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I can't address this whole issue, but a lot of it is about suspension of disbelief, and how big of a suspension the movie is asking the audience to make. You can 'sell' Charlton Heston's stuntman in a wide shot, but imagine how much more impressive it would be if that wide zoomed instead of cutting to a big snarly closeup of the real actor?
I would not call this Harry Potter example a case of 'jumping the shark' because the movie is firmly in a fantasy world and isn't asking the audience to accept all the flying around as happening on a more realistic plane, as Children of Men did. If Harry Potter is flying around on a broomstick through Piccadilly in the next movie as the trailers suggested, it'll be that much harder for the CGI to be acceptable.

I kinda thought it passed that threshold during a sequence you raved would be a classic: the T-Rex fight in King Kong. It was so absurd, so defying of both physics and biology (a T-Rex is chomping at his arms and renders nothing more than mere flesh wounds...catching Ann no matter what...bad compositing of film and digital elements...).

That said, wasn't it silly watching CGI characters battling in LoTR? Those where as much video game movies as I've ever seen. Same with the two Matrix sequels.

But this is generational. You or I might find The Road Warrior visceral because having seen it new, we still have the memory of that rush. But I'm pretty sure somebody raised on the trajectory of the past 20 years is going to look at it as antiquated. Just as I've always had difficulty watching movies pre-mid-'50s.

I don;t think it's entirely generational Mutiny, my 25 yr old horror-sci-fi freak gaming brother agrees with me that Island of Lost Souls and Bride of Frankenstein are two of the best entertaining movies ever made. SOme CGI-ed movies he loves some he Hated (like Hulk and King Kong).

My Bro loved Sin City which had much of the Unreal about it but was still entertaining (despite Dpo's dislike of it, I defend it), and I'm sure he'll love "300".

I think it comes down more to do you like a good story more than good effects--some young gamers may only be there for the Tech! But judging from the popularity of The Notebook with the youngsters, there still is room for movie sans CGI for the young.

I hate CGI where it is totally non-realistic, but in some testosterone-motivated movies it can be fun if it isn;t completely dumbed down to the IQ of 10.

King Kong is such a great example. At least with old fashioned special FX, within degress, the character can only do what a real human could do.

Now with CGI, ALL characters are superheroes. Tom Cruise can get blown off a train and into a helicopter and live and Naomi Watts can suffer the amount of physical shock and trauma that would snap most people's necks in seconds but survive it for 3 hours and still look like a million bucks.

It's made films even less human and more silly.

Just saying 'its fantasy' doesn't cut it. What makes the best fantasy work is having it somewhat rooted in reality and twising that reaity. When even the laws of physics are changed, it all becomes ludicrous.

I notice rear-projection most of the times I see it. I guess it's because I didn't receive that training not to notice.

Are we calling these movies "video game movies" because they have so much CG? That's a very recent development in video games, and that's something that should be kept in mind. No one thinks Pac-Man or Space Invaders when you say "video game movie." It's the games in the last few years, which have plausibly real-world graphics that we're comparing to. And video game graphics aren't close in their realism to what can be done in movies. There are no video games that look like an SW prequel, or LOTR, or Matrix. There isn't enough rendering power to do it.

I think that term has to apply to more than just the graphics. I think Children of Men has definite video game elements, not because of the graphics, but in the viewer's perspective in the camp battle sequence. You follow Clive Owen as though you're in a first-person shooter game. Movies are also criticized as being like video games for having shallow stories, more spectacle than plot, or the like, which traits are taken as characteristic of video games.

You can say something is a "video game movie," but if all you mean by that is shorthand for "it has lots of CG," it doesn't wash.

"King Kong" sucked, CG, story, everything.

300 isn't involving as an action epic because it's as impersonal as the graphic novel on which it's based. And it exists in a kind of fever dream version of Ancient Greece, so the artificiality of the violence wasn't so much distracting as expected. This is idealized, teenage boy stuff; Miller's even said his book was inspired by his childhood memory of 300 SPARTANS. So it's appropriate that the film resembles today's dominant media for that age group.

As for using CG in conventional live-action movies, I think Michael Bay does a masterful job of incorporating digital elements into his practically staged action sequences (the freeway chase in BAD BOYS II is a classic in that regard), though I can certainly enjoy CG overkill as self-parody in something as deliriously retarded as TORQUE. But if you're trying to sell me on actual peril, there's no substitute for real shit being smashed up by real stuntmen, which is why I can't wait for DEATH PROOF.

I think 300 gets such a resounding smack with the videogame label because the histrionics and tropes of the thing (every line is yelled and action tries to mimic and outdo gladiator/saving private ryan, like every combat based video game has attempted since those movies hit) are more like a videogame genre than like any film genre.

And it doesn't help that the whole thing has a veneer of platiccy malleable flesh that looks subtly unreal and feels completely wrong to most people looking at it. Same thing with the shots of plastic cape n suit Superman from last year, (and also the way his flesh was surreally textured, imo).

Sin City was clearly a comic book genre, and had that stylization going for it, it never attempted to look real and had the advantage of black and white to play with. 300 doesn't come across as a comic book, it comes across as a videogame because it lands squarely in the midst of where many popular videogames have been exploring ad infinitum (how many enemies can one person or one small group kill and still win).

Jeremy - I haven't read 300: The Graphic Novel, but my tale on Sin City was that the same panels recreated on a movie screen didn't have as much power because the experience of reading - which includes more imagination than seeing a film, even with a comic book - is just different.

Images that just don't work in the literal medium of movies - made more literal by effects that are so close to "real" - can be inspiring in a book or in a painting.

For some reason, I think of that shot from the trailer of The Queen, where she turns to camera and stops. It always gets an audience laugh because Mirren and Frears understand that it is the head turn and the head locking into that very familiar view of Elizabeth makes it something more than the sum of its parts. That is cinema, as simple as it is. And the picture of her looking at you is something else altogether.

I think Nicol nailed it. There's a difference between a film grounded in reality (where people are compelled by the laws of nature to act a certain way) and those which arepure fantasy. 300, though based on an historical event, is quite obviously a fantasy and, as a result, the "video game" aspects of the movie are easier to take. Same with Sin City or Star Wars.

You start getting into trouble with films like King Kong and Spider Man. Has anyone seen the new Spider Man 3 clip online? The action scenes fall into the same "video game" trap as Star Wars or Sin City, but the realism of the setting forces the scenes to stretch credibility.

Though I haven't seen 300 yet, I've definitely noticed movies recently that actually have stories paced like videogames. Van Helsing, for example, wasn't just laden with CG, but the story seemed to be patterned not in traditional 3-act structure, but like a series of levels of increasing difficulty, each of which culminates in facing a boss or lethal puzzle of some kind. Same with Sky Captain.

Resident Evil and Silent Hill are plotted like puzzle games -- characters begin not knowing anything, fight monsters, plot hints are slowly revealed, then a ton of exposition is laid on you in preparation for the final level -- which is no surprise since they're directly based on such.

From what I've seen of 300 so far -- and I haven't read the comic -- it sounds like it does follow a videogame format, with progressively harder "bosses" and missions. But it also looks like the CG is way better than in Gladiator (anyone remember those flocks of birds?)

The thing about CGI is, except when used subtly (like in, say, Gump), it makes live action films look like cartoons, and some us just don't give a fuck about cartoons and don't consider them to be the same kind of filmmaking that we grew up on and love.

There is no need for suspension of disbelief in cartoons/films with so much CGI...what's to believe about a cartoon? I for one find that kind of filmmaking laborious at best. Which is why a big cartoon like Lord of the Rings is beyond juvenile and ponderous to so many, while fanboys everywhere think it's the holy grail of storytelling.

But there's no question that the video game/big CGI film analogy has a ton of validity. Just take a look at the lines that'll be outside the 300 - it'll be filled with the same crowd that makes video games so popular.

"Which is why a big cartoon like Lord of the Rings is beyond juvenile and ponderous to so many, while fanboys everywhere think it's the holy grail of storytelling."

$3 billion worldwide boxoffice, 30 Oscar nominations and 17 wins. Looks like the "many" people who hate the films are on the wrong side of history.

"Looks like the 'many' people who hate the films are on the wrong side of history."

I must have missed that day in grad school where they taught us that history has sides.

In the case of 300, it REALLY looks like a videogame. The blood, more often than not, looks like it came directly out of EA’s Fight Night. The sepia blur is classic videogame. And the endless s close-ups are basics of a medium that has hard time recreating realistic human movement. -- D.P.

It's funny to me that you would use Fight Night as your video game reference point, as that series is widely hailed as one that continues to push the envelope in terms of graphical output for video game consoles. Just the other day, I was playing Fight Night Round 3 on the Xbox 360, and my girlfriend commented on how "real" the graphics looked.

Of course, it's all relative. Video games have always been fake, while films are based in reality. It's simply interesting to me that these lines are being blurred these days -- sometimes intentionally (as in Sin City) and other times, unintentionally (Attack of the Clones comes to mind).

I also appreciate the fact that Jurassic Park was brough up first and foremost as an example of a film where the CGI STILL stands up. I mention this on a quarterly basis when chatting with film school buddies, family, etc. I simply cannot comprehend why a film that came out at the outset of the CGI lifecycle manages to best almost every film that comes out today. I honestly wish I had devoted a research paper to this subject while I was still in school so I could've justified spending time watching a ton of CGI-filled flicks to get to the bottom of this.

Those dinos from the original Jurassic Park get me every single time...

Possibly because Jurassic Park doesn't rely 100% on CGI, but integrates it with animatronics.

The times I find CGI to be distracting is when it's out of context with the film and the "world" it has established. If I buy the setting, the story and the characters, I also buy the effects it utilizes, be they CGI, animatronics, stop-motion, puppetry or whatever else you might throw out there.

I find the effects in the original King Kong to be just as good as they are in the latest incarnation. They work for the movie as it was made. I find the car chase in "the French Connection" to be much more thrilling and dynamic than the one in Bad Boys II. It has nothing to do with how many flips the car make, or if they are real cars or CGI cars. As I said earlier, it has everything to do with me "buying" the premise and the film itself (and of course that the film adheres to its own rules).

I contend that that is the case with "300", for my tastes at least. A story of over-the-top superheroics with mythic overtones works superbly in a hyper-stylized "painterly" (NOT videogame) film, where every frame looks like a wall mural re-telling the story (and it seems to be catching on...if I'm not mistaken, this is the direction Zemeckis is going in with "Beowulf")

Equating all CGI (as DP is not doing, let me emphasize, but it is very common nonetheless) with "videogames" is in my mind as erroneous, shallow as it is dimwitted.

"I must have missed that day in grad school where they taught us that history has sides."

That's because it was in High School, AP European History:

"History is written by the victors." - Winston Churchill

Agreed that Jurassic Park's work still holds up. It really does look amazing still.

Somebody up there mentioned that movies are staged by computer games these days, and I think that is indeed true. Same goes for a lot of animated films. It's like you can imagine each individual scene in the movie as being a sequence in the game that can easily be sold to 13-year-old boys whose parents won't let them buy the games the big boys are playing.

The reason 300 looks like a computer game is because it's all CG. The background and everything. It has that pixelated look (I'm only judging from the trailer and ads I've seen). Same goes for movies where entire sets are just made from CGI.

I think I play a decent amount of video games. And not a single damned one of them looks as lush and gorgeous as 300 as does. "video game" movie, "comic book" movie...all i see is art. (commercial art, sure, but art nonetheless).

Has anyone visited Rotten Tomatoes for 300? Any negative (or "rotten") review is being hit with DOZENS of angry comments from pissed-off nerds. Is this the usual case there? Really, people feel this STRONGLY about... 300???? I'm not a comic or graphic novel reader, so I'll be the first to admit I'm not really familiar with it, but from the urgency and anger of these "fans" (who again, HAVEN'T SEEN IT), you'd think this was beyond Tolkein and Lucas put together.

Anyway, check it out for a quick laugh.

I remember Dave being bombarded with fanboy angst after his Superman Returns review popped up.

But, let us remember, 300 was in the IMDb Top 250 before it was even released! That's how feverish the fanboys are.

As I said in the other thread, the IMDB top 250 thing proves the users there are stupider than the ones at RT, but given the Inquisitional reaction to negative reviews at RT, it's a very close run thing.

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