The Suspension of Disbelief

I’m not really sure if I’m just becoming less tolerant or if I feel overexposed right now, but I just can’t deal with bad visual effects these days. I’m not talking about seamless adjustments like David Fincher is known for, or even CGI used in sci-fi media like Dune or Star Trek, but I’m talking those everyday scenes that use CGI because they are cheap or lazy.

Recently, I started watching Havoc, the Tom Hardy led action flick by the director of The Raid. I was crazy excited for this film, but once it started, I began rolling my eyes. Here were, admittedly, pretty decent CGI cop cars chasing down suspects, but the strange and jarring camera sweeps made me feel like I was watching the beginning of a cut scene in Grand Theft Auto and not a motion picture. I actually turned the film off, because I just wasn’t in the mood to watch that much CGI.

A few days later, I turned it back on, and from what I could tell, they used Volume, the three-dimension green screen ring that was made popular by its usage in The Mandalorian. It works great in something like The Mandalorian, where the backdrop is entirely made up, but its way less effective when you watch Tom Hardy walking down an alley way, and it’s clear the night sky, the city scape, the cars in the background, and heck, possibly even the buildings in the alley are all CGI. So, I turned it off again.

I spent a few days thinking on why my tolerance has dropped for computer generated graphics in films. I mean, I’m still okay if they are done seamlessly like in Godzilla One or even Jurassic Park, but the video gamifying of movies is just not for me. Especially in a film like Havoc, where it really isn’t necessary, or that atrocious opening sequence of the last Indiana Jones film. And don’t even get me started on Expend4bles.

I think the problem is it breaks my suspension of disbelief. The moment my eye picks up on something that is so shiny or moves unnaturally, I struggle to refocus my attention on the story.

But it made me wonder, what about movies from the past? For example, the stop-motion in Robocop or Empire Strikes Back was pretty evident, so why was that less offensive? Am I simply being a grumpy old man and screaming “Back in my day” at the clouds? I don’t think so.

I think the old school practical effects could be less offensive, because the backdrops were still real or at least made of something real. It wasn’t just a harsh distinction of what was real and what wasn’t. My mind could still process that I’m seeing something tangible moving and it was impressive to see something that shouldn’t work (like an AT-AT) working. I could appreciate the time and effort that went into making a beautiful scene like the attack on Hoth, whereas when I see a fake city street, my brain struggles to go “This is a dangerous place”. Instead, it thinks, “Well… that doesn’t look real.”

So, what is a guy to do? Complain? Whine? No… not me. There are plenty of movies that don’t use CGI or ones that use it properly, and I can easily just turn off anything that annoys me. And for right now, maybe I’ll just stick to older movies, there is nothing wrong with that.