say here is that some lessened sensitivity over the “quality” of CGI is likely warranted right now. And I know, we all prefer good CGI over bad so why not enjoy what we enjoy. Well because the industry is gaslighting us over how much CGI is actually everywhere and fundamental to modern cinema, likely in part because they enjoy pushing down the CGI industry, but also because they want to control what we think of as “spectacle” so that they control and retain effective marketing. Out of that YT series, there were two really novel things for me. One, was that the studio’s have always underplayed their reliance on effects and lied and not given VFX artists due credit almost since the beginning. Two, was that part of what’s going on right now with CGI and the excitement over “practical effects” is that the glorious epic spectacular shots that got viewers excited in the past have lost their appeal or efficacy due to over saturation over time. But spectacle puts people in seats and makes money. So the studios want to be able to tell us and control what is “good spectacle”.
Sounds conspiracy theorist, I know. But I’m not talking about thought control here, just marketing. Think about how much you or I actually know about VFX and CGI? Do we really know what is “good” or “bad” CGI? Sure somethings will stand out to us as “bad”, but I’ve seen instances now of people mistaking “practical” for “bad CGI” for the simple reason that they don’t actually know what the practical thing really looks like (the Rings of Power trailer with liquid metal is I suspect a good example … people thought it was cheap CGI, but it was apparently practical … the point being that basically no internet nerd actually knows anything about what liquid metal looks like). Add to this how things and tastes have shifted pretty quickly as CGI has gotten way better pretty quickly, and you get a weird scenario where viewers can want the latest/best CGI to the point of being hyper-critical of “bad” CGI that would have been well received 10-20 years ago … while also demanding practical effects that “look real” when there’s a good chance that they’re either being lied to about what is real and isn’t and also don’t really know. But the studios want us hyped. So they’ll keep lying or trying to feed us what they think we want right now. And then viewers’ tastes will be molded by this experience. We’ll think we know what the latest/best CGI is and what “good and real” practical effects look like … which will push the next stage of attempts to hype us with lies and catering to our particular and likely somewhat arbitrary needs. It’s what got us to hyper-CGI driven film making in the 00s-10s and has got us studios lying now about practical effects that actually involve a lot of CGI (Top Gun seems really egregious on this front). And in all of this lack of transparency is a whole industry going unrecognised and being over-worked and underpaid by studios more likely to pretend they don’t exist than actually pay them for the work they do. So … maybe try to enjoy the story, characters and the writing? Maybe don’t be so obsessive about good/bad VFX? Maybe we no longer know what we’re talking about when it comes to convincing VFX, or at least spoilt to the point of being artistically meaningless in our amateur critiques? Maybe just break the hype feedback cycle /rant