... why not just put the damn actors in make-up?
I've read takes on the film praising the amazing quality of the CGI and yet, when I look at stills, trailers and hi-def clips from the movie, it looks to me, yet again, as fake as fake can be. Why? Why do others see great looking creations while I see elaborate cut-scenes from video games?
I don't know the answer to that, maybe I never will. Maybe I just hate the fact that the loss of great make-up artistry is a loss of great artists whose work took until 1981 to be recognized by the Academy and now, barely thirty years later, it's already disappearing.
17 comments:
I've been sick of the whole computer generated looks for quite a while now..It all has that perfect squeaky clean toy-like appearence..zzZZzzz
Last month I saw Takashi Miike's latest,13 Assassins..I felt like I was seeing something made 40 years ago..Aside from a few structures getting blown-up,the old fashioned way and some flaming buffalos,it was all human flesh,blood,sweat and tears..pure body language.
I just don't see the problem with make-up. CGI as a replacement for matte painting seems okay (both have about the same appearance) but make-up is demonstrably better. Maybe in another twenty or thirty years the CGI will look convincing to me but, for now, it still looks "drawn" no matter how much detail they give to the skin, hair, eyes, etc.
I feel exactly the same way as you do, Greg. I look at the trailer and promo photos for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and the first thought that pops into my mind is, "Man, the CGI looks utterly crap on that film." And then I start feeling like an alien because according to every review I've read and various comments expressed by others, the rest of the world thinks the movie looks ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. I just don't get it but thankfully my husband agrees with me (and so do you!) so I'm not completely isolated in my loathing for the look of that movie. And I'm not even sure why I hate the way the film looks. I suppose it's because I don't mind CGI as much when I'm watching a film about a fantasy monster (like Cloverfield or Starship Troopers for example) but if I'm watching a CGI rendition of a real creature that I've observed with my own eyes at the zoo and in countless nature docs, I guess I just can't "suspend my disbelief" all that easily.
That being said, I have a natural disposition towards all the summer blockbusters this summer. I mean, do we need any more generic cliche-ridden superhero movies? YAWN! Cowboys and Aliens? A match made in HELL if you ask me. '80s era cartoons (Smurfs/Transformers) made into live-action movies? ENOUGH ALREADY! Um yeah... I guess I'm a bit jaded. I'm hoping next summer will offer up more interesting movies like Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS so I'm saving my pennies. And this fall there are a lot of films I'm interested in seeing like Von Trier's MELANCHOLIA, Polanski's CARNAGE, Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER and I think the new adaptation of TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY looks pretty interesting, just to name a few. I doubt that all the films I just mentioned (besides the last) will get a wide release and I'll probably have to wait until they're available on DVD to see them. The simple fact is that many of best movies being made today aren't playing at your local multiplex and very few of them have the budget for any CGI.
I too have no desire to see the blockbusters you mentioned. Summer rarely offers up much of anything I want to see. The great dramas and comedies, horror and sci-fi, seem to come in the off-season more often than not. The stuff offered up for the summer is aimed directly at an audience that I definitely don't belong to.
but if I'm watching a CGI rendition of a real creature that I've observed with my own eyes at the zoo and in countless nature docs, I guess I just can't "suspend my disbelief" all that easily.
And that's exactly how I feel! I don't understand why they couldn't use CGI for the hoards of rising apes but keep the main character, Caesar, as a live-action actor in makeup. Hollywood is filled with extremely talented make-up artists. I mean, Tim Roth, in the Burton version, looked absolutely great, and that was ten years ago. Imagine what they could do now.
It drives me nuts. I swear, the people saying it looks great, I just don't know what they're seeing.
Another vote for it looks terrible and I don't get why people think it looks good. It has that weird, shiny, softened, glowy look that is absolutely fake looking. Real things don't look like it. I always feel like I'm watching a video game when I see CGI of people/animals in films; maybe the people who think it looks good play video games all the time and because it's better than that, they think it's real. I don't know. I hate it and want it to go away.
Hollywood is filled with extremely talented make-up artists. I mean, Tim Roth, in the Burton version, looked absolutely great, and that was ten years ago. Imagine what they could do now.
I've only seen clips from Burton's version because it just didn't interest me but you're totally right. Even if the film was utter crap at least the makeup was great.
t has that weird, shiny, softened, glowy look that is absolutely fake looking. Real things don't look like it.
I totally agree with you JR. It looks like someone covered the camera lens in gooey golden vaseline. I often feel like I'm looking at a closeup shot of an aging actress in a 1950s melodrama. I've played a lot of video games and watched a lot of animation but I still have a weird gut reaction to bad (in my eyes anyway) CGI.
Obviously we've all been cursed with an anti-CGI gene. I kind of feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE after he found the glasses. Everyone else is seeing a great film that you should spend money on but all I see are the words "Obey" and "Consume" when I'm watching the trailer. I'm not particularly happy about it. I wish I could get excited about RISE OF PLANET OF THE APES or CAPTAIN AMERICA but I just can't.
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick CGI's ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum.
JR and Kimberly, video games is exactly the feel I get but didn't express it when I wrote this so I went ahead and changed the line in the piece to it looking like video game cut-scenes to me because that is what it looks like. It doesn't really match up well with the real actors on the set and has the softened edges that, I suppose, the makers of it think makes it look natural but it pulls it out of the movie for me.
I saw Dragonheart on tv the other day (hadn't seen it since 1996) and was amazed by how obvious the CGI was. I hadn't seen it as much at the time but now, wow, does it stand out! I wonder if in 15 years Rise of the Planet of the Apes will look just as fake to the people who now think it looks great.
Blame Avatar. It made a shit load of money on a lame premise with BS CGI effects, and the crowds ate it up. To this day, I have refused to see that film since IMHO it has single handedly destroyed the genre, and the craftsmen (and women) who made it. Willis O'Brien and Jack Pierce are probably turning over in their graves. And as for Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake, save your time Kimberly. The film stinks, and the only good thing about it was the makeup. Since you've seen that, you need see no more.
Sometimes CGI can look superb, as Spielberg and Peter Jackson have shown. I don't watch Jackson's KING KONG and wish, for all that movie's faults, that they'd created Kong any other way.
But I agree on this movie. None of the CGI looks very good. It's in no way cutting edge. At first, before the movie came out, I thought it was just an almost done, but unpolished, version of what we'd see, because the ads for KING KONG made me similarly concerned, until I actually saw the film. But the ads for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES haven't changed. The CGI still looks the same. So...I guess that's it, then.
Fred, I had a very mixed reaction to Avatar. I reviewed it here when it came out and basically found more bad than good but the action sequences were well-directed. The blue people, though, never looked like real physical entities on the set in front of the camera. They looked like animations.
I bought the DVD of Burton's version when it came out thinking once I saw it I'd love it (I love POTA movies so much) and, thus, would be good to own for when I watched it again.
Nine years later, that still hasn't happened.
Bill, one of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how good the CGI looks in Jurassic Park. Now, our oldest son loves it and has put in the DVD countless times so, I assure you, I'm not working off a twenty year memory here. I've seen the CGI in that movie often and recently. And I'm telling you, it STILL looks better than CGI today, almost twenty years later. It's amazing!
Obviously, it helps that Spielberg had models built for much of the action and the CGI only for running movements but still, when the T-Rex is in pursuit of the jeep, it looks completely real.
And, I agree that Jackson's Kong looks a lot better than Caesar does here. Maybe there should be some kind of movie law that only Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson be allowed to use CGI for anything outside of backdrop effects.
Like you I am a lifelong PLANET OF THE APES fanatic, and only just several weeks ago escorted my entire family over to Manhattan's Film Forum to see the original Schaffner version on the big screen, even after uncountable viewings over the years. So I approached this new release with trepedition, especially after the disaster perpetrated by Tim Burton.
I must say the CGI work the new film is commendable and tyhe film is pretty much as good as the majority concensus has gloriously proclaimed. Franco is affecting and the film bears some striking narrative and thematic similarities as the extraordinary documentary PROJECT NIM, that just released weeks ago.
But let's see how it washes with you....
Well, Sam, despite the crankiness of this post I'm sure I'll like it. I'm very, very forgiving of sci-fi and this one sounds pretty good. I just hate the look of CGI, that's all. If the movie's good and the CGI's bad, I'll still like the movie. It's just that I would have preferred make-up instead.
And I am SO jealous that you got to see the original on the big screen! Man, I love that movie!
I’m with you cranks and crabapples. Ever see the 40’s SUPERMAN with Kirk Alyn? When Superman flew, they’d cut from live action to cell animation. Don’t know if it “worked” back then, but it looks ridiculous today. I get the same jarring effect when a CGI character appears. It’s like watching a strange hybrid movie where the live action is suddenly interrupted by animated sequences.
There’s also a problem of scale and exaggeration. CGI can provide very convincing backgrounds, like Victorian London or Depression-era New York, but then you get the recent SHERLOCK HOLMES with a finale atop a skyscraper-high bridge, with the whole city beyond, vast cloudy skies and a setting (rising?) sun, and the scale is so huge you stop believing what you see. The atrocious VAN HELSING had a castle bigger than the Sears Tower (or whatever the hell it’s called now), and rooms the size of a train station.
Then there’s exaggeration. The original KING KONG had the sailors chased by a brontosaur. In the Jackson version, it’s a full bronto stampede, hundreds of them, PLUS raptors running between their legs, PLUS the whole thing staged on a crumbling cliff edge path. And it goes on, and on, and on. The T-Rex scene was amped up with 3 T-Rexes, and they had the dinosaurs swinging from vines in a bottomless ravine. I’m still thrilled by the jerky stop-mo T-Rex in the original, but I’m bored with the super-scale CGI.
And while I’m at it, I also detest the motion capture films like POLAR EXPRESS. They creep me out. Looks like Tom Hanks was killed, stuffed and animatronicked, like a Disneyworld Hall of Presidents figure.
No doubt someday, and soon, CGI will be seamless. And yes, Greg, RISE will look fake to everyone in 15 years. That’s when we’ll get a remake.
The atrocious VAN HELSING had a castle bigger than the Sears Tower (or whatever the hell it’s called now), and rooms the size of a train station.
And the worst werewolf transformation in film history!
And, yes(!), I'm so with you on the exaggeration aspects. I've run down the dino scenes from Jackson's King Kong countless times only to be met with, "Oh, come on, it was kind of fun." But, no, it wasn't. It. Was. Dull. When you do too much, it's boring. And I'm talking here about anything, not just CGI. When a director no longer understands that tight editing can make an action sequence better, all is lost. But there's this mentality that every frame is sacred and nothing can be cut.
The complaints in these comments remind me of audiophiles with self-proclaimed "golden ears" prattling on about the nuances of various pieces of hi-fi equipment; and when put to an actual listening test, wouldn't be able to discern one from the other.
You people know CGI when you've something as conspicuous as, I dunno, aliens, fully bipedal apes, or over-sized castles to look at. However, I can assure you that you're often looking at CGI, but don't realize it.
Also, if you've seen an examples of makeup work in person, you'd realize it's amazing it works at all, if not for the skill of the DP and others involved. Some stuff I've seen described as "really good" looked like the work of elementary school kids in person. The makeup artist deserves credit, but certainly not all of it.
Finally, some of you "don't see the problem with makeup". It depends. If the situation can most readily be addressed with makeup, the VFX sup will choose makeup. If there are unknowns at the time a decision needs to be made, CGI is arguably a safer choice in certain situations.
Future Primitive, I agree that often times people don't know they're looking at CGI, like in Zodiac for instance, which uses CGI for a lot of the period set and city art direction. And you've seen us praise CGI (see my comments on Spielberg). My point there is that the detail given to the work makes all the difference. With Spielberg, the time and money and detail that went into Jurassic Park made a clear difference whereas in later movies, CGI was used as a quick shortcut.
For a movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with enough money and time, I think it could have been a good area for compromise, where the lead character, Ceasar, could have been done in makeup and the rest of the apes CGI'd. But again, I don't know the specifics and details of the production and, as you've seen here, everyone who has seen it seems to like it quite a bit, as I'm sure I will as well.
In the end, I think makeup artists are underrated, espececially when doing a movie without an alien, ape or mutilated creature but simply actors made to look a little older or younger. All I'm really doing here is mourning the inevitable loss of a great art form just as I have and would for the loss of great model makers for miniature shots. Sure, CGI will eventually be able to do all of it better but it's still cool as hell to see the real thing.
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