SFX disaster!

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2003)

The crushing truth is that many of the major scenes look horribly, horribly fake. The bullet-time squared scenes in the Burly Brawl, for instance, just look about as fake as an arcade game--Neo's skin is completely off; it looks like plastic. (Shots where all you see are black suits look better.) Final Fantasy characters looked more real. Again, the scene of Morpheus fighting on the trailer looks incredibly fake in terms of background and location--it doesn't look anything like two guys fighting on a truck moving 60mph on an outdoor highway. I'm amazed more people haven't focused on this. It's yet another case of CG work actually moving us back in terms of realism--film-makers try to do too much and then fall on their faces, creating work that seems less real than 70s miniatures. Spiderman is another example. If Neo looks all wrong mostly because of his textures (his skin, especially), Spiderman looked fake because of his motions--he twirls around as if the laws of physics don't apply at all. To me this is a depressing failure on the part of Gaeta and the Brothers--the Bullet time sequences in the original Matrix just look more convincing. Their backgrounds may have been virtual, but with our attention focused on Neo, it was alright since he looked and was real. Better luck next time guys.