Sky's post reminds me of an observation I made earlier this week. I decided to finally sit down and watch Peter Jackson's King Kong remake. I was actually really enjoying it for the first hour or so, slow moving, but interesting enough. Then they landed on the island and it got really boring as we spent the next hour or so watching a well rendered CG monkey dance around, small things, and fight dinosaurs, in a series of action sequences that get so boring and repetative I have no idea how anyone could stand to watch the movie more than once per lifetime. Sad thing is, I was actually enjoying the movie up until that point, but for the sake of my own sanity I turned it off and went to go do something else and have yet to finish it. Do people really find watching what is essentially computer generated cartoon characters beat the crap out of each other in endless and meandering battles to be entertaining? I just don't see it.
Alright, back to my point. My point is back in 1993 I went to see a film called Jurassic Park, it pretty much defined awesome to me at the time. I had always loved dinosaurs, but I never really ever had a solid image in my mind of what a real dinosaur might have looked like, after seeing Jurassic Park I was convinced beyond a doubt that that is exactly how a real one would look. Any movie I had seen before with dinosaurs in it contained dinosaur models that were far from convincing. Jurassic Park mixed real physical animatronic models with CG elements, and it was down right amazing. I could care less about the later two films, but I still watch the first one sometimes, and am still impressed with how damn awesome those dinosaurs look. Maybe it is just my bias from having seen it in theaters back when it was state of the art, and thus is cemented in my mind as I originally saw it, I don't know, but I still think it looks amazing.
Now, flash forward to the year 2005. Over ten years later. Take a look back at 1993, remember those things people called cell phones? Remember those bricks people use to carry around on their hips called pagers? Look at cars, computers, televisions, cameras, and every piece of technology you can imagine. It was a different world, if we could zip back in time we would feel like we were in the stone age! 16 bit graphic consoles, PCs running Windows 3.1, no mp3 players, but kids carrying around massive clunky Walkmen with massive clunky headphones. Technologically, the difference is extreme. So why is it that in this massive budget movie we are back to having dinosaurs that look like cartoons? If a movie from the archaic early nineties managed to pull off dinosaurs that could make a 12 year old nearly pee his pants, why are we now making movies that look like Roger Rabbit or Pete's Dragon? How have we regressed so far in the evolution of special effects?