Punches and Pixels

The increase in VFX work over the 21st century has been staggering. As computers grow more powerful, CGI has gone from a centerpiece effect (e.g. the liquid-metal of the T-1000 in T2, the bullet-time of The Matrix) to a defining feature of the modern blockbuster. Part of the reason for a superhero boom is that there was no consistent way to make superpowers feel realistic. There were plans for adapting Spider-Man long before he arrived on the big screen in 2002, but the technology probably wasn’t ready to catch-up to doing whatever a spider can until it figured out digital stunt doubles. When Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was released in 2001, people bemoaned the look of the Uncanny Valley, but now motion-capture, particular with faces, has leaped over that hurdle to where we can go all the way to face replacement if we need to. It’s not always perfect (especially if we know what an actor is supposed to look like), but we can see how rapidly the technology has advanced.

Back in 2014, critic and journalist Drew McWeeny wrote an article for HitFix about “the age of casual magic.” The gist of the article is that because we now expect that VFX artists can do anything, we’re no longer wowed by the spectacle they provide. For the average audience member, all CGI is basically the same because there’s so much of it and we don’t know the work that went into it. I remember when I visited Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) for Battleship in 2012, we discussed how these water effects were different from previous films using water, and while I love that kind of detail, I imagined most people don’t really pay it much mind.

CGI has also now become a crutch for filmmakers where it takes power away from directors who want something specific and into the hands of studios who believe they can fix anything in post. In a previous Substack, I revealed how much I enjoyed that Cocaine Bear was largely people in the same space and while there was a signature effect (the titular bear on cocaine), the film rested largely on real spaces and real people. But in a CGI landscape, you’re almost working in the medium of animation, and if something isn’t testing well, the studio can demand that your house go back and come up with something new. VFX go from something meant to awe the audience with technical wizardry into a setting like any other and, especially when it comes to superhero movies, the studio attempts to overwhelm the audience rather than surprise them. Sure, there are exceptions like Avatar: The Way of Water, but as I’ve noted previously, most directors don’t get over a decade and a blank check to do whatever they want to make the VFX just right.

And yet now it feels like in this age of casual magic, the pendulum may start to swing back where the way to stand out isn’t by having the most cutting-edge VFX, but by using VFX as a supporting element to stunt choreography. The studios may not like it because to them, anyone can manage VFX (they can’t, but clearly that’s what studios believe) but there are only a handful of stunt coordinators and directors who know how to capture death-defying stunts and gorgeously choreographed action scenes. Even though they’re “old school”, it feels like these films are winning the day because when people go to the theater, they want to see something unique, not more CGI mayhem.

John Wick vs. Shazam

Last week, I saw two new March releases. The first was John Wick: Chapter 4 and the following night I saw Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Neither has an amazing story or rich characters; the narrative and the people that inhabit it exist mainly as a skeleton to hang set pieces on. But if your goal is spectacle—to wow your audience with the kind of action they’re not going to get in a typical TV show or a streamer where, even if someone makes a well-constructed action flick (Hulu’s The Princess comes to mind), it gets buried alongside all the other streaming content—then you should break from the norm, and the norm has become CGI overload.

If you look at the John Wick series, they became hits because directors and former stuntmen/coordinators Chad Stahleski and David Leitch (with Stahleski directing all the sequels solo and Leitch going on to helm blockbusters like Hobbs & Shaw and Deadpool 2) know how to make incredible action. These are not plot-heavy films. There’s a lot of fascinating world building, but the story’s are momentum machines to push assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) into different environments where he will kill lots and lots of people in a stylish manner. It’s not even that Wick is a rich, interesting character. He simply has clear motives and Reeves carries enough inherent charisma that he doesn’t have to give a flashy performance. The flash is all in his movements and convincingly pulling off as many stunts as he can (I assume Reeves has a stunt double but it’s clear he’s also doing a lot of the stunt-work since they’re not cutting around him).

The focus on thoughtful stunt-work that’s cleanly choreographed and well shot has powered the Wick films to increasing success. The first film cost $20 million and made $86 million; the sequel made $174 million worldwide; and the third film cost $74 million but pulled in $328 million. Lionsgate backed an idea that wasn’t based on a pre-existing property, trusted their directors, and now they have one of the biggest franchise success stories of the last decade. They gave the audience something they weren’t seeing in the rest of the action landscape, and audiences responded not because the studio had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on VFX, but because these filmmakers delivered a higher quality experience that couldn’t be easily emulated.

Then there’s Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which serves as a prime example of everything wrong with current superhero movies. While I don’t want to romanticize the genre’s past (there were some rough outings in the mid-2000s after the success of X-Men and Spider-Man), Marvel has set a template that, on a macro level, simply plays as jokes, self-awareness, and CGI destruction. It’s almost plug-and-play at this point, and so the conflict in something like Shazam! Fury of the Gods loses what made the first movie work (a kid playing with superpowers and embracing his new family) to just a rapid joke-machine punctuated with CGI-filled action scenes. The most personality there is from director David F. Sandberg are some mythical beasts that emerge in the third act, which feels like the smallest stamp possible, especially when you consider that it leads to a bit of record-scratch product placement (it may be that the scene was intended to play as a joke, but if so, the joke falls painfully flat).

It feels like audiences are growing wary of this kind of empty spectacle. It’s not that they think CGI is inherently bad (they clearly went nuts for Avatar: The Way of Water), but there’s only so many movies you can see where superheroes fire off self-aware one-liners and then get into big CGI punching battles where everything feels weightless. It’s not even that the superhero “genre” has started to irk audiences as much as the way it’s being presented. When they all start to blend together and have no stakes, then there’s not a lot of reason to head out to the theater when you can wait six weeks and see it on streaming.

Perhaps I’m being naive when I argue that quality wins out, but look at the two biggest box office success stories of last year: one was Avatar: The Way of Water, which, regardless of how I feel about it, was not some slapdash CGI overload but James Cameron working to push the technological envelope to where the experience wouldn’t be more of the same. Second place went to Top Gun: Maverick, which blended practical effects and CGI to put you in the cockpit of a fighter jet, an experience you couldn’t get from any other movie. That’s not to say that every box office success is an expression of quality, but the current landscape shows audiences wanting something different when they go to the theater.

Films like John Wick: Chapter 4 are hard to make. You can’t just hire a bunch of VFX houses, pay them as little as possible and call it a day. You need to have an army of well-trained stunt people who can execute choreography efficiently and brilliantly. The flip side is that the audience will appreciate it. I don’t know how John Wick: Chapter 4 will perform this weekend, but I’m willing to bet it will be better than Shazam! Fury of the Gods.