The decline of Visual Effects in Cinema

Lately it feels like we have seen a decline in quality when it comes to visual effects. We're going to look into it and see if there is a reason.

We could go way back into the history of Hollywood effects if we like, but I prefer to stick with what I know, and so our focus here will begin in the 80's when CGI first began to find its way into mainstream cinema.

In 1993 Steven Spielberg created what might be, in my humble opinion, a visual masterpiece. Jurassic Park took the idea of Computer Generated Imagery and amped it to 11. Watching dinosaurs walk across the silver screen and looking as real as any creatures we had ever witnessed in cinema was amazing, and we knew the industry would be changed forever... and it was! For a while we started to witness a rise in Computer generated effects.

We can watch the timeline of CGI’s progress starting in 1985 with  Young Sherlock Holmes which gave us our first fully CGI character, the Stained Glass Knight! It was crude, but for the time it was also wonderful! We then moved on to films like the Abyss, 1989, and Terminator 2, 1991, but all of those creations were of non-living, breathing creatures. Jurassic Park gave us dinosaurs!

1997 Starship Troopers saw giant bugs and massive battles. It was stunning to watch soldiers go up against huge creatures that felt real! Then in 2002 Peter Jackson and WETA delivered to us Lord of the Rings, creating dozens of CG characters and immersive battle scenes. 2009 we were taken to the world of Pandora in the film Avatar and we watched in amazement in 2008 as Iron Man walked out of a cave and into cinema history. It was beginning to look like CGI would soon become unrecognizable from real life and then… everything changed.

 I suppose it isn’t fair to say EVERYTHING changed. There are still amazing effects in Hollywood, but while blockbuster films saw their budgets growing, the audience began to see a noticeable decline in the quality of our visual effects. Let me use a few modern films to give reference. Black Panther, released in 2018 and made on a budget of $200 million! Yes, the story was great, and some of the effects were solid but then we had the train fight sequence where Black Panther and Killmonger looked like cartoon characters. Why? What happened?

How about another $200 Million dollar film, Wonder Woman 1984 from 2020? The fight scene with Cheetah was ridiculous. The Flash, 2023, $220 Million and numerous poor effect scenes scattered from the opening sequence through the climactic battle. Recently we had Borderlands, $150 Million dollar movie with effects so bad I took to comparing them with the 1980 B-Movie Flash Gordon which was made for about $130 million less!

So what is the issue? Where are things falling short? There is actually a very simple explanation. It isn’t money (not just money  anyway) it is time! When these films are being produced the studios are farming out the effects shots to various companies. The effects companies will bid on the work and, since they are competing with a number of other Special Effects houses, they inevitably under bid to try and win the job (yes I know it sounds like it’s money but trust me, there’s more). Now they have the job, but it comes with stipulations, and those stipulations are usually time. The studios want the effects fast, and they want them cheap!

When I was in college for Audio/Visual production we had a saying: “Fast, Good, Cheap! You can have two, but never all three”! Studios want them fast and they want them cheap and because of that the VFX artists are either not given the time, or not given the funds, needed to fully render the shots. Studio execs don’t care if all of the characters in Flashes Time Void look cartoony because, historically, their films are making money… or they were anyway.

Effects artists are getting tired of catching the blame and they are starting to speak out, and audiences, well audiences are hitting their threshold as well. It is unacceptable that a film should exist with a $150, $200, sometimes even $300 plus million dollar budget, and the effects come out looking like something created on a Windows 95 Machine. Again, I go back to Jurassic Park, a film with a $63 million dollar budget, where the special effects were treated as an important piece of the storytelling. That filmed went on to gross over a Billion dollars worldwide! Pair it to the more recent Jurassic World films, which by todays standards look decent, but stacked up against their 93 predecessor? No comparison , 93 wins.

Maybe it’s time we drop the budgets back down a few million and return to the time when less money lead to ingenuity. Let’s stop trying to push movies out as fast as possible and instead give the VFX Artists (because they are artists) the time they need to create their Opus!