I’m Not Impressed: Elaborate CGI vs. Old-Fashioned Planning (Quote of the Day)

Don't fall, little fella.

The opening pre-title-card sequence in Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) takes us through all the mechanisms of all the clocks in the colossal train station that Hugo, the boy who lives, orphaned, inside the clocks, maintains daily.  It twists and winds its way through in a way that I know that camera actually couldn’t, so I know I’m not watching an actual set and scene presented on celluloid but a CGI construction.  This is thoroughly unimpressive to me.  The more elaborate CGI shots get (this one was reminiscent of the pathways taken by the winding camera that opens Fight Club), the less impressed I am by them.

It’s like this: When I’m watching Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and Danny and Tina and Lou are walking along the hallway towards the camera as they discuss Lou’s career and just before they get to the camera, Lou announces he’s leaving Danny for another agent and Danny freezes right in front of the camera, that hits me hard.  It’s a great, emotional moment that hits the audience in the chest as squarely as it hits Danny.  Later, looking back on it, you can be impressed by how perfectly they timed their conversation with their approach and savor the fact that it was all about a vision that director and cinematographer had about how the scene would play out and look and then, by God, they rehearsed it, prepped it and did it.

With Hugo, CGI animators were given a frame presentation of how and where the “camera” (the monitor screen on the computer designing the scene) would be and began to busily draw and render and create the scene.   And the scene is quite elaborate, which is why, conversely, it is unimpressive. That walk in Broadway Danny Rose, that’s impressive!  It’s simple, not complicated.  It’s not a Rube Goldberg construction designed to wow us beyond belief but an elegant play between actors and camera that performs its task so beautifully and, seemingly, effortlessly, that we cannot help but be moved.  By contrast, at the end of the opening sequence in Hugo, when they finally get to him looking out the glass from behind the clockface and show the title, I thought, “Thank god that’s over.”

– Greg Ferrara, “Five Years, Five Pet Peeves, Five Reasons to Go On“

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