CGI has killed film.

[Drunken Irishman]

At least you'd think so if you watched a Sci Fi original movie.

I know, I know, I bitch about the Sci Fi Channel a lot, but yeesh. Right now I'm watching The Bone Eater and the skeleton looks worse than the skeletons in the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts.

[Forkboy]

1. That's because Ray Harryhausen was a genius.

His stop motion work was simply amazing art.

To be fair though, using the Sci-Fi channel to judge anything by is like using Boloney Alfredo to judge Italian cuisine. :)

[Deja Q]

2. Quantity vs quality

A couple of detailed CGI renderings would put to pasture a thousand digitized blips. Why modern movies are chock full of space scenes with a brazillion ships...

Then again, the remastered Star Trek: The Original Series looked cartoonish too thanks to the 'updated' effects. Even the prequel 'Enterprise' looked better.

CGI does offer more potential and freedom than model shots, but it takes a lot more to make it look genuine, or at least passable.

[XemaSab]

5. I'm assuming that they had a large CGI budget when making the prequels

It is therefore safe to assume that it was state of the art technology.

Comparing and contrasting the race on Endor in Return of the Jedi with the race scene in Phantom Menace, the Endor scene beats the living snot out of the scene in Phantom Menace. Why? Because the background was obviously a real place with the models added in, while the latter scene was all CGI, and it shows, badly. x(

And on edit: there's something about the quality of the light that seemingly cannot be faked.

[Auggie]

3. I'll take a decent story over CGI any day

[Deja Q]

4. Those don't exist anymore. CGI and eyecandy is all that matters.

:(

[Auggie]

7. The Reader. Doubt. Sideways.

Once in a while a few squeeze through

[Mike 03]

6. I hear you, believe me.

I think screenwriters need to be encourage and actually paid to invent new, better forms of the cinema you are describing.

Producers in Hollywood want everything to be for free. They would rather pay nothing for JUNK than a little bit for something groundbreaking.

And that is just how it is, and always has been, sadly.

[Tikki]

8. I always liked this movie and the idea behind it........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEU5Mk_pmlE
TRON

Not sure if it was early CGI technology or what ever...

Tikki

[Yavin4]

9. "The Bone Eater"?

You sure you're watching the SciFi channel?

[Jamastiene]

15. ...

:spray:

[Stuart G]

10. Classic Horror Sci Fi....no CGI...Aliens

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/

If you have not seen this, please rent or get it at the library. A classic film, great effects, and lots of fun. Great direction and monsters were..monsters.

Sigourney Weaver starred, great cast, wonder effects

James Cameron directed this great flick, and you cannot help but enjoy it. Also it will scare the daylights out of you.

[DarkTirade]

11. After my brother saw the newest Die Hard movie

he commented that while the movie wasn't great, a lot of the special effects were damn good.

... then he did some research and found out that all the ones he thought were good were the ones that were NOT done with CGI. :)

[OwnedByFerrets]

12. LOTR was full of cgi....didnt kill it.

[MorningGlow]

13. I was just thinking about CGI while watching a non-CGI movie

My son has just tweaked to the Indiana Jones movies, and while we were watching the first one I found myself thinking how all the stunts were done by stuntmen--and only a couple of decades ago--but now all of it would have been done with CGI. We haven't seen Crystal Skull yet, but I suspect I'm going to be very VERY aware of the CGI as compared to the earlier movies in the franchise.

[Orrex]

17. A word of warning about Indy4

Imagine that you're at the theater watching Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Now imagine a seven foot tall man with a deep baritone voice standing right in front of you. Then imagine that he has a megaphone and is shouting in your face at the top of his lungs. And then, just for the heck of it, imagine that he's wearing a hat made out of balloon animals and that his jacket is made up of thousands of blinking Christmas tree lights.

The CGI in Indy4 is so bad and so obvious that you won't even notice the megaphone guy. But you will notice how terrible the film is, independent of the CGI.

[MorningGlow]

19. And I'll bet this balloon-animal-hatted guy is going to come to my house

with his twin brother--or maybe he's one of triplets and they're all going to show up--I can only imagine how bad the CGI is going to look off a DVD on our very modest flat-screen TV (32"). :scared:

Still, MG Jr. loves Indiana Jones so much that he'll think the movie's great no matter what, and I guess that's all that matters. Kid's got taste, though--of all three movies he's already seen, he prefers the first one. And Willie from Temple of Doom (aka "the screaming lady") irritated the heck out of him as much as she did me. That's my kid! :D

[JTG of the PRB]

14. Maybe SciFi used up all it's "Make a Decent Product" budget on BSG...

Because damn BSG was excellent, while almost everything else on SciFi is, shall we say, not as good.

[Orrex]

16. Pan's Labyrinth and City of Lost Children were both excellent, to name just two

Since the earliest days of film, the problem isn't the special effects; it's the execution of the story. This is no more true now than it was when they shot The Great Train Robbery.

CGI is badly overused because it's cheap, but it's only a symptom of a problem that's been around since the inception of the art form.

[elshiva]

18. Good point. There have been bad films since film was created.

[intaglio]

20. By Jove! It's sound that has ruined moving pictures

.... that and colour.