The Misuse of CGI

Well summer is back, and with summer comes mindless action movies featuring cars, babes, and CGI robot porn, yeas, another Transformers movie is here. I am honestly not a Michael Bay hater, i loved Pain and Gain, and nBad Boys was perhaps one of the most defining film of my childhood. I posted last year about films featuring too much CGI looking hyperreal and fake, but this post is not a critique of the CGI itself, it is more a critique of the way modern action films use CGI, and the fact that nothing in cinema is real annymore.

Films used to be sort of thrilling, watching a 16 wheel semi truck get flipped over in The Dark Knight or watching a man bungee jump off of a bridge in GoldenEye was thrilling, as both of those were done for real, no computer involved, and the thrill of danger adds a slight frisson to the audience's excitement. 3D has managed to regain some of this excitement and sense of danger, by making the audience feel like they're in danger by having giant robot penises two inches from their nose, but audiences watching these moves on their iPad don't have this effect, rendering the films dull and lifeless.

Transformers is typical summer movie popcorn fare, but the lack of reality, coupled with a lack of heart, means that no one really cares. Toy Story 3 wasn't real, there were only computers involved, but the audience cared, because the story contained heart and emotion. Thus the Transformers films are like Toy Story 3, with the pathos removed. Giant imaginary robots flying at each other with the subtlety of a Miley Cyrus concert surrounded by humans that are entirely indistinguishable from each other leave a product that just ends up feeling pointless. If all the alien robots are obviously incredibly fake, and all the robots are indistinguishable from each other, then why should i care?

Filmmakers have this idea that action films don't need emotion, but they are wrong, the reason that Frodo hanging off the parapet in mount doom or the loss of Rachel Dawes are so visceral, is because we learn to care about these characters, and we feel their loss and their suffering, i can't honestly say that i cared any more about Sam Witwicky at the end than i did at the beginning. The main problem with modern action movies, is that they don't give us a reason to care, there is no emotion, no loss, and nothing is real anyway, so watching giant alien robots grapple over a cube, is oddly pointless, because there is nothing real either in my head registering emotion, or on screen, and i can watch with the passive bemusement of a roman citizen watching gladiators fight.