For the past 12 months, Hollywood has been facing a serious case of CGI fatigue, with critics tearing into would-be blockbusters for their over-reliance on it. In the New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote that heavy effects work in Ant-Man 3 “instead of endowing the inanimate with life, subtract it”, while Ellen E Jones wrote in the Guardian that Little Mermaid was “rendered lifeless” by CGI. The Netflix rom-com You People, starring Jonah Hill, made headlines when it was revealed that the final kiss in the film was done with CGI and the actor Christian Bale didn’t mince words when he said working exclusively in front of green screens on Thor: Love & Thunder was “the definition of monotony”.
As if in response, 2023 has delivered a buffet of practical-effects-driven films to the multiplex. Greta Gerwig used techniques dating back to silent film and soundstage musicals to bring her fantastical, hot-pink vision of Barbieland to life, Christopher Nolan reconstructed Oppenheimer’s Trinity test using miniatures, and Christopher McQuarrie hoisted a train carriage 80ft into the air in order to film Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s stomach-churning final stunt. Indie films have been getting in on the fun, too: Wes Anderson turned a piece of Spanish farmland into a real town, complete with plumbing and electricity, for Asteroid City; the “penis monster” in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid was made entirely with prosthetics; and the buzzy horror film Talk to Me has been praised for its gory and “disturbingly real” prosthetics.
Film historian Pamela Hutchinson says that this wave of films arrives after a period “where they said: ‘CGI, you can do everything [with it,] and endless possibilities await you.’ Now we know that can be done, and we’re a bit distrustful of it, we’re a bit over it. Because we now know that everything can be done on the computer, when you see the Barbieland set, it’s refreshing to see something that someone has built with care and attention.”
Katie Spencer and Sarah Greenwood – respectively, set decorator and production designer on Barbie – say that, for Gerwig, there was no question that her film would not be brought to life using in-camera techniques. “Greta is a lover of cinema – she’s 39 years old, and her knowledge is phenomenal,” says Spencer. When she and Greenwood – known for their work on period films such as Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice – joined the project, Gerwig said she wanted to echo classic films such as Jacques Tati’s Playtime, or those made in the 1940s by Powell and Pressburger.
“One of the most important things for Greta was the idea that when children play, they play with touch as much as anything,” says Greenwood. “Nowadays, we’re so well versed in what’s real and what’s not real on the screen, that even children know when something is real and tangible. One of the things that [Gerwig] wanted to get across in the movie was that these toys were real, they were there. And that, of course, is music to our ears.”
Spencer says that the old-school magic of the techniques used – including, notably, a transition sequence in which Barbie and Ken travel to the “real world,” which Hutchinson says is “exactly how they’d have done it in the 1910s” – created an “infectious quality” on-set. “You’d find [cast and crew] in the miniature studio or in our studio or watching the transitions for the joy of it,” says Spencer. “People have more ownership of the film, even if they have nothing to do with it – they have more pride in it.”
While Barbie’s practical effects were designed to evoke the feeling of playtime, other films seem to take pride in real-life techniques in the face of AI’s increasing influence on Hollywood. The latest Mission Impossible sees Tom Cruise facing off against an all-seeing AI called “the entity” – a narrative mirror to Cruise’s real-life efforts joining strike talks to warn against the use of AI in film-making. “I think we’re all a little spooked by CGI at the moment, and particularly the generative qualities of AI – the idea that you might take someone who’s no longer with us and re-create them as a living actor,” says Hutchinson. “But if you cut away from a long special-effects shot to Tom Cruise, landing in his parachute, it’s almost a way of making a promise to the audience, saying: ‘We did do some of this, we’re not going to just show you things we made up.’”
Hutchinson notes that, while a great deal has been made of practical effects in this summer’s blockbusters, that doesn’t mean that there are no VFX whatsoever. (Nolan, in particular, has been criticised for not crediting a swathe of VFX artists who worked on Oppenheimer.) “We aren’t actually going to believe that there are no special effects in these films, but we’re going to believe that we saw something that actually happened on a set somewhere,” she says. “We want that connection again – we’ve all been very impressed by a digital landscape and then got bored with it straight away. We return to these [techniques] and remember that the people who make our films [are] also the artists who designed the background sets, people who build scenery and so forth, and realise there is so much more artistry to film-making than just one person ordering a certain number of computer artists to do a certain thing.”
Greenwood is glad that Barbie has proven there’s “still an audience for what we do. It was very painstaking, but I’m sure having 500 VFX guys working away in the dark is also very painstaking,” she says. “It’s just much more fun the way we do it!”
