Odds & Ends
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The Beowulf Express
A new trailer / preview reel for Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf has hit the net. The best version is here, but there's a YouTube version below in case that's too much of a download. Unfortunately, though, the trailer is sufficiently dark and choppy that it looks pretty awful when it's been Youtube-ised. I'll skip my standard spiel on the uncanny valley (see here for some of my earlier comments). What this Beowulf trailer made me think about is how conflicted I am about the potential of these sort of highly digitised movies. By that I mean movies where most or all of the environments are either computer generated sets, or highly manipulated with computers, whether these use human actors (as in Sin City) or live-action-like motion-capped animation (a la Polar Express or Beowulf). The divide between the animated and non-animated films in this genre seems to be largely trivial now: because these projects use animation that is motion-capped off real performers, and which aspires to photorealism, in an aesthetic sense they are essentially the same thing. (True animated films, like those made by Pixar, are a different beast again.) The films I'm thinking of are distinguished instead by their aspirations to harness realistic-looking performers to highly artificial environments. There are a whole lot of techno-geek directors who seem to have decided this is the way of the future: Zemeckis is one, but there's also James Cameron (with his uber-sci fi project Avatar), Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), George Lucas (given how far the new Star Wars films went down this road), and Peter Jackson & Steven Spielberg (with their upcoming Tintin movies, which I talked about here). As I said, I have mixed feelings about this. Looking at this Beowulf footage, and discounting the pointless pseudo-animation on the humans, you can see that there is enormous potential in this technology: it frees filmmaker form all sorts of logistical and technical shackles that go with traditional techniques. And we saw in Sin City that you could get a really distinctive look in this way. Yet so far for the most part what we are seeing is the aesthetics of computer games transferred to the cinema. The elimination (or minimisation) of sets means that we get the free-floating camera familiar to gamers. The fact that it's all put together in the computer, rather than having to work around the realities of celluloid and lenses and light, gives us the same cinematographic tics you get in games (bleach-bypassed looks like in 300, or other highly synthetic visual schemes). The bad animation in the Zemeckis films is reminiscent of game cutscenes. And when you add in all the other cliches of computer-effects (massive battle sequences, swarms of objects or creatures), you start to get a series of fairly indistinguishable looking films. I'm not such a luddite that I think the emergence of computer game aesthetics in cinema is an inherently bad thing. But what we're seeing at the moment is the influence of computer game cliches. Filmmakers are being granted enormous freedom, but having won that freedom they're all choosing to do the same thing. Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 26.8.07  
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