Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bulkington (A) on July 24, 2003 at 09:06:37

In Reply to: STAR WARS---WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE NEW MOVIES? posted by croft on July 08, 2003 at 13:22:52:

The story; the script; the exigencies of CGI; the direction; the bad acting resulting probably from the the aweful lines, the bland, pre-digitized soundstages, and George Lucas, who gets smugger and more stupid every time I see him interviewed (McGregor said somewhere that his role in the prequals marked his single worst experience as an actor) . . . I think a good many of the millions of viewers who saw the prequals and thought "I could have done better" really could have done better. Of the originals, I think The Empire Strikes Back is far and away the best. No coincidence that Lucas didn't direct it.

CGI is just bad--or bad on the scale on which it was used in the prequals. It's interesting to compare the differing constraints that CGI effects and the methods of the originals place on film making. CGI mainly requires long shots (or extreme light or darkness as in the Hulk) to maintain any sense of convincingness, whereas in the originals, when you have a real actor interacting with a monster or, say, when Darth Vader is pelting Luke with machinery in Empire, closeups are required to disguise the fact that only limbs or upper torsos or objects on guidewires are being employed. But the latter is still more effective because the actors are interacting with something real, something tactile. CGI should be used to augment the old methods, not as a wholesale replacement.

But not even that would have saved the prequals. They're that, will not endure, and I think dampen the potential interest in later generations in the originals.