4 Reasons Movie Special FX Are Actually Getting Worse

What the hell happened? A phenomenon we've lovingly named the CGI effect ... effect.

As we've mentioned before, Peter Jackson's attention to detail on the Lord of the Rings trilogy was so insane that every armor was crafted based on the backstory of an orc, most of which were onscreen for a whole six frames before being decapitated -- not only that, costume designers painstakingly handcrafted over six miles (for metric enthusiasts, that's "a shitload of kilometers") of chain mail, just so that they could put them on orc actors who would be wearing armor over the mail, at night, in the rain. After Jackson was dragged kicking and screaming back to the director's chair for The Hobbit, though, he said to hell with that and created all the orcs in nice and easy (for him) CGI. Hence the buttlord in the screencap above.

And The Hobbit trilogy is just one example in an increasingly disturbing trend of filmmakers who use CGI where practical effects would at least suffice, if not be better. Check out this supercut of VFX from The Expendables 2, where CGI was used for breathtaking effects like making a white helicopter black:

Lionsgate
The same technique was used on the cast's hair.

Or the scene where Sly sends a CGI motorcycle careening off a ramp into a CGI helicopter. We're talking about the same guy who became a film legend by actually jumping off cliffs and getting knocked out on camera. But, OK, maybe the helicopter/bike thing isn't such a good example, because when have you ever seen a scene like that using practical effects?

20th Century Fox
Oh.

Yes, even the lesser Die Hards have more balls than today's movies: the famous helicopter scene from Live Free or Die Hard was filmed using a real car, helicopter, and pee-soaked stunt man, with only a dash of CGI to make it a little bit more explodey in the finished film.

The CGI effect effect is even working its way into non-genre films. For The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese apparently got tired of scouting locations, so he just filmed his scenes wherever he set up his camera and then Photoshopped the proper background in later:

Paramount Pictures
The Jonah Hill cocaine party was filmed at a completely different Jonah Hill cocaine party.

At least the CGI companies must be getting loaded from all this extra business, right? Nope. It's the opposite, actually, because ...

In turn, this means that the VFX companies have to take on so much work to try to turn even a meager profit that their artists end up working 15-hour days for weeks at a time, on top of cutting frivolities like health insurance or overtime, just to keep their lights on. The Noah company, Look Effects, isn't some little start-up: they also did the CGI on shows like Lost and Game of Thrones. However, the only way they could land Noah was by low-balling it, and then it's not like they could go back to the studio and say, "Hey, so, apparently we can't generate an apocalyptic flood and some 3 million odd animals stuffed on to a giant boat for the price of a Happy Meal."

Their only hope, at this point, is to deliver something badass enough to impress other studios (and hopefully get a little golden statue). Of course, to do that, that probably means you're going to have to cough up for good CGI, and the slight problem there is ...

It turns out that making the most visually spectacular images that the human brain can comprehend requires a good bit of scratch. That's why huge-budget blockbusters have been becoming the norm (33 of the 50 most expensive movies of all time have been made in the last four years); studios are so preoccupied pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into CGI for schlock like Battleship because they could, that they didn't bother to stop to think if they should.

And, as CGI continues to improve, movies only become more reliant on it. We've mentioned before how Rhythm & Hues, the visual effects company most famous for bringing to life all the Oscar-winning, pants-shitting fear of sharing a Tunnel of Love rowboat with a 400-pound marvel of evisceration and death in Life of Pi, went bankrupt because they did their job too well.

Universal Studios
"We were worried about that for a minute, too."

Meanwhile, the studios are pumping more and more money into already-bloated special effects budgets (it sure as shit isn't going toward better screenplays). For Transformers: Thing of Whatever, Industrial Light & Magic spent about 15 weeks per Transformer just getting the basic model ready, and each model has about 10,000 parts -- that's not a joke, that's seriously how many individual pieces there are in Michael Bay's idea of a talking truck. The company had to start making models six months before filming even started, just to meet the production schedule. And remember, ILM is like the GE of special effects studios, so if they're balls-to-the-wall to make their effects look good in a profitable fashion, what chance does a scrappy, upstart VFX company have?

The over-CGI-ing of movies is having one positive effect, though ...