Gratuity for the Wrong Effect

Tom Maguire
17 August 2003

      You don't see a lot of naked women in movies anymore. Outside of the occasional topless female in an American Pie movie, breasts have all but disappeared from the silver screen. Commercial Hollywood films used to be a goldmine for the appearance of naked women, but not anymore. Why is this? Is it the dark shadow of political correctness left over from the 80's and 90's that still hangs over America? Is it conservative "family values" that have driven nakedness out of our multiplexes. No. I think the answer is less sinister. It's the internet. Movies are simply unable to compete with the power of freely available porn online and in fact they have appeared to stop even trying. The shear amount of naked women on the internet is so overwhelming (as any red-blooded online American male knows) that Hollywood has stopped putting naked babes in movies and left them to the privacy of the online American home. So what are we left with without the promise of seeing naked women in harmless R rated exploitation movies? What is Hollywood using to draw audiences into theaters that the internet can't possibly compete with? Easy. Special effects. Lots and lots of special effects. Wall to wall special effects. Gratuitous special effects.

     The greatest recent example of this is Tomb Raider 2: The Cradle of Life. The reason this movie exists is as an excuse to bring the famous video game vixen Lara Croft to life. Tomb Raider 2 star Angelina Jolie is one of the most glamorous actresses in Hollywood who's fame is due in large part to her open attitude toward sexuality on screen. Hell it seems like she's struggling to keep her clothes ON in half her movies. In Tomb Raider 2 however, Jolie's beauty takes a distant backseat to the copious amounts of effects work in the film. Except for an all too brief bikini sequence toward the beginning of the film, Lara could have been played by Rob Schneider in drag for all the movie cared to show of Angie's chiseled physique.

Dinosaur Technology

Back in the golden age of special effects - the pre-digital 1980's - effects were hard to do. For the most part all effects were comprised of trick photography involving scale models, blue screens, motion controlled cameras, forced perspective shots, animation, rotoscoping, and various other decades old tricks for making the impossible look real. In 1993 Jurassic Park was the digital straw that broke the analog back of special effects and made everyone a believer that computers could be used to photorealistically recreate anything anyone could imagine. The problem with computer technology is that because it's still in its infancy major advances can happen in months and what was state of the art becomes affordable to everybody. The technology for creating realistic looking dinosaurs in 1993 is ancient in computer years and could be done now on a moderately equipped PC or Mac. And it seems this is what's happening. A recent Variety articles describes the situation in Hollywood as an "F/X Gridlock" where effects are now so numerous and common in films that even comedies like Legally Blond 2 have up to 400 computer generated shots. There's more effects houses doing more effects work for more effects movies than anytime in the history of Hollywood. Variety's article describes a backlog of post production work so great that effects were being tweaked on Pirates of the Caribbean "hours before it's June 28 premiere." This is a great situation - for the graphic artists doing the CGI work and their companies that are reaping the benefits. But what does that leave the audience with when filmmakers can conjure up any image with the click of a mouse? In the worst instances, Tomb Raider 2 and movies like it where the special effects looked rushed and not so special.

"Steak tastes about the same. Except now there's more trimmins."

The old classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 has skewered many movies that contain painfully long sequences of characters going to some place, coming from someplace, or just generally traveling to where the action is. The problem is that going to an event is seldom an event itself. This still holds true in Tomb Raider 2 as no matter how gussied up with special effects that same old exhilarating "walking sequence" is it's just as meaningless as ever. As Lara and her companion decide they need to go to a location we cut to an obvious CG Delta Wing Jet that is dropped from a carrier plane and dive bombs to their designated location (barely missing a local fisherman in his rickety boat). My description is as exciting as the sequence itself - not very. In another scene Lara and her sidekick wonder what the fastest way is to get to their destination. Cut To: Lara and her male sidekick motorbiking on and along an obvious green screened Great Wall of China. These certainly are expensive effects shots but they serve no purpose in the film other than to justify their own existence. The thinking must be that audiences are drawn to effects movies for the effects themselves, not the story or characters. Or maybe it's that because effects are such a large part of the budget in these spectacles they get the attention over less costly matters like writing the script. In a movie like Ghostbusters, the still reigning king of effects comedies, every effects shot exists as integral part in the storytelling process or as a visual punchline to a joke. The great effects movies of the 80's have images that endure and hardly any of them have shots that aren't important to the story.

If the anemic performances of several big budget effects spectacles this summer are any indication audiences actually do care about original stories and interesting characters more than "shit blowing up." If the studios continue to take a hit in their wallets, maybe they'll go back to old tried and true mother nature and bring back the boobs.