In Defense of Crappy FX

I saw The Illusionist at the press launch along with everyone else and pretty much agreed with the reviews on Siffblog. It’s a middling mildly entertaining movie. But what I want to rant about on this, the opening day of SIFF, is how CGI ruined this movie. I have a love-hate relationship with computer graphics in general, and in the case of The Illusionist they do a great disservice to the plot.

In the movie, Ed Norton is a masterful illusionist, and the crux of the movie is whether the illusions portrayed are tricks or magic. Neither – it’s fricking CGI. I laughed out loud when the poor cops were trying to duplicate one of his tricks with a hand cranked projector and smoke. That’s not going to work! You need to outsource to a decent animation company!

At one point, the illusionist makes an orange tree grow out of a seed in the span of seconds – yes, with CGI. When a book containing the solution to the trick shows up, I expected it to be filled with computer code.

So my plea is this: can we not use CGI just for the sake of it? Story first – and if you need to use FX then please follow the logic of the story you’re telling. I blame James Cameron and George Lucas. Can anyone really defend the second Star Wars trilogy when compared with the first? Special effects don’t make a movie good, but they can make it bad.