20th Century or 21st Century films?

[Harpo]

Now that the 21st Century is a teenager, let's compare the sci-fi & fantasy films of the 21st Century with those of the 20th Century.

Are things better these days? Is the current fad for 3D just a passing fad like in the 1950s, or will it prevail in the longer term?
Do we prefer the Star Wars trilogy & Ray Harryhausen over the Lord Of The Rings trilogy & Joe Letteri? Peter Jackson's Kong or Merian C Cooper's Kong?

Would you rather watch reruns of the old black & white classics,or do you prefer do get excited at the prospect of the next CGI-filled retinafest from one of the modern great directors?

 

[steve12553]

I purchased and will watch the Hobbit some time in the next couple of weeks when I have time to dedicate to it properly. (I will also watch it in 3D). This may improve my opinion of 21st century films. My biggest fear of this one is my senses being overwhelmed. There is a limit to how much action and special effect movement I can watch before I can no longer see or follow anything. Maybe that fact that I live 47 years in the last century and was raised on the films I consider classics like Forbidden Planet and the Harryhausen films and other from that era. I've only been impressed with a few films out of this century. I did thoroughly enjoy Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I thought his King Kong was much more like a video game than a film. It pushed way past my level of "suspension of disbelief". The girl staying conscious and aware during the trip to Kong's lair instead of fainting from fear or (more likely) dying from multiple broken bones from being handled and thrown around. So many of the newer film try to dazzle the audience with new and better special effects instead of impressing their audience with a good story and an appropriate amount of effect shots. the idea of too much does exist.

 

[Foxbat]

I'm definitely a child of the 20th century and it's Harryhausen (and his original mentor Willis O'Brien) over CGI for me. I'd rather spend my time watching old black and white classics than 3D 'extravaganzas'.

Sure there have been very good films in the 21st century and there was some absolute tripe from the previous century, but the 20th is the one that gave me the love of cinema and that is an absolute that can never be changed by something as trivial as the movement of time.

 

[Mr Fraaz]

Star Wars - best of the 20th century.
LotR - best of the 21st.

I really couldn't compare them. But unless personal memories and nostalgia is involved, I generally tend to like modern films better.

When I saw The Hobbit I was expecting to be annoyed by the 3D glasses, but I forgot them after a while. I can't say that they added all that much to the experience though.

 

[Gordian Knot]

It's kinda hard to compare a century with a decade. The overall trend this century, though, is disturbing. With the growth of power computing allowing movie makers to put just about anything on the screen, there has been two terrible resulting problems.

The first is that, far as I can see, the 3D computer modeling people don't have any classical training in style or design. There has been an explosion of the most hideous designs. Back when building a spaceship, for example, was from physical materials, there was a certain limitation that made ships look more real.

With 3D modeling, just because any design can be made, that doesn't mean it should be made.

Compare the stunningly beautiful, swept back flowing design of the Star Trek the Motion Picture Enterprise with the abomination of the 2009 reboot. The latter is a travesty of mismatching pieces. The saucer, the engineering hull and the nacelles are all completely different styles and sizes, and none of them go with the others.

The other major problem for me is the more-is-always-better kind of thinking. Again, just because you can show two armies of thousands of warriors clashing together, that doesn't make for better battle scenes. When they were limited to actual people, the battles were more personal, more in your face and thus much more intense.

Just to mention one example, the massive battles in Troy couldn't hold a candle to the fight to the death between Achilles and Hector.

 

[Steve Jordan]

It's kinda hard to compare a century with a decade. The overall trend this century, though, is disturbing. With the growth of power computing allowing movie makers to put just about anything on the screen, there has been two terrible resulting problems.

The first is that, far as I can see, the 3D computer modeling people don't have any classical training in style or design. There has been an explosion of the most hideous designs. Back when building a spaceship, for example, was from physical materials, there was a certain limitation that made ships look more real.

Most new technologies are used wildly upon first being developed... until people figure out the most effective use of it, and "usage" becomes "art." We're still so early in the world of computer-generated imagery that we're seeing more of the "thousand ships" effects and not enough of, say, the computer work put into Jurassic Park... which, admittedly, had an over-the-top subject, but the filmmakers took pains to present the dinos realistically, to great effect.

Still, I have a hard time separating cinematography by the century line. As Jurassic Park indicates, we clearly had effective computer-generated imagery in 1993, and it still beats out similar work being done today, 20 years later (Ow! My back!). Dividing cinematic eras by an arbitrary year-mark is doing it an injustice, and ignoring the real elements that mark the end of one cinema era.

I would consider 3D to be probably the technology that will demark the next era in film; but to be honest, the present 3D movies, mostly 2D with post-production trickery, are akin to the early "talkie" films Modern Times or The Jolson Story: Groundbreaking, to be sure, but more novelty than the later resulting sound films. When 3D becomes truly immersive--which I think is still a good ways off--we'll be at the next stage in film development.

Until then, I really don't see a reason to separate the 20th and 21st century films for comparison.

 

[BetaWolf]

I really don't like mixing CGI and live action (or making it terribly obvious at least). It's like the wonky animation and live action thing that was done in the 80s and 90s. So one way or the other.

I'm very much for the twentieth century films. Other forms like 3d gaming is fine in the 21st. Original star wars over the pathetic prequels.

 

[Gumboot]

I really don't like mixing CGI and live action (or making it terribly obvious at least). It's like the wonky animation and live action thing that was done in the 80s and 90s. So one way or the other.

I'm very much for the twentieth century films. Other forms like 3d gaming is fine in the 21st. Original star wars over the pathetic prequels.

I'm with Steve Jordan. There's no really fair or productive way of comparing films divided by an arbitrary line dictated by our calendar, which has no bearing whatsoever on the development of cinema.

As rightly pointed out, the progression of cinema language has tended to follow a familiar pattern. When a new technology is implemented the initial films exploit the technology as a gimmick, often at the cost of other pre-established technologies and techniques. Film fans and critics alike decry the "death of cinema". As familiarity with the new techniques improves, and new technologies make the technique more versatile, gradually its use fades back into its rightful place as just another tool in the filmmaker's toolbox.

And the thing is, this can take decades. For twenty years after the invention of sound, people were declaring that sound ruined films, and that it was the worst thing that had ever happened. It wasn't really until the last 30 years or so, with the advent of digital surround sound, that audio has been able to achieve the same levels of sophistication and artistry as the images. It literally took half a century for the new technology to "bed in".

Right now we have, not one, not two, but three major new technologies in various early stages of application to cinema. CGI has been around a little while now, and is becoming more sophisticated, but there's still some of that "look we have CGI" stuff going on. But increasingly, the CGI work going into a film is so subtle no one but the filmmakers would even realise it. Removing power lines. Changing the sky. Crowd duplication. Not to mention the various other applications that people don't strictly think of as CGI. Every single film, even the lowest budget indie features, go through a post-production process called colour grading. Think of it like adjusting the brightness, contrast, colour balance, and so on, except on steroids. What they can actually do is phenomenal, and that's only possible due to hugely powerful image processing computers.

The second major technology, as already mentioned, is 3D. 3D has been attempted various times in the past, and has failed every time, never getting beyond the gimmick stage. The reason for this, I think, is mostly that the technology was so primitive that other artistic aspects of film were too severly compromised to achieve 3D, and resolutions to that problem were not able to be found. Now, thanks primarily to the other two technologies I'm discussing, filmmakers are finding work arounds pretty quickly. At first 3D could only be shot in studios, but then they developed ways to shoot 3D on location.

With The Hobbit you see another substantial advance in 3D technology, with the creation of sophisticated camera rigs allowing for an unprecedented level of control over camera movement and perceived image depth.

It's still very early days, but I think this time 3D is here to stay, and filmmakers seem to be getting their head around the technology far faster than they did with technologies like sound.

The third technology, which hasn't been mentioned, is digital cinema, and this is probably the thing which has most enabled and advanced the two technologies above.

In a very short space of time digital cinema has gone from the domain of wannabe hobbyist filmmakers to the preferred choice for some of the world's most celebrated cinematographers. In 20 yeas we've gone from awful standard definition interlaced video, suitable for nothing much beyond the 6 o'clock news, to the Arri Alexa which out performs Super35 film on many key points.

The Hobbit was shot on a digital camera called the RED Epic, in pairs, to create the stereoscopic effect of 3D. Because of the small size and relative cheapness of the cameras, they had something like 65, able to have separate camera pairs for various different unique rigs.

Even fifteen years ago, when they were preparing to shoot the LOTR films, that would have been impossible. LOTR was shot on Arri 435s - a Super35 film camera. I'd be surprised if there's 65 of them in the entire southern hemisphere, and they're worth a couple of million dollars each.

For me, what's really exciting is that in 10 or 20 years, these three technologies would have stopped being gimmicky novelties, and will just be another tool in the filmmaker's tool box. That's when filmmakers will really begin to explore and exploit the artistic possibilities of these technologies in ways we probably can't even imagine.

That's why I'm not keen to make a call on 21st Vs 20th Century films at this point in time. "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"