Graphic novelties

Love it or loathe it, computer-generated imagery - that's CGI to you - is now a regular tool of film-makers, making actors weep and armies march. And the latest action spectacular takes the technology to a new level, writes Donald Clarke

WHAT are angry cinemagoers whinging about this week? The film's another darn sequel. The film's got too much product placement in it. The film's too Rob Schneidery.

Most of us have uttered such complaints while emerging from the latest confection of explosions and alien invasion. But, in the last decade or so, one particular gripe has begun to elbow others aside. Jeez, Brenda, the film's got too much CGI in it.

Ten years ago the acronym for computer-generated imagery would have been unfamiliar to many film fans. Now, exhausted by too many shimmering hurricanes and casts of digitally rendered thousands, we all have some idea exactly what it is we're complaining about.

Those who have become allergic to CGI should approach this week's stunningly bombastic 300 with particular caution. Telling the story of the conflict between the Spartans and the Persians at the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, this adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel has its fleshy actors move about a world composed entirely by computers. "Every frame in this movie is a visual effect," Zack Snyder, the film's director, has explained. More to the point, every frame in the movie looks like a visual effect.

Taking their cue from Miller's source material, the images have a painterly unreality that makes absolutely no concessions to verisimilitude. Why have 100 galleons when you can have 10,000? If one man is taller than another, let him be 10 feet taller.

300 is certainly not the first film to place its performers among exclusively virtual sets. In 2004, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow found Jude Law and Angelina Jolie frolicking in a steampunk universe knocked up in director Kerry Conran's basement. Two years ago, Sin City, another Frank Miller adaptation, used computers to simulate the sparse noir world of the original comic.

Some punters find the conspicuous unreality of these films hard to bear. But, surely, their success - Sin City took millions and 300 is already a huge hit in the US - is a demonstration that CGI is becoming comfortable with its otherness.

One might make an analogy with electronic music. There are few sounds more horrid than the fake strings or ersatz horns produced by that horrible electronic keyboard your Uncle Eric used to play at family gatherings in the 1970s. By way of contrast, the beeps and squeaks in the music of Kraftwerk and, later, techno and industrial tracks, proudly sound out the musicians' determination to go beyond mere emulation.

More worrying, surely, is the creeping tendency of directors to use computers to do things actors should be perfectly capable of doing themselves.

We're not talking here about the huge multitudes rendered digitally for such epics as Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. In the years since the hay-day of the sword-and-sandal epic in the 1950s it has become prohibitively expensive to hire that many extras. The massive crowd scenes in those two Ridley Scott pictures would have been simply impossible to stage without the use of electronic stand-ins.

The genuinely suspect activities of some film-makers were discussed at the recent conference of the Visual Effects Society in Los Angeles. Jeff Okun, the body's chairman, explained how the makers of Blood Diamond had digitally added a tear to Jennifer Connelly's face in order to make the never particularly jolly star look that bit more miserable.

"Acting is all about honesty, but something like this makes what you see on screen a dishonest moment," one of Okun's colleagues added. "Everyone feels a bit dirty about it."

Not surprisingly, actors have begun to express concern about boffins monkeying around with their performances after the cameras have stopped rolling. Tom Cruise, employer of the finest lawyers west of the Mississippi, has had a clause inserted into his contract declaring that any such alterations must meet with his approval. Film-makers can, presumably, make him hunkier, browner or, ahem, taller, but any attempts to digitally humiliate him will be firmly slapped down.

Should we really be upset that we can no longer trust an actor's tears to be her own? After all, make-up artists have been applying glycerine to unsatisfactorily damp faces since before movies could talk. When Cruise appears to leap out of an aeroplane without a parachute, you can be fairly sure that some diminutive stunt man has just earned himself a substantial cheque.

With the possible exception of films from the Dogme '95 Movement - and even that group of austere Danish purists have admitted to cheating on their claims of no makeup, no artificial lighting and so forth - all motion pictures are prolonged exercises in deception. What difference does it make if men in white coats have tweaked that actor's smile? Well, it should, perhaps, matter to the actor.

If a desired effect is not achievable through traditional film-making procedures then, by all means, turn to the mouse and keyboard. No set builder could put together the sprawling vistas behind the actors on 300, so it is perfectly reasonable to call in the computer scientists.

Jennifer Connelly should, however, have been persuaded to think of dead puppies (or whatever else it is that makes her blub). Do your job, woman.