Ridley Scott explains the “danger” of modern-day CGI
British filmmaker Ridley Scott might have been the talk of ‘Tinseltown’ back in the 1980s, thanks to such late 20th-century hits as The Duellists, Alien and Blade Runner, but the filmmaker has never really been able to recapture this past glory. Sure, in the new millennium, he’s enjoyed such successful movies as Gladiator, Prometheus and The Martian, but their prominence cannot compare to the majesty of his early creations.
Perhaps the change in this creative output comes down to the rise of advanced CGI, making practical effects a mere expensive alternative to the norm. Indeed, CGI has become such a normalised industry practice that it would be unusual not to see it being used in the latest blockbusters. Popular projects like Disney’s Marvel cinematic universe utilise an abundance of computer-generated visual effects for each of its movies.
Likewise, the same can be said for almost every movie coming out of the contemporary Hollywood system, with everything from Martin Scorsese’s five-time Oscar-nominated movie The Wolf of Wall Street to James Wan’s beloved 2010 horror flick Insidious opting to use CGI to some extent. Implementing these digital technologies is cheaper and easier than using practical effects, but it’s easy to forget what is lost in the process of this transition.
As Ridley Scott told the American Film Institute in an interview from 2010: “Today, I think with digital effects, you can do anything it’s pretty easy, pretty straightforward, and I think that, in itself, becomes a danger because I think by getting a sense that it’s not real, that it’s digital, I think very often takes the fear factor out of it”. Assessing modern criticisms of contemporary blockbusters, Scott’s words certainly remain pertinent.
Continuing, the filmmaker adds: “I haven’t seen a really scary movie in a long time where maybe the explosions are too big for someone to actually survive. When it’s actually shot real, there’s a sense of that”.
Whilst there is certainly sense to Scott’s perspective, in recent years, the director has been criticised for his inability to adapt to modern ways of working. In response, Scott resorted to blaming millennials for the failure of his 2021 film The Last Duel with Adam Driver, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. A medieval tale that tells the story of King Charles VI, who declares that a noble knight settles his dispute with his squire through a duel to the death, the film failed to score big at the box office despite strong critical reviews.
On Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, the director stated: “Disney did a fantastic promotion job. The bosses loved the movie because I was concerned it was not for them”. Though, after a level-headed start, he continued by adding, “I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cell phones. The millennian, [who] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you told it on the cell phone”.
As a result, Scott has come to be considered something of a relic of Hollywood’s past, representing a type of filmmaker who no longer exists in contemporary cinema, for better or for worse.
