Blade Runner and Alien have great effects, but they’re also great films: they were made before a movie could rely on the effects work to pull it through.
Visual effects of some kind had been a core part of the movies almost since their inception (though one seriously suggests that maybe having them around before Buster Keaton did his famous window and collapsing building stunt might have increased his personal safety. Any fan of classic science fiction has enjoyed time and again Lock Martin in a rubber suit as Gort vaporising things in The Day The Earth Stood Still at the behest of Michael Rennie or the ID creature illuminated in the force field in Forbidden Planet, or the ants in Them! and not cared about the fact there are minimal effects (and by modern standards) quite primitive ones. Actually, I’m going to put the caveat there for the ID creature because that’s both actually really effective and and holds up bloody well (clip on Youtube), the same cannot unfortunately be said for the giant ants, though the opening sequences with the little girl in the desert are some of the best ever made for atmosphere and sense of impending danger. One could easily come up with hundreds of other examples, both in the SF and Fantasy Genre but also other films which relied on Matte Painting and other techniques to augment the reality. But the point is that, ultimately, they were hung around the script and the plot, not the effects.
We love riding with Luke as he makes his final run to attack the death star, and the effects are believable enough, but at the end of the day even in 1977 nobody thought more a moment he was going to miss, the bit we enjoy is when Obi Wan tells him to turn off the computer and use the force, at the end of the day what matters has nothing to do with the effects, nothing to do with how it all looks, it’s the way they hook us with that plot moment. The effects team for Blade Runner created the archetype modern high tech slightly dystopian environment, it’s immersive and totally enjoyable, but what do we remember? We remember Roy Batty proving how human he is just before he dies (I won’t mind if you stop reading and go and watch it, I’ll even provide the link). Alien took the grand old plot of putting a small number of people in a country house with a murderer and updated it, let’s face it, the Xenomorph is really, really scary but it’s the tension which makes the film work; for an interesting comparison, think how alike it is to Jaws with the three of them on that small boat being menaced by the shark, the VFX shark is good for it’s day but it’s nothing special by modern standards. As an aside, the best description of Alien I’ve heard is “the film where everybody ignores the smart woman, and then everybody dies except the smart woman and her cat”.
What I think happens now is that effects are stunningly, amazingly good – these days when you watch the special features on the DVD you find that entire scenes actually consist of the key actors on a small set, with the ennviroment and lots of the people in the background put in with CGI – the days of Cecil B DeMille and the casts of thousands are long gone, why bother kitting out all those extras when you can generate them digitally and procedurally animate them? Now, let’s not pretend modern effects aren’t good, because they are, it comes down to what purpose they’re serving in the film (or equally to be honest these days in a TV series), are they enhancing our enjoyment of the story, or are they covering up for the lack of one? Are they there because they’re necessary or are they there because they can be? Do we actually need to see the monster? Close Encounters only shows us the aliens right at the end (and in a way I think they could almost have got away without so doing at all), we do need to see the Xenomorph, but a lot of the time it’s the way the steadily diminishing crew react to knowing they’re trapped in that ship with something they can’t beat which really makes the movie.
I sense that these days sometimes the film or series is to a degree about the effects, audiences expect the breathtaking and believable and so long as the production company can throw enough money at the effects studio they can have it. The Guardian review of Avatar two called it a ‘trillion dollar screensaver’; frankly I couldn’t see the point of the original movie, whoever coined the phrase ‘Dances with Smurfs’ to point out that the plot had been done in a more realistic, socially relevant, context without a vast effects budget was pretty much right. Movies and quality tv must first of all be about people, plot and script, then when you’ve nailed that you can add the minimum of effects you need. Currently I’m enjoying two great shows on Netflix: Black Spot / Zone Blanche, and Wednesday – in both the effects when they happen, are good but they only support what are essentially good, character driven stories.
visupulse 