“A film’s photographic effects should not be created for their own sake as independent, beautiful or powerful images. In the final analysis, they must be justified psychologically and dramatically, as well as aesthetically, as important means to an end, not as ends themselves. Creating beautiful images for the sake of creating beautiful images violates a film’s aesthetic unity and may actually work against the film” (Boggs, Joseph M., and Dennis W. Petrie. The Art of Watching Films. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.)
Filmmakers have not only been overusing CGI and special effects in recent films, but have been making entire movies based off of what they can do with the special effects and 3-D imaging within a simple storyline; creating the feeling of being trapped in a video game, rather than the feeling of experiencing a movie. Journey to the Center of the Earth is full of stimulating and exciting fast moving scenes, all at the expense of a lack of development of not only the plot but the characters, who also lacked depth and general likeability. The film critic, Brian Orndorf said that the director might know what he was doing with special effects but “he’s at a loss when it comes down to nurturing even a tuft of human interface.”
Avatar is another example of this type of film; sacrificing what really counts (the plot, the characters, and the message) for cheap, plastic thrills. The entire film is based off of the special effects and the 3-D aspects of it. Everything else about the film however is incredibly less memorable. The dull plot might be pumped up by the remarkable computer generated imagery but it was essentially no different than three well known films: Pocahontas, Fern Gully and Dances with Wolves.
This new kind of film might be the “latest” but is it really the greatest?
word count: 307
