Yesterday I woke up with a crick in my neck, and it’s been awful. It slowed me down a lot at work because I couldn’t bend down much or reach for things without pain. I breathed through my mouth a lot more because of that, and my lips got super chapped. I barely got any deep sleep last night, according to Pokémon Sleep, because the pain and discomfort made it hard to settle in. Not being able to put much weight on either shoulder made getting out of bed hard. I hate it.
Earlier this week, my brother shared with me the story trailer for the new Captain America-Black Panther game 1943: Rise of HYDRA. It was made with the Unreal Engine, which is able to make highly realistic visuals that move with you in real time. I’m kinda of two minds about it. My first reaction was that it looked like very well-produced vanilla. The characters’ faces were wooden, the action was slow and weak, and I’m not partial to the big reveal of the story for a game about the rise of a Nazi group focusing on what one assumes is a short-lived confrontation between the two heroes. Of course, I also recognize how impressive the Unreal Engine is, considering that when I was a kid, everything was blocky. It’s a real technical achievement, and it’ll probably look better as a game, since I assume the action will be much faster and better-looking. I also liked the aesthetic of the game. It’s a good combo of war game realism with classic 40s comics style.
All that got me thinking about how the pursuit of realistic art in popular media is more about crowd-pleasing than making the best work. In general, art education in this country is severely lacking, so most people can’t properly appreciate and evaluate art. It’s why people say museums are boring; they expect to have the movie experience of staring at a painting and finding God, and they can’t come close to that because all they see is shapes and colors, as facts. In light of that, the easiest way to convince a large, ignorant audience that your art is good is to make it as realistic looking as possible, because it takes no acumen to identify the quality. It either looks like the thing or it doesn’t. I’m not saying there’s no merit in realistic art, or that the only reason anyone pursues it is for easy adulation. It has a lot of value, and it is very impressive and requires a lot of skill. At the same time, I think a lot of popular media and narratives around it push realistic art as objectively better, even in situations where it’s not the best choice, because it’s easier to digest.
I don’t think video games are at their best when they look live action. The idea that that’s the pinnacle of what the medium can offer is pretty shallow, if you ask me. Like any piece of art, the choices made should always reinforce intent and themes. Realistic art is best for things you want to feel as real to the human experience as possible. We’re not going to get an immersive view into the hell of trench combat, disease spreading through camps like wildfire, and fields of wounded and dying soldiers grappling with the point in following their orders in any war game, and especially not one starring Captain America. The “realism” of war games is about glorifying violence in a binary moral universe and pretending to be a hero, a fantasy. The idealism of superheroes should be depicted differently, in my view.
The technology behind it is incredibly impressive, though. It’s disappointing for me to see that kind of technical advancement used for something that feels so mediocre. I had a similar experience watching James Cameron’s Avatar. There’s not no merit to those movies, but they weren’t anything special. The plots are nonsense, the characters aren’t particularly great, and the action is average. The one thing it has is that it looks really good. They invented new technology to make those movies, and you can tell how it paid off. The whole movie is basically animated, but you’d never know to look at it. Except for how those double speed scenes in The Way of Water were so jarring, it’s hard to argue with the achievement there. That’s why I dislike those movies so much. All that work, all that innovation, all that effort into making something so breathtaking and immersive, and it’s used to make that? Wouldn’t it be easier to just film in a jungle? Could we use that technology to make anything more worthwhile? Something not realistic, that can use all that power to convince us the impossible is right at our fingertips?
All that comes back to some recurring ideas of mine. Digital technology is so new that we forget how little we know how to best and fully utilize it. Big studio productions are often heavily animated with computer graphics when they don’t need to be, which inflates the costs and overworks the animators. The final product suffers, too. The classic meme is to point out how good the dinosaurs looked in Jurassic Park, and it’s true that they hold up compared to many of today’s movies. The obvious reason being that they could focus their best efforts because they only had to animate the dinosaurs, not entire sets in three dimensions so the film could be reshot from completely different angles in post. Marvel Studios gets a lot of heat for that, and I recall when Iron Man came out and everyone was bragging about the practical effects. People get excited for that now. Practical effects, physical media, a better relationship with the natural world. We keep separating ourselves from our own experiences as physical animals as we obsess more and more over our “unique” spiritual nature and technological “superiority.” There’s a place for everything, but if you want a shot to look real, it helps if it is.
That’s why I like it better when animation technology is used to make animated films, rather than live action ones. We’re getting some great animation these days, too. Spider-Verse, Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish, TMNT Mutant Mayhem, these are all very top tier films. The technological advancement at Sony Pictures is really impressive, and the aesthetic of those Spider-Man movies is carrying over into a great new generation of movies. Both TMNT and Puss-in-Boots took that mixed media look and went in their own directions with it, to great effect. I didn’t see Wish, but I recognize the style in the trailer. And all those films were amazing on every other account, too. I think part of it is that, unlike how many big studio films are made these days, you have to have specific artistic vision for every shot in animation. By nature of the medium, you have to plan it all out from the start; you can’t just film it from every angle with an array of cameras and play around with the CG environment. Now is a really great time for animation. Knowing how good the movies have been lately, I was kinda surprised that Miyazaki won the Oscar. I mean, it’s Miyazaki, I don’t doubt he earned it, but also did you see Across the Spider-Verse and TMNT? I should see The Boy and the Crane; I meant to, and I missed it in theatres.
Knowing what our technology is currently capable of, I’d like to see that incredible potential be used to make much more diverse art. I have to imagine that the Unreal Engine, or similar tech, would be able to make something incredibly immersive and beautiful if it were directed at an unrealistic aesthetic. Get it? Anyway, yeah, we should be making movies realistic with practical effects rather than with toxic method actors, and video games should look like games instead of movies. Art education needs a serious rebirth in this country.
Weekly Thoughts 3/23/24
Life in the Gutters 