Should CGI be Banned

How do you solve a problem like Beowulf? The first known work of literature in the English language has been brought to the big screen a number of times in recent years, never entirely satisfactorily. On Friday, Robert Zemeckis' attempt to adapt the epic poem hits cinemas, and this time the hulking Geat (read Swedish) warrior of the title is depicted in the director's trademark motion capture CGI. Now I should point out before we begin that I have major, major issues with digital effects. I had to go through several months of counselling after witnessing the sight of Jabba the Hut digitally recreated and superimposed onto a previously deleted scene in the "updated" version of the first Star Wars film (I refuse to refer to it as A New Hope). And I haven't yet seen Elizabeth: The Golden Age, but plan to keep things that way after viewing the trailer, which features a Spanish Armada rendered completely devoid of grandeur and menace through the use of CGI. Frankly, I would happily see a blanket ban on all digital effects in film, tomorrow. Imagine if science fiction movie makers had to use their ingenuity again when depicting spaceships and monsters (as in the original Alien). We might witness a return to the practice of using scale models, such as those in the original Star Wars films, which were 100 times more realistic than their CGI equivalents in George Lucas' rubbish triptych of prequels. So it was with some trepidation that I attended a screening of Beowulf, particularly after reading some of the reviews of Zemeckis' previous outing to use the motion capture technique, The Polar Express (one critic referred to it as the Zombie Express because, he said, the process of rendering the actors' performances into CGI caused its stony-eyed characters to resemble denizens of Hades.) Beowulf, you'll be pleased to hear, is a vast improvement, and the use of a technology which creates an altered version of reality seems somehow appropriate for a story so entirely routed in fantasy. On the other hand, for a movie which features what should be appalling scenes of men having their heads bitten off and gently crunched by Grendel, perhaps the most hideous creature ever to be shown on the big screen, not to mention Angelina Jolie starkers, it somehow fails to really get the blood pumping. And I can't help feeling that's down to the fact that the use of CGI is less affecting than live film. If it's not real, why should we react to it as though it were? The argument is, of course that monsters like Grendel, and the dragon which appears later in Beowulf, could never be properly realised without digital effects. My response would be that there are ways around these things: shooting with models, puppets; from angles which fail to show the entire creature: there are many possibilities. Without wishing to hark back to Star Wars yet again, the original Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, which was just a gaping maw in the desert filled with horrible teeth, was far more terrifying than the dumb computer game monster which emerged from said orifice in the reworked version. What are your most hated CGI moments? And when do you think digital effects have been used successfully in film?