I just got back from the cinema. Áine and I went to Snow White and the Huntsman as an excuse to eat ice cream and hot dogs and drink a litre and a half of Diet Coke (watching my figure, y'know?). Last week we went to Dark Shadows for the same reason, but the cinema didn't have hotdogs then and we were majorly pissed.
And a trend I've been noticing in these films lately is that now that CGI technology has come as far as it has, they're just kind of sticking special effects in for the craic. This is the part where I would include a spoiler warning but the special effects I'm describing have absolutely no bearing on any plot or character points.
I would love to have been in the production meeting for SWATH when some producer was flicking through the script and spoke up with "Look, I'm just spitballin' here, but could we have someone melt at some point? We could work that in somewhere, right? In the Dark Forest or something, all kinds of crazy shit happens in there."
And all the lackeys would have nodded and said "Yah, I love it, I love it". And the producer, buoyed by the approval of his idea, would have said "And I was thinking, just stick with me on this one, guys. While she's delivering this speech, what if she was just like, standing in a fire? Just, y'know, crisping up and blistering, real slow like". And the lackeys would have applauded and nodded. And one of them would say "That is pure Snow White gold!" to a snort of appreciation or two. At which point the producer would have said "Speaking of white gold....". Meeting adjourned.
In Dark Shadows, the first time I saw the porcelain cracking effect on one of the characters, I thought "Wow, that's really cool. It's an interesting way of conveying this characters emotional state right now. It kind of gives her this superhuman humanity". And if it had been left at that, it would have been a cute little moment. But then in the last twenty minutes of the film, this whole "The characters skin cracks open" thing was brought back in and by the end of it she looks like a fuckin' egg that got dropped on the floor a few times. And I was thinking "Oh so when they kill her she's just going to like shatter into hundreds of pieces. That'll look pretty cool."
THIS IS THE BIT WHERE SPOILERS KIND OF BECOME AN ISSUE.
But no, when she dies, she just kind of dies. She may as well have not had half her face missing at all for all the damage it did her.
And then, for no plot-advancing reason whatsoever, and with no apparent foreshadowing, Chloe Moretz is just a werewolf. She just fuckin' is. And the thing is, that her being a werewolf offers her no advantage in fighting that Blonde Witch-Egg-Porcelain-Doll Hybrid. She gets her ass handed to her either way, so my question is this; why make her a werewolf at all? Why not just have the human character come out and fight the BWEPDH? Is it to add an extra layer of mythical creature goodness to the film, like when you dust icing sugar on top of a tiramasu? Or is it, as I suspect, just to give the special effects editor something else to do? I swear if I was sitting in front of a computer for months at a time rendering Chloe Moretz into a green werewolf for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, I would want to be getting paid a serious amount of money. A girl can dream.
ROUND ABOUT HERE IS WHERE I STOP SPOILING SHITTY MOVIES FOR YOU AND LEAVE IT TO THE SPECIAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR.
So, while I'm all for CGI and special effects and all of the wonderful things they have brought us, can we just like, ease the fuck off a little, guys? Because all we're doing is distracting the audience from what's happening in the film with no advantage to the advancement of the plot or character development. Because all of a sudden instead of watching the film I'm like "Oh wow, look at that. Those are some pretty cool effects. I wonder if they had to animate each hair individually on that, like with Sully in Monsters, Inc." and my suspension of disbelief is thrown all outta whack. Sigh.
Also, as a sidenote, and on a somewhat related topic.... You know those moments you occasionally have in films where your suspension of disbelief goes completely out the window and you kind of realise that all you're watching is a bunch of actors on a set with a camera being pointed at them? I had one of those in SWATH. I realised that what I was looking at was a camera's view of about twenty horses clumsily balleting through mud, with some really quite nervous actors sitting on them, and a director sitting at a monitor a few feet away going "Mmmm, yeah. This is pure Snow White gold."
No comments:
Post a Comment