1 - Overcomplicated and overlong

There's no need to stop, the computer can just keep churning this stuff out

Although CGI clearly can’t create perfect film effects, many of the guys in the effects business appear to be under the delusion that they can do just about anything with CGI, so they do, and they don’t know when to stop. So, instead of carefully planning one action scene around an exploding building, because your budget will only allow you to blow up one skyscraper, and carefully choreographing the action in real time, you now fill scene after scene with hundreds of exploding buildings, thousands of complicated robots and by the end of it we feel like our brains have been mashed into puree.

Take a film such as ‘Transformers,’ where the CGI robots are actually pretty damn good, but the action scenes are so complicated that you end up losing track of what’s going on and feeling like you’re a bit stupid for not being able to keep up. You assume that everyone else in the cinema know what’s going on while you’re struggling to see who’s winning, but they’re actually just as confused as you.

The problem is that the animators carefully render those scenes frame by frame, putting a painstaking amount of effort into getting the shadows and lighting spot-on, but that’s all completely lost on normal human beings when they watch it at 24fps with added motion blur.

As well as this, CGI action scenes have also become far too long, again because you have no restrictions on what you can’t include any more. Just because you can include hundreds of robots in a fight scene, doesn’t mean that you have to. Exhibit A? Again, we refer you to the Matrix Reloaded’s ‘Burly Brawl’, which is confusing, overlong and dull.

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