watched this last night. the first 20 minutes are just dazzling. it captures the feel of a comic book much better than any movie in its genre, even if on a small’ish tv it probably doesn’t look as good as it did in the theaters. however, the story and so forth aren’t very much better than another recent installment in this genre, “the league of extraordinary gentlemen”, though this is wittier. giovanni ribisi, who i like a lot, does a serviceable supporting turn but the appeal of angelina jolie and gwyneth paltrow continues to baffle me. and is there nobody other than jolie who can play englishwomen in action films?
technical stuff: on the one hand we have something like “terminator 3” in which computer generated monsters and machines interact with the world of humans; in this we have humans being digitized and inserted into a world of computer generated machines, animals and sets. both kinds cost many, many millions to make (i believe this was $70 million)–but neither is as much fun as “raiders of the lost ark”. i thought i had a point when i started that last sentence but i see it might resemble one of roger ebert’s so i’m just going to back away from it.
I haven’t seen “Captain” yet, and your point about its cost-to-pleasure ratio are probably dead-on. Yet I’m curious if all the hullabaloo about cgi assumes some radical break in film history, when it’s simply a technological shift for somewhat-common practice.
I was struck watching “Songs from the Second Floor” how every shot was so perfectly lit–and it was because the director (like Kubrick) shot it all indoors, with sets and gorgeous matte paintings.
The artificial shot versus the on-location, in-person variety… I can think of good and bad examples for both. “Troy” isn’t crap because of cgi, and “Spartacus” isn’t good because of all those extras.
But there is something disheartening about a big budget. I’m very nervous about the new “Kong,” ’cause a substantial pleasure of the original–which I adore–is its gloriously unreal backgrounds and stop-motion monsters. Cheap isn’t always good (“C.H.U.D.”) but the aesthetic of cheap has many unsung pleasures. (Although, here I am touting cheap… and I think the original Kong was pretty damn costly. Was it? If so, substitute the penny-pinching “The Howling” for “Van Helsing.”)
“Kong” was releavtively inexpensive, Mike. They recycled sets from “The Most Dangerous Game.” The 1976 De Laurentiis remake, which I love, was exspensive. $25 million (a lot at the time).
it turns out that “sky captain” would have cost at least twice as much if shot on location etc. but it bombed anyway. that aside, i guess what this technology or approach to animation allows is a freedom of set design etc. that can’t be matched conventionally because the digital world is not bound by the laws of physics. at the same time this film bypasses the dilemma of “final fantasy” in that it has actual stars in it, and it blurs the line between animated and “real” in a new way. so i suppose my quibbling about plot etc. might be missing most of the point. at the same time there is something a little off about the idea of really expensive animation replicating the look and feel of really cheap comics. (by the way, i thought ang lee did a pretty good job of capturing a comic-book feel in “hulk”.)
i just wish the imagination and vision that went into the visual look of the film would have extended to other things. if this is a old-style comic-book come to life it also faithfully maintains those comic-books’ blinkered vision of things like race: the heroic world of “sky captain” is entirely white, the only non-white characters are a couple of untrustworthy asians. at least “the league of extraordinary gentlemen” had an indian captain nemo (naseerudin shah disappearing into a beard).