It’s that time of year again – that point in the cinema release calendar where Tom Cruise does something cool-looking and life-endangeringly unwise. This time around, rather than feeling the Gs in an F/A-18 Super Hornet, he’s Base jumping off a cliff via a motorbike. (You’d think at some point he might like to have a nice extended sit down in a drawing-room comedy, but no, it seems not.) Cruise’s latest gambit is almost certainly the most heavily trailed stunt in movie history, so central to the marketing of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (in cinemas Monday) that a nine-minute video was released showing exactly how it was done.
Cruise is not the only one trumpeting his stunty wares. Dead Reckoning is joined in cinemas later this month by Oppenheimer, a film for which the notoriously visual effects-averse Christopher Nolan elected to recreate a nuclear explosion, rather than resort to CGI. Par for the course, really, for a man who has never met a truck he didn’t want to immediately flip over.
You can understand why both Cruise and Nolan would want to lean on their capabilities for keeping it real. In a landscape where so many films are laden with CGI, that sort of authenticity is a real selling point. And what’s more it comes at a propitious time, because 2023 has been a bit of a disastrous year for CGI in films. There was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a film that received no end of brickbats for its hideous, soupy visuals, and The Flash, the CGI for which was deemed so ropey that its directors were forced to clarify that, no, the film (pictured above) was actually meant to look like that. Most recently there was the digital deageing of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which as well as raising complex ethical questions, looked a bit shonky to boot.
So what’s the deal with CGI at the moment, and what do the people who work in the industry think of it? To find out, I spoke to a VFX animator who has worked on a number of major blockbusters (and, perhaps as a result, asked to remain anonymous). Here are five interesting takeaways.
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Bad CGI is often down to bad planning
CGI is an involved process, says the VFX animator, with artists often booked years in advance, and tight schedules set. So anything that disrupts that schedule is likely to affect the end product. Late changes – a studio exec doesn’t like a hat a character is wearing, for example – will mean extra work for artists that will have to be crammed into already hectic schedules, meaning the end product may suffer. And there is an awful lot of after-the-fact tinkering that goes on: the animator cites Avengers: Endgame, where the time travel suits worn by the characters were inserted or “digitally tailored” long after the scenes were shot. The old line about “fixing it in post”applies more than ever, it seems.
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… while good CGI recognises its own limitations
Jurassic Park is now 30 years old but despite the digital technology used on those films being less advanced than today’s technology, the VFX animator cites it as an example of CGI done smartly, with lots of scenes set in darkness, which is often easier to create and render digital effects for. Contrast that with many modern blockbusters, often filmed predominately on soundstages with green screen, necessitating the use of a lot more CGI, and sometimes without a clear idea of what the finished product should look like. (“We had a rough environment that we were sticking a few main characters in,” one of the VFX artists working on Quantumania told Vulture.)
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Human faces are the toughest thing to get right
Our VFX animator notes that CGI often works best when it is depicting something that we’ve never seen in the real world – dragons, aliens, long-extinct species. Things get trickier when it tries to recreate something viewers are more familiar with, most notably human faces. The uncanny valley is still a bit of a chasm in this regard, but the technology is ever-narrowing that gap, thanks to the emergence of AI (which was used for the Harrison Ford de-aged scenes in Dial of Destiny, as above). That of course will bring with it a boatload of ethical issues – dead performers being digitally revived, AI creating actors’ likenesses without their permission – but also more prosaic ones: will future audiences really want to watch a digitally recreated Cruise or Ford over the living, breathing star of their era (who presumably they have an unhealthy parasocial relationship with)?
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Artists are overworked – and under-represented
Overtime is an expectation in VFX work, says our animator. The working regulations that are in place for other Hollywood workers often aren’t applied to VFX artists. That in part is down to an absence of a history of strong organised labour like in other Hollywood professions – there is no formal VFX union in the US, despite attempts to unionise (in the UK VFX artists come under the umbrella of Bectu). There have been plenty of stories about the industry being at breaking point – but, the animator notes, that’s hardly unique to VFX at the moment, with a writers’ strike ongoing and an actors’ one potentially on the way.
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VFX is everywhere – even in films that boast otherwise
Tom Cruise might get bonus points for hurling himself across a building, but the harness he’s wearing while doing so will still need to be digitally removed in post-production. So, the animator suggests, while marketing departments might be trying to create a schism between “authentic” films and films with lots of CGI, it’s something of a phoney war. The extent of which digital effects are used in films is underestimated by us viewers: the animator points to Parasite, whose central house was in fact two separate sets stitched together digitally. For all the visual brilliance of films like Avatar: The Way of Water, sometimes the best CGI is the CGI you never knew was there in the first place.
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