Will and CGI

So I'm sat there watching 'I am Legend' and thinking 'oh this is isn't too bad' and I went up thinking that right up to the point when the CGI vampire/zombies came in. *Sigh* I know CGI has come a long way these past few years - but they're still nowhere near convincing enough yet. If the film makers had been really smart they'd have kept all the monsters in the dark where we could never see them properly - it would have been a lot, lot more realistic and a lot more scary that way. The very first scene where we (hardly) see them in the dark was really good. If they had kept it like that throughout the rest of the film... But oooooh no, they had to let the effects department show off what they could do. So it's zombies running and racing and even crawling up walls, and flying through the air - an alpha male's close-up who has a mouth that can open much, much too wide without dislocating his jaw... and it all looks too much like one of Will Smith's last films - 'I, Robot' - another film where I thought the CGI was totally unconvincing - and they were supposed to be robots. It's Will Smith vs a not-too-distant relative of Mario for crying out loud.

Computer animation never works for me because there's obviously no gravity, no weight, no resistance, everything moves in an unnaturally smooth, far too perfect way, there's no muscles or skeletons involved. In fact the only places I think CGI excels is in depicting architecture, space ships - where there's no gravity and so you can expect a weird smoothness of motion, and out and out hyper-realistic cartoon style animation that the likes of Pixar do best. At least there you can easily forgive it's shortcomings because it's not ever trying to be anything other than what it is - it's honest to it's materials.

Which reminds me - as I was watching it and thinking 'what is it with Will Smith and CGI - he's done so many films with it now; the aforementioned 'I, Robot' (that was rubbish), the MIB films (amusing enough), 'Independence Day' (awful), and then they came to the scene where he mouths along with Donkey out of Shriek. As if to rub the CGI point home just for my benefit.

So it turns out - I still prefer 'proper monsters' that is -real actors or animatronics covered in latex, and paint and dripping goo - even now they're still the most convincing and frightening. CGI is just a cheap cop-out and Hollywood has come to rely on it far too heavily these days.