Motion Pixels

One of the most shocking twists of Star Wars: The Last Jedi has nothing to do with the story. As an aging Luke Skywalker tries to forget about the difficult choice he must make, a familiar voice and figure suddenly appear. At this point in the film, the audience gasps in excitement as Yoda returns to the silver screen. However, there’s something odd about the way he moves. His body looks stiffer, and he just bobs up and down as he talks. It’s very obvious that Yoda is merely a puppet. In a franchise that has been maligned by fans in the last two decades for an over-reliance on CGI, and that previously featured a fully-rendered Yoda doing backflips to unimpressed (if not horrified) theatergoers, this is already enough of a surprise. That said, consider that much of the domestic box office is nowadays reliant on massive multi-hundred-million-dollar superhero epics relying on pure CGI escapism (assuming that the studios aren’t planning on simply recouping their expenses in foreign markets), and one begins to appreciate the fact that, in 2017, a Hollywood movie featured an alien creature actually produced with human hands.

There’s no denying that computers have had a positive impact on Hollywood. Computer animation allowed filmmakers to render characters and scenes normally unobtainable with practical effects. Digital cinematography made filmmaking cheaper for both independent filmmakers and Hollywood, with major studios putting out cheap and well-received titles such as Get Out and Split. Digital projection, combined with the DCP (Digital Cinema Package) standard, substantially lowered the costs of putting films in theaters. This has led to acclaimed independent and otherwise non-mainstream titles such as Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, and Eighth Grade receiving major theatrical releases. Films like Avatar turned 3D movies from a gimmick into an experience. The negative impacts, however, have threatened the traditional film industry as a whole. A variety of streaming services and on-demand platforms make actually going to the movie theater (and suffering through noisy patrons, cellphones going off, and other disturbances) seem like a chore, not to mention that some platforms have cut out the middleman and produced films of their own, including Netflix, Amazon, and even YouTube (all of which have had theatrical releases for their titles, some with major exposure).

Despite all this, more than half of the most expensive films in history have been produced during the current decade, and most of those are genre films which required the very best and most expensive in cinematic technology (to say nothing of the few recent computer-animated films on the list). A number of high-profile films each year still deliver at the box office, but if only certain types of films (e.g. superhero and sci-fi franchises) make money, then it’s not hard to imagine studios relying on a few major digital explosion-fests for their yearly earnings. Then there’s the phenomenon of CGI remakes. Do moviegoers really need to see a live-action/CGI Yogi Bear movie? Does every Disney animated classic need to be remade in a more realistic version? Were audiences so desperate for a CGI version of Rugrats that the studio put out a release date over two years in advance? Will they even be watching it in theaters by then?

Technology has simultaneously managed to transform Hollywood for the better, threaten its existence, and reduce it to mediocrity. It’s hard to tell where the industry will be in the next few years, since so much has changed within a short time. 25 years ago, viewers were amazed to see computer-generated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Today, just choosing to use puppets is enough to get people’s attention.