Over the summer, I watched San Andreas when it was first released in Singapore cinemas. I remember feeling incredibly dubious about everything that took place in the movie, and I found myself trying to convince myself that what I was seeing was real. To be honest, I found the film so terrible that my friend and I eventually left the theatre halfway through the movie. It's interesting to me that while mutual friends of ours found San Andreas absolutely groundbreaking, my friend and I thought it was completely unrealistic.
Main characters always reach points of near-death but never truly die, and this seems outrageous. You would think that in an apocalypse, at least someone would die, but nobody does. Women dodge collapsing debris in heels and manage to survive a monstrous earthquake with scratches. In terms of cinematic entertainment, the destruction on the city looked real — comparing The Matrix and San Andreas, the CGI-effects in the later definitely triumphed the former. However, in the storyline aspect, it was terrible. I didn't believe the story at all.
I've been told on multiple occasions to "please, for the love of God, turn off your CMC just for this movie." Being a CMC student, I find myself viewing things more critically than most of my other friends. As we discussed in class during the Habermas week, we live in a time of hyperawareness, a generation of "hyperstimulated sensitivity." Sometimes I wonder a reality in which I was not a CMC — would I enjoy movies any more (or less, even)? In other words, if I weren't as aware of things as I am now, would images look more realistic and believable? One thing is for sure: I enjoyed a lot more movies as an oblivious kid than I do now.
I know what you mean about being ruined as a casual movie watcher! In some ways, I think it makes me enjoy or appreciate movies more because I can appreciated them for content and the surrounding contextual messages. If a movie can stand up to my critical CMC eye, I will enjoy it much more! I also really identify with your struggle with the emergence and wide spread use of CGI. While I think certain aspects of early CGI were wonderful, the use of CGI now is so popular and prevalent now that it is hard for the moviegoer to discern what is real and what isn't. I think that originally CGI was used as an extension of reality or an aid to the narrative story, now CGI is used as a crutch or too heavily relied upon in order to make a less than stellar story seem more fantastical and produceable. If one were to strip away all of the CGI from Transformers, or in your example San Andreas, there would be little narrative left to connect the story. In order to make a story seem "more real" CGI is actually hindering the narrative capabilities of the story, thus making the overall product seem less "real." I think that the overuse of CGI often sterilizes a film. There is an organic quality to a film that does not use any computer generated affects that cannot be copied by a film completed created in a computer. I used the example of the rereleased Star Wars films episode IV-VI in class, but I also think of the comparison between early hand-drawn Disney cartoons and that of the current computer animated Disney Films. The organic quality of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves cannot be recreated in Tangled or Frozen, no matter how "real" the animators may try to make the characters seem. Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I believe that fiction should be separate from reality and the hyper-realized CGI only hinders our creativity to push past the realistic and the reality.
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