#deaging cgi... but.

[mcbitchtits]

the most horrifying part of alien romulus is the fucking facial cgi (as always)

pretty fantastic movie otherwise though, excellent horror. more in line with the original alien than any of its sequels, although it does feel like a lot of the beats are also like "DO YOU REMEMBER ALIEN (1986)??? see what we did there?!"

the writing starts off strong with what felt to me personally like a very interesting approach to, you know, the horrors of capitalism and mining (poverty, dead parents, teen pregnancies, trapped by the remoteness of the environment, company towns and company stores), and it does a fair number of interesting things contrasting that to the parts in orbit (gravity fields, etc.) and, frankly, some absolutely fantastic horror visuals that make you feel like they are really innovating with both creature design as well as like they maybe used to work in halloween haunt mazes? very... personal shots? which i appreciate because i feel like covenant et al were more cinematic, which was fine, but also less horrifying in some ways. the acting was pretty good.

however the facial cgi for [spoiler character] was fucking terrible! this has been my #1 complaint about cgi for going on decades now and i have to be honest, this was some of the ugliest finished work i have ever seen. textures not mapping cleanly, form distention with animation, just real shit work. dunno if it's lack of budget or a bad art/animation director or the ever-present crunch because SFX is ununionized, but jesus fucking christ i hate this shit. it was bad in I, Robot and it was slightly less bad in Tron Legacy and it sucked all over again in Rogue One and The Mandalorian and Dial of Destiny! learn some fucking lessons from animators and rediscover the uncanny valley!!! watch jaws and spend a metric asston of time considering why we see so little of the shark! APPLY THE LESSON

(or, like, you've already got a half-destroyed character, just lean into it and make their mouth mechanics destroyed by acid or something. or make it look even more unnatural on purpose! it's a horror film! there are a lot of solutions and bad cgi is the worst one always!)

anyway i just really DO appreciate any time the alien sequels really dig into the birth/body horror. it's good! more of them should be better at it! fuck off james cameron! (sorry had to get that dig in there) (also, i mean, specifically, all the growth and rupturing and body-breaking, and to a lesser extent all the giger-styled vulvas etc; the actual uh babies and so forth are less interesting to me from a horror perspective. definitely weird and unsettling but also a little slenderman-was-born-on-the-something-awful-forums, you know?)

also effective use of treating the facehuggers like spiders or tarantulas. underrated approach to reinterpreting their horror. (unfortunate time to have a fur gremlin running around the house.) what i liked most about this movie is it managed to take a lot of the existing horror elements of the alien franchise and make them feel fresh and new and horrifying in completely new ways. real good shit.

also i see you weyland-yutani "W" podships, i see you AD and props. go prod team

love the score also. felt almost williams-ish and kinda raidersesqe (in the ark horror sense) and i vibed with it severely

[rotteneldritchhorror]

hate to say it-- kinda love how this season was shot...

the interviews being shot like that is so incredibly funny, the jj breakdown scene/longshot is literally a cinematic masterpiece, hate to say it but the surrealism of the nighttime scenes being so badly set during "night" is kinda iconic to me, some of the hand-held moments, the zoomes-

this season is kinda fucked up (cough cough. *stares*) but tbh.... its definitely not my least favorite

[lastofthe20thcenturygirls]

they are letting shahrukh be old in movies bollywood is healing

[billcarden]

idgaf how old rami malek is Get his ass on set and put that mask on him right now. girl fuck you

[hourcat]

man. tron visuals just hit different

[parakeetpark]

Also I miss 2005 Mandy's hairstyle, they gave her a BOWL CUT ;;;;;;;;;;; But I'm glad she had a big role in the movie, I would've been pissed if it was just a cameo

Like I got to the credits and went OH Costas, my good friend Costas I forgot about you!!!

[whereserpentswalk]

Tolkien personally states that his elves were supposed to be what humanity would be like without original sin. However, in basically every version of the Abrahamic creation myth, wanting to wear clothing is a direct result of eating the fruit of knowledge. Meaning that for the worldbuilding, philosophy, and theology of Tolkien to make sense the elves would have to be naked unless they specifically had a reason not to be. However none of the works in the lotr cannon have properly portrayed elves this way. However, with the power of cgi, deaging technology, and labor rights violations, in an all new extended edition coming to Amazon Prime in 2025...

[monsterbisexual]

48 minutes in i finally get to see my girl‼️🩷💞💗💌💕

hmmm is my soul ready to watch the only saw movie i havent seen yet (x) or should i watch 3 cuz its next in rewatch order 🤔

[intermundia]

could the anakin deaging cgi be better? yes, absolutely. but i've also decided that he is a force ghost or hallucination or whatever, so he can be a little uncanny valley, as a treat. he almost looks like he's about to morph from his vaguely creepy angelic form into a demonic one, which imho would be great. i don't want ahsoka to be talking to the 'real' anakin in the force, i want her to be confronting some version of him in a vision, generated as a manifestation of dealing with her own issues with her past and having a padawan. i don't want 'actual' anakin to be involved at all, you know? so yes, make him a vaguely unsettling looking dream being, that's fine. just as long as he's not supposed to be real.

[spockvarietyhour]

about Star Trek reunification… I was heart broken to hear it used AI technology, but more research from the OTOY website says they actually had actors in a studio using physical prosthetics, and then digital alterations and AI were used in post to basically iron out the CGI so like—that’s cool, AI is good when used as a tool and not a replacement for artists but… it still feels wrong. Maybe just because society as a whole isn’t “there” yet for ethical use of AI (fresh off the heels too of Coca Cola’s latest sins)

Thoughts?

Yeah I skimmed it and the uncanny valley is real bad at points. I guess I'm glad Robin Curtis is back and that Shatner (in whatever capacity) and the Nimoy Estate EP'd this. I don't doubt good intent, but I was waiting for a second mouth to open on Kirk given the weirdness of the deaging.

Also, sure I guess go ahead and tie to Discovery. Why not.

[seriousfic]

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Might as well give this a shot. I'll liveblog at half an hour intervals, starting with the opening.

-It's not all bad, but it's pretty clear the magic is gone. Deaged Indy always lands somewhere between a Tintin character and that bit in Skyfall where Daniel Craig's head was pasted onto a stuntman's body. It doesn't help that the director tries to cover for the CGI by drowning the sequence in murky darkness.

-There's also a bad start-and-stop quality to the action that keeps it from ever seeming to kick into high gear. There'll be a brief burst of action, then Indy sneaks around for a bit, brief burst of action, EXPOSITION DUMP, Indy sneaking around a bit. So it doesn't feel like things are escalating, more like you're playing MGS and you manage to hide for thirty seconds so the alert is canceled and you go back to just wandering around. There's even a part where the guards pull an alarm and it only sounds in one part of the train--Indy's able to just mosey along through another boxcar. What's the point of that alarm? To tell everyone in a ten-foot radius that there's trouble?

-Credit, they actually come up with some good set-ups in this... Indy hotwires a car that is immediately boarded by Nazi higher-ups who think he's their driver and Indy is about to be hung when an Allied bomb lands in the middle of the room to take things from bad to worse (missed opportunity: he should've been standing on the stool when the bomb hits, taking out the floor, so he goes from out of the frying pan into the fire instead of from being strangled to being strangled). The problem is the pay-offs just aren't there. Indy doesn't come up with a clever way out of his problems, he just gets lucky. Hell, I'd settle for a decent quip like "No ticket!"

-Indy gets lucky so many times in this, to the point where you might think it's a superpower a la Longshot. Let's count 'em off.

The bomb kills all the Nazis who are hanging him.

The beam that he's being hung from breaks.

An AA gun on the train is hit by a bomb and goes haywire, taking out all the Nazis pursuing Indy.

Voller is knocked off the train by a signal post thing when he has Indy dead to rights.

A bomb knocks out the train track, crashing the treasure train in a way that leaves all the artifacts intact.

Indy does nothing to affect the outcome of any of these, he just has plot armor an inch thick.

-I know the opening of an Indy movie is a bit early for the supernatural to kick in, but there's a weird bit where the Nazis are after the Lance of Longinus, but it's both powerless and a fake. These are our antagonists? Indy could've stayed home and it would've changed nothing.

-And you have to compare this to the opening of Last Crusade, which was real people on a real set doing real stuff, as opposed to this, which is a CGI effect on a soundstage, not doing anything as memorable or original as River Phoenix did.

Speaking of good set-ups, you're saying this is a train full of looted historical treasures... why not have every train car have some crazy artifact inside it that complicates things? Like Indy runs through a boxcar and it's full of Greek statues and he has to avoid getting crushed by them and he knocks one over to squash a Nazi and one falls over and it breaks through the wall and he uses that in some way? Wouldn't that be tons of fun?

But this is just anemic 'running from the top of one boxcar to another boxcar' stuff. All the advances in special effects technology since Last Crusade came out and yet there's way less spectacle. Even the train derailing at the end is an anticlimax.

[just-a-randomperson]

You know what? I WILL spoil episode 4.

WE GOT CGI DEAGED HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN!!! LET'S GOOOOO!!!

[ripiah]

oop this video says everything i have to say about the ghoulish, deaged cgi freaks in star wars

[galaxythreads]

I guess none of y'all have seen the star wars shows? Where they used cgi on old man mark hamill instead of getting a younger actor to play luke in the mandalorian

I have, actually! They also did that in Captain Marvel to a few of the actors (coulson and fury specifically). It's easier to make someone look old with makeup than it is to deage them. Software can do that, but it's still a really complex, expensive process. I think it probably would have been better to hire a younger actor for Luke, but that's just me. I think Disney got a little bit burned when they tried to do that in Solo with Han and people hated it. I thought Han's actor was fine, but people are weird and nostalgia is strong. They did that on Anakin's actor too, right? In Ahsoka?

The unfortunate thing about Disney recently is that they keep trying to continue stories of live action characters that are in their 20s from 10-20 years ago, but they really, really like their original cast. it does create a disconnect between the audience and the character when the character is supposed to be like 22 and the actor is 40+, or, in Luke's case, 70.

22 year olds look like they're 15. I'm 20 and I got mistaken for a 9th grader a few weeks ago.

I personally think we should just find new characters to tell stories about instead of constantly rehashing old ones, but that's just me.

[gracelyns]

ugh why didn't they bring back brock kelly to play dean in the flashback in 10x02 instead of cgi-deaging jensen that never looks good

[cinesludge]

Movie #11 of 2024: Arthur the King

So I got one of those AMC movie pass things as a gift, and AMC apparently does a thing where they show a movie that's not quite officially out yet but they don't tell you what it will be ahead of time. It's a mystery!

That's how I ended up watching a CGI dog out act Mark Wahlberg, which isn't surprising and this is definitely not a movie I would ever willingly watch.

In fact, looking at the poster, I'm pretty sure this is the exact same design for that Harrison Ford dog movie that came out in 2020. Did I ever tell you I was the finishing editor on promotional dog food spots for that movie? True exciting Hollywood story.

Uhh what were we talking about again? Oh right, Arthur the King I guess is fine and the dog isn't always CGI, but the facial expressions and noises it makes are definitely all super deep fake generative AI deageing-filter Irishman Al Pacino young face style.

It's only 90 minutes which is and I guess it is kinda cool that it's based on a true story which plays out during the end credits. What are the odds I pull the latest dog movie for mystery cinema? It's dumb and you'll think about your dead dog who died of a rare kidney cancer and almost cry the whole time, which is a very common thing that could happen to anyone watching this cheesy movie and not specifically me.