Motion Capture Mayhem

Rating: Null/10 (26 March 2010)

"If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, its tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead." - Peter Greenaway
Long before James Cameron's supposedly "revolutionary" virtual performances in "Avatar", Robert Zemeckis was motion capturing his heart out in a series of exorbitantly expensive 3D films.
His first attempt was "The Polar Express", a film with wonderful ambiance and gorgeous art design, 200 years of Christmas iconography distilled and spat back out as a kind of super-concentrated, high gloss, Norman Rockwell simulation.
The first hour of the film is a blast, Zemeckis' virtual camera dancing along all angles, whizzing between small spaces, looping back and forth. Combine this with some moody lighting effects and you have a pretty gorgeous animated movie. Unfortunately the film's second half reveals Zemeckis' message, and we suddenly realise just how insidious "The Polar Express" really is. An ode to materialism, greed and irrational belief, we can no longer forgive the film's ethnic stereotypes and creepy facial animations.
Dubious messages were rectified with Zemeckis' "Beowulf", though the uncanny facial expressions still remained. Packed with fine tuned action scenes and zany camera work, "Beowulf" is a fun action movie with enough sleaze and gore to compete with most male-oriented action blockbusters. The film's tale of temptation, greed, revenge and corrupted bloodlines, works well in a Shakespearean way, but mostly the film is a celebration of hyper-aesthetics and virtual camera work.
Zemeckis followed "Beowulf" with "A Christmas Carol", a story so well known that one sees little point in watching his CGI sculpted remake. With the story so familiar as to be pointless, one instead savours the film's Victorian architecture, Zemeckis' enclaves of light and shadow, his free-floating camera and dizzying choreography. It's fun in bursts, but why not just re-watch Bill Murray's "Groundhog Day", a superior re-imagining of Dickens' classic?
Ultimately these three films, and later "Avatar", herald the onslaught of a new kind of hyper-cinema that looks set to be our future. The virtual cameras of tomorrow – no longer bound by the laws of physics - render everyone from Hitchcock to Welles to De Palma obsolete (whilst paradoxically negating the spectacle of camera movement), whilst the ability to render super-mediated environments means that audiences will increasingly find "real lighting" and "real spaces" to be thoroughly banal. But the real future of all this is not film, but video games. Already cinema audiences have begun to cluster around the 30-60 age range, younger audiences increasingly dying out. Kid's are turning to interactive media, and increasingly theatre advertising is drifting away from promoting films and onto promoting X-box and PS3 titles.
What the likes of Lucas and Spielberg created was not "film as amusement park", but rather "video game as cinema". Cinema, unable to offer immersive experiences in a world overrun with mediated experiences, a world where thousands of youtube videos are uploaded every second, in which every film can be torrented at the click of the button, in which massive multi-player games can be played instantly through the television, in which an abundance of images has left images virtually affectless, has no choice but to regress further into a kind of super inflated parody of itself.
7.9/10 – "Beowolf"
6/10 – "The Polar Express"
7/10 – "A Christmas Carol"
"The Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol" are the weakest films here, one better off hunting down the Charlie Brown Christmas TV specials. "Beowolf", despite being ripped to shreds by critics, is a pretty good action movie, with some real emotion behind those creepily rendered faces. Incidentally, Zemeckis' motion capture production house (ImageMovers Digital) was shut down due to the poor box-office performances of these three films, studios embracing instead the performance capture technology of Cameron's "Avatar".