I think Cameron doesn't quite get that his guerrilla style film making is what gives his earlier movies a lot of their charm. Most of what he accomplished wasn't as easy as it is now when you can just have an idea, and have a CGI artist realize it no matter the scale. If there was an idea, you had to solve the puzzle of how to realize it, and sometimes that called for in-camera trickery. It also made you plan shots around practical effects, and some of those shots are iconic parts of cinema history. Mirrors, reverse motion or simply turning the camera upside down. When I watched those old movies I constantly had the question "How did they do that?" in my head. Nowadays, I don't have that question, because the answer is always CGI.
This is why I try to avoid doing photography effects in Photoshop after the fact rather than as part of the photo. Some of the most amazing images out there are photoshop creations, which doesn't take away from the beauty of them, but for me, there's an added layer of awe when something seemingly impossible is pulled off in reality and not "faked" in a computer and I get fun out of pushing myself to come up with ways to do certain things.
I almost feel like filmmakers should forget they have CGI, think about things they want to do, how they would achieve them practically, then turn to their CGI artists and say, go render this with your computers. Perhaps this could result in films feeling of the quality of practical days while being able to execute things more efficiently with technology, best of both worlds.
Like that now infamous stunt in T1 where the Terminator is on the hood of the car and the brick wall is moving not the vehicle.
It?s not that Cameron has forgotten what he learned from his low budget days it?s that practical filmmaking is surpassing cgi in cost.
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It's so crazy that at one time, it seemed like CGI was way too expensive and thus you had films like Jurassic Park still relying heavily on practical animatronics compared to today where Jurassic World is 100% CGI. Even the most mundane shots are done with CGI because of the burdens of doing them practical. Rambo Last Blood has CGI shots of driving because rigging to a car and everything is too costly vs parking a car on a green screen stage and shooting that.
I don't think CGI is a bad tool, I just feel that filmmakers are becoming so caught up in it's abilities and seeming limitlessness that they're losing a storytelling quality that practical films forced, and it's a shame because I think there's room for both sides to work together and deliver something special.
While a fair argument can be made for the lack of screen time and visibility, I loved that the Godzilla 2014 CGI treated the monsters like men in suits with their movement despite being CGI that could do anything and I think it led to a more realistic looking CGI creature vs CGI animals whose movements defy reality and look fake.
As a child I found the T1 endoskeleton scary, or at least I was in fear for the characters as it was going after them. Even in that state and with it limping along I felt like they were outmatched, it couldn't seem to be killed whereas Reese was by now a wreck. So perhaps the scariness was as much in the vulnerability of the heroes.
Now there doesn't appear to be any vulnerability in the heroes. Grace seems to be handling this Terminator pretty damn well, beating it senseless in at least 3 different encounters from what I can tell. As if she wasn't enough in comes Sarah Connor kicking its ass too. Seems like they don't even need Arnie but he's there anyway so there's 3 protectors. I'm more concerned for the villain. Is he going to be OK?
I see that Mr H chap on youtube has been making the same observation.
Yes, they want Sarah Connor to have a cool entrance and be a total badass, but they did that at the cost of the main villain's credibility. It's poor story telling, and a lack of understanding of how to make an effective badass protagonist. The one thing you don't do is undercut the main threat or villain. It's like in the beginning of Man of Steel, they have Crowe beat up the biggest villain in a hand to hand fight scene in the first 15 minutes of the film.
Imagine if the T 1000 got easily beat up by the T 800 during their first encounter in the mall? The outdated uncle Bob easily dispatches the T 1000, and does so by dropping one liners to look awesome and totally cool!! That would be bad. Well, jus from looking at the trailer we know the new villain is outmatch and that's before they even get Arnold's help.
In this agenda pushing world, it seems like filmmakers are getting too lost in the point they're trying to make and throwing it at the audience out the gate rather than realizing you can take the entire course of the movie to get there. Sarah Connor is a scared victim on the run at the start of T1 and at the end, is a badass who took out the machine which can't be stopped. T2 introduced her as a broken woman struggling to cope with the knowledge she has of the future, and they slowly build up her badassery a bit at a time culminating in a barrage of shotgun hits to the T-1000 in the steel mill before the gun jams.
In all cases, she went through hell along the way and wasn't a dominant force from the first shot on screen. If anything, Halloween 2018 is a better film at depicting a strong woman without showing off her strengths until almost the end of the film when you fully realize how strong and in control she was. Dark Fate feels like it was made by Disney to push a notion upon the world and not to continue a level of storytelling established in the originals.
Perhaps part of it is that eventually you run out of ways to have a scary villain in this series because there's finite things you can do and at some point, we as an audience know they can be stopped, but I think there's room with clever writing to still be threatening anyway, but that's not where the focus is being put in the stories, the villain is becoming more of a plot device and nothing more and focus on everything aside from it.
