China Mieville is down on CGI's impact on sci-fi filmmaking. Avatar is his exhibit A.
Posted by eugene at February 8, 2010 3:21 PMEven those of us exhausted by yet another overlong mawkish gush — let alone one which reiterates the old cliche of Going Native and Leading Them to Freedom by Becoming the Most Awesome (White) Mohican™ — can admit that the special effects are impressive. But that’s a very long way from liking them, or thinking they’re a good thing. That computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rotting science fiction from the inside.
In the relentless search to produce the most ostentatiously spectacular scenes possible, CGI, which once had the potential to be a useful aesthetic tool, has become a mannerist absurdity. It is straightforwardly untrue that CGI “looks real.” Are we yet at the point in history where we can all agree we could totally see the digital seams whenever Gollum walked onscreen? Can we stop pretending that the Na’vi and rendered landscapes of Pandora in “Avatar” don’t immediately stand out from the real physical actors, moving as they do with the unpleasant, jarring, parabolic precision of all CGI?