Ridiculous Opinions #204
Everyone who has been in my film classes knows that my favorite film is Raiders of the Lost Ark. I saw Raiders at the age of nine in 1981 and it so captured my imagination that I walked out of the theater saying, “I want to be an archeologist when I grow up!” For years, I enjoyed the Indiana Jones movies, culminating in the underappreciated Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (We won’t talk about Crystal Skull).
On Thursday, Abbey had tickets to an advance screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in Disney Springs. It was a screening for employees of Hollywood Studios. It was a fun little event and I’m so glad that my youngest daughter chose the most important person in her life to take to the movie and not someone like her mother or sister. She chose the most important person.
But just like most films that I have seen in the last couple of years, my reaction to it was meh. It wasn’t a bad film. It was just kind of…there. Abbey asked me what I thought the film would be like before we watched it and I said, “I bet I will enjoy it, and then forget that I watched it afterward.” This turned out to be totally true. It was loud. It had good set pieces. The acting was fine. But the film as a whole was…soulless.
And it was at that point that I realized why I don’t like movies much anymore. It’s because they’re fake. Yes, of course, all movies are fake, but I’m speaking in particular about the use of green screen and digital effects in modern films. It’s too much.
There was not a single moment in that Indiana Jones film where I felt that they were in an actual location. None of the coloring of the film looked natural and none of the backgrounds looked real. The scenes where they digitally de-aged Harrison Ford looked like a video game cut scene. I know that if you were to pause each frame of the film, you would look at Harrison Ford’s image (see picture above) and say that it looked real. But when in motion, it didn’t.
I actually first started to notice this during an episode of Yellowjackets about three months ago. We were watching two actors having a conversation in a car as they drove down the road and I thought, They’re not driving down the road. The backgrounds are green screen! Part of it was the unnatural way in which their hair blended into the background. Part of it was the way in which they had a tendency to look at each other while driving down the road. I’ve been driving for over thirty-five years and I never look at the person sitting next to me. You know why? Because I’m driving!
This is being nitpicky, I know, but the truth of the matter is that I think my brain is rejecting what I see on film. Literally. I think that my brain thinks, This is not real. Do not connect with this. It’s like when you eat something bad…your body rejects it and wants it out of its system. My brain seems to be doing that as of late with all of these shows with their fake backgrounds and unrealistic color.
I didn’t always feel that way. There was a time when I embraced CGI and wanted studios to use more of it. I thought that it opened up unlimited possibilities for filmmakers and that our imaginations could not be contained by this photo-realistic, digitally created trickery. CGI could show us things that we never could have dreamed and provide filmmakers with opportunities to do things that nobody before had ever attempted.
But I was wrong.
Studios did what all businesses do. They took a good thing and ran it into the ground, all in the name of making money. They found out they could fake some backgrounds, so they did, and now they’re doing it for everything (because filming in actual places costs money!). Just look at the horrors found here…
They found out they could digitally retouch the faces of actors, so they did it. For everything.
Props in people’s hands? We can do that digitally. Your two actors need to kiss? We can do that digitally. They don’t even have to be in the same room!
It’s too much, and I think that, from a psychological perspective, I am not enjoying movies because I am not transported to a different place. Whether I realize it or not, my brain knows that what I’m seeing isn’t real and it is rejecting things on a subliminal level.
So, when I watched Indiana Jones, I didn’t connect with the movie because my brain knew it was all fake. I don’t like any of the Star Wars shows because none of the backgrounds are real. Marvel movies don’t work for me anymore because nothing is real in those films (even their hair).
An example: I loved the first season of a tv show called The Bear. And I think part of the reason is that I have this theory that the director would not let the actors wear make-up. That sounds weird to say, but I feel like my connection to the show had a great deal to do with the fact that the people on the show looked like real people! Everyone in each episode looked like someone I might encounter on the street. (Of course, in Season 2, which I’m watching right now, they have a higher budget and thus the actors are beginning to look a bit more Hollywood-like).
Contrast that with Ted Lasso, which, over the course of three seasons, seemed to cake even more make-up on their actors until their skin looked like peach-colored clay. The people no longer seemed real to me. But that seems to be happening with everything! Sorry, people, but as a balding, middle-aged man, very few men sport as much hair as some of our current Hollywood actors, CGI has been used to remove wrinkles from some of your favorite stars, and yes, Sandra Bullock’s face no longer moves.
All of this has evolved in me over time. I used to read about filmmakers demanding to shoot on film rather than on digital. I thought they were just being snobs and trying to be exclusive. But maybe I’m coming around to the notion that film is a physical medium, whereas digital does not actually exist. Therefore, nothing is real anymore!
I think we’re all craving something real, and until Hollywood starts building sets and having actors perform together in real spaces, we may not get what we want. And that will make me, a curmudgeonly old man, continue to rant about movies and how much I don’t like them.
In class, my students are constantly asking me my opinion on movies. I’m always incredibly negative about everything I have seen, and in my mind, I kept wondering why I felt that way. Now, I know…
