“The Dark Knight Rises” debuts more new character posters
Has the Sacha Baron Cohen shtick jumped the shark?
Tim Grierson on Will Smith, the Last Movie Star
Exclusive download: Corporal, featuring Michael Shannon, presents “Glory”
The Mundane Fantastic
The most advanced special effects these days go out of their way to look a little imperfect.
Motion pictures come out of photography, and photography (as we’ve always defined it) requires film: a chemical process that results in a verifiable record of reality that one can literally see and touch. When you hold a section of a 35mm film print of “Forbidden Planet” up to the light, you’re not just seeing an abstraction. It’s a visual account of something that actually took place — human hands designed, built and painted those splendid planetary sets and the spaceship that lands on it, and the filmmakers were so entranced by the sheer beauty of what they’d made that they locked the camera down and let us drink in what they’d created. The tactile nature of the analog-era special effect was the source of its magic. It was all that the movie needed. Everything else — lens flares, whip-pans, animated sparkle effects — was visual gravy.
Boisterously enjoyable as it is, the new “Star Trek” is temperamentally and artistically the opposite of “Forbidden Planet”: a quick-cut trailer-for-itself that rarely holds a shot for more than three seconds. And yet, in its odd way, the dirt on the lens in that shot of the Romulan ship represents a coded yearning for a vanished time — an analog age in which fantasy filmmakers used cameras loaded with film to capture three-dimensional, tactile, real objects, be they actors, sets or elaborately detailed miniature cityscapes, submarines, starships and the like.
It’s as if the movies themselves are acknowledging that, to quote Gertrude Stein’s putdown of Oakland, “there’s no there there.” Because the hearts of individual shots (the CGI robots, supersoldiers, heroic hamsters and giant spacecraft) aren’t, the movies urgently try to do something, anything, to make it seem as if they are real. That “something” is achieved by striving to make the event seem to happening in the moment, so quickly and unexpectedly that the camera can barely keep up.
The end result is an inversion of the dynamic that used to rule the cinema of the imagination. The methodical, concentrated presentation of unreal situations — from Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton warriors in “Jason and the Argonauts” to the simply-presented time-jumping-by-DeLorean in the “Back to the Future” series — made old fantasy movies seem lighter, more playful, more enchanted. Even mundane moments seemed fantastic. Accidentally or on purpose, the new fantasy films do just the opposite, making the fantastic mundane.
[Additional photos: "District 9," TriStar Pictures, 2009; "Star Trek," Paramount Pictures, 2009]
