Death of the Epic

[robinbloke]

Death of the Epic huh? Sounds pretty damning, well it's not about the films content - although I do now have to seek out the Iliad to read it and work out just how much they zillered the story - my classical friends are at this point no doubt gasping as they say "You've not read that?". I am Jacks uncultured braincell.

Anyway, yes. Epic. Death.
Many years ago, back in a time when films were real films and Epics truely were; when things like the Longest day had wall to wall stars and films like Zulu made your eyes pop as there really were fousands of 'em a time before CGI.
Part of cinema is suspension of disbelief, how it can suck you in and make everything real, so you can see the thousands of people standing there and know that they are people.

CGI has killed this for me, I've played enough computer games and seen enough films to see the difference between CGI and people, I looked at the front ranks of the massed Greek armies and thought, "Ah, dust after row one, CGI characters start there, the front row is real."
Thats not suspension of disbelief, thats analysis. The film has failed to make it real for me, computers have killed the epic world on the big screen.
What exactly am I whittering about? People. Things that need CGI like sci fi and such can reap the rewards, vehicles and spacecraft and planets all work, but people - we still can't produce realistic people. Why?
Take The Lord of the Rings one of the most important characters was a CGI character, but they tagged his movements to those of a real person, he moved and paused like a real person did - Computers still haven't managed to capture that spark of uncertainty or randomness, or... something about people when they portray them.

So when the massed ranks of zombies fall over in the explosion in Dawn of the Dead remake I'm thinking "Nice ripple effect explosion, but I'm not buying it."
When the massed greek armies drag their ships up onto the Trojan beach I'm thinking, "Multi frame repeat sequence on those characters, it's stuttered but you can see the repetition."
Computers can't make people convincing, not for me, not yet. I've been fooled by racing games in a glance, thought they were real - but there were no people we still haven't got that yet.

Anyway, rant over. Troy wasn't too bad, much over goryness and predictable hollywoodness. Acting was okay, glad I saw it on the big screen.

But how difficult could it be to hire a couple of dozen people to drag a ship up onto a shore, given the current budget costs for CGI I'm willing to bet that it's probably cheaper to do that way as well.



But I did actually quite like it...

Comments

[twentypence.livejournal.com]

Must admit I saw the dust cloud and thought exactly the same thing... But it's not just people, as when watching the start of Day after tomorrow I was thinking about the texturing on the ice shelf.

It's nice and impressive that you can make giant armies, but it's not exactly new is it. Remember Spartacus? They did it then, recorded one group of extras in formation, super imposed the image several times so a couple of hundred extras suddenly became a couple of thousand.

It does have it's place, and it also means that none of your orcses are wearing their digital watches, but I'm much more impressed by the hundreds of storm troopers when the emperor arrives in Return of the Jedi than I am by the thousands of Clone troopers in Attack of the Clones.
This is summed up by during ROTJ I'm looking at the Scout Trooper who obviously doesn't know what standing to attention actually is (an individual) while during AOTC I'm counting how many CGI troopers there are in a block. 676 btw.

I love seeing indiviuals, actual people, CGI just fails to cut the mustard these days.
And would it hurt, to just once, during a big CGI battle, have some of the corpses of the good guys lying around?

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Damn, I was going to cite Spartacus as another good example of people in films. But then it's individuals - people - duplicated not soulless CGI.

Your hapless trooper is just what I mean, seemless blending of millions of CGI characters, big deal, no character, no individuality. No suspension of disbelief.

[twentypence.livejournal.com]

Quite, and it can make a big difference to a film, it allows the audience to empathise with the characters even a little and that's the kind of things that can make a real difference to a film experience.

Look at the most famous CGI characters, personally I'd say these are Jar Jar Binks, Dobby the House Elf and Golem (I'm also told there was a dancing baby that used to randomly pop up in Ally McBeal, but I put that down to some kind of drug induced idea on behalf of the writers).

Jar Jar Binks, universally despised, everyone wanted him to die and are hoping, that in May, he will, horribly, preferably after being turned into pre-cooked sushi by a proto-Vader.

Dobby... annoying beyond all belief, unfortunately, as we've read the books and the plot is somewhat on the predictable side, we have very little hope that at any stage it will be killed. We can only hope that instead it simply fades into obscurity and is cut from the 4th film due to timing issues.

Golem, the least annoying of the lost, an interesting character (a novelty for CGI) who has a lot of internal conflict. At the end, he turns out to be the deciding factor in destroying the ring... but as he was falling, with the ring in his hand... did anyone actually care?
Did anyone think 'yay, the annoying git is finally dead' or 'awww golem got what he wanted, but now he's going to die'.
I know I didn't.

Even Final Fantasy which was entirely computer generated felt very sterile to me on the emotion side. I never once felt any kind of strong emotion from anyone in that film.

I guess that's the key, Computers cannot portray emotion, and that's what we humans take many of our communicative hints from, it's how we get to know people and identify with them.
Does anyone here have a friend who they've never seen express any kind of emotion?

Even if it only comes down to random spod "Brian Brianson" dying horribly on the battle field, if it's a real person we identify with them. If it's pixelated character "Foot Trooper #24-B" then we really don't care.
Give us real people and we care about loosing them, give us CGI and we become blase towards war.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

"Death of the Epic" suggested to me that you were going to talk about a loss of the epic mood in terms of dialogue style, character presentation, timescale etc. - but then I think of "the epic" in a rather Bakhtinian sense: mostly arising from an oral-formulaic tradition, and exemplified by Homer, Beowulf, the Elder Edda, the Tain, Culhwch and Olwen etc. ... all the sorts of things I studied in my undergraduate degree. In that sense, the epic died a long time ago - modern fantasy (even LOTR) may use the same sorts of content, but the feel is utterly different: it is a type of novel, not a modern epic.

Actually, I feel that a lot of Hollywood films do reflect the epic mood (in my sense) very well: there is an uncrossable distance between us and the main characters (they are implausibly beautiful idols, protected by hero-shields, epitomising without any grey areas qualities such as Courage, Cowardice, Beauty, Pride, Treachery...); there is very little character change during the film; there are strict conventions about what can happen in terms of action (there _has_ to be some heterosexual love interest; Good, or at least Hope, must ultimately triumph; certain actions are 'fated' to happen; moral failings are always punished); a lot of effort goes not into scintillating dialogue or plausible characterisation but into impressive set-piece effects (extensive formal descriptions of warriors, monsters, armies in the poetic epic, stunning visuals (CGI or not) in the Hollywood epic). All sorts of things that people often describe as artistic flaws in the standard Hollywood high-action drama are IMO also characteristic of the ancient epic.

I liked Troy a good deal; my main complaint would be the lack of gods (though I suppose the film did not clearly indicate their non-existence, and there was still room left to believe in them if you wanted to - it was a sort of agnostic presentation).

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

The dancing baby was really big at the time. It gave me The Fear.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

Well to my ulcultured mind, never having been exposed to the 'classic' epics, 'Epic' to me means a film that encompasses a story on a vast scale with a cast of thousands, something that has been years and years in the making that conveys vast aspects of the world and society and people in the story.

Stories are all so very formulaic now, you can boil down virtually any hollywood story to:

"Boy meets girl, they fall in love, defeat the bad guys and live happily ever after."

When a film surprises me or presents a story I can't predict, that's what I like. That and amazon women in bikini mudfights.

Predictability is something I loathe in films, one of the things that really irked me about Van Helsing (for example) it was basically a spoof film (which is the only conceptual way I could tolerate watching it) every scene was set up for a half dozen cliches, nothing was new, everything could have been predicted. Dull, dull, dull.

I think we essentially agree, well maybe apart from the bikini women mudfighting bit ;)

[twentypence.livejournal.com]

I only know about it because I saw an advert from Ally McBeal and this thing was floating on the side of the image dancing and I think she was dancing too.
My only response was wtf?
It reminded me of train spotting. :o)