The Suspension Of Disbelief

• 28th Oct 2011

The Suspension of Disbelief

I was supposed to be one of the writers giving their input into Filmwerk’s recent Star Wars retrospectives and I’m afraid to say I let my editor down. (Worse still they aren’t so recent; such is the time I sadly seem to find for these things these days.) Go check them out though, as always from the Filmwerk crew they make a great read.

I do think actually the reason was a little more than just not having time. I didn’t want to look at the films and write about them as retrospectives. I thought I would struggle to keep the articles on the straight and narrow and keep to the topic at hand. What I really wanted was to look deeper into the reasons as to why the prequels failed to ignite my passion in the same way as the original trilogy had and that’s why we are here. I’m not going to be presumptive enough to force my opinion on anyone but feel sure my views may be shared by many. If they are not, perhaps they may spark some debate. Either way, I need to get this off my chest.

I should add that this piece is not about Star Wars specifically, although the extension to the series is one of the most obvious and blatant bodies of work that can be used as evidence to support my case. No, I want to look at movie making as a whole and the expectations of the cinema audience that currently spend their hard earned cash, packing out cinemas, buying DVDs, downloading from legitimate internet sources and upgrading their current crop to HD.

As cinema has moved on and, like everything, has felt the need to embrace new technologies, movie studios seemingly feel that things have to be bigger, better, faster, louder, grittier, this-ier and that-ier! For me here lies the biggest problem. At what point does taking things to the next level become a step too far? To what degree could and should a movie create a believable world where we as audiences accept all that we see and are transported into another place away from our daily grind?

Movies are there to transfix us and entertain us. To re-imagine all that we know and all that we think we know – aren’t they? They are the movies, so whatever can be imagined can be done, within the realms of the technology available to a film maker. Whatever they want to show us, we should believe. If this is true then anything goes, anything is acceptable… Isn’t it?

For me this is not the case. There is an argument on both sides of this fence I know. This can be mainly that everyone’s level of plausibility will differ… but I think we are being duped. I think that the onus lies with the film maker and their team to create that suspension of disbelief; it’s not up to us to find it and accept it.

Two films in the last few years spring to mind to show you where I’m coming from: Die Hard 4 and 2012, for differing reasons. There are plenty more and I’ve only picked these films as they really frustrated me.

Firstly, 2012 was set to be a visual spectacular and in places it was. But this was a film about the end of the world – the end of our world! I wanted this film to be great. I wanted to sit there and be able to imagine the horror as everything was ripped apart by the power of Mother Nature. Instead, I sat there in horror as ludicrous stunts, enhanced by poor CGI propelled a limousine full of people through falling buildings, crumbling roads and flew it across the Grand Canyon. OK, so that very last bit didn’t happen but it may as well have. You see, none of what happened in these scenes and many others are physically possible in our world. Therefore I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The raw excitement and thrill that I should have felt as my planet was torn limb from limb was instead replaced by a wish for the film to be over so I could go about the rest of my day.

The makers of Die Hard, an already successful franchise, seemed to feel the need to take things to the next level too. When Die Hard was first released in 1988 it changed action movies forever. This was partly due to the realness of what audiences saw. Every piece of broken glass that John McClane stepped bare foot onto we felt with a pain-wincing realism and at no point did he make his escape from the Nakatomi Plaza on the back of a passing F-35 jet. Fast forward 19 years and we are presented with Die Hard 4.0 where McClane drives an 18 wheeler up a collapsing free way at the most impossible of inclines only to end up on the wing of a certain jet. Had that screenplay been written in 1989 I think (and I hope) that the studio would have thrown it back in the writer’s face and said ‘don’t be so bloody ridiculous’. I certainly don’t think it would have made it as far as Willis. Then, hopefully, it would never have made it as far as me.

Flip this all around though and in the same universe and same world in 1978 a figure dressed in blue and red from another planet made the world believe that a man could fly. At no point would you find someone tutting in disbelief. Why? Because he was from another planet. Plain and simple. His powers were acceptable and with good reason: our laws of physics had been explained away and what Superman could achieve made sense.

Likewise, Hollywood golden boy Christopher Nolan’s Inception took everything we knew about our beautiful rock and turned it on its head in much the same way the Matrix series had done before. Clever ideas indeed and these meant boundaries of reality could be bent and changed; they could sit outside the scope of what we know and believe.

But neither John McClane nor Curtis Jackson (2012) are blessed with such capabilities and therefore are surely bound by the laws of physics as we are. If we are to buy into the adventure surely it needs to deliver it to us in a manner that does not leave us doubting the ability of the characters involved.

Sadly, I think it is more than just a need to go one bigger, one better and keep audiences coming back for more. Over-the-top set pieces and dramatic climaxes, stunts that require CGI as they aren’t possible to do in reality all mask what I see as poor film making and scripts. I have yet to walk out of the cinema with my friends and for one of them to say, “you know what that film needed was for Mr X to jump a mini bus off a bridge, land it on a low flying jumbo jet, get out and walk along the fuselage, climb through the cockpit window, lump the terrorist, land the plane on a moving train and save the day.” But they have said that they felt similar stupid and ignorant scenes should have been left out.

There is a dumbing down of films and people are sadly becoming more accepting of these things as it becomes more and more normal to see them in our movies. If in doubt and you can’t think of a decent plot line or way to get the hero to escape, stick in a stupidly over-the-top stunt; hey, they’ll all buy it anyway so we are in the clear.

I’m yet to look at the biggest and in my eyes most unforgivable of these examples. Yes, it’s Star Wars time. Before we get started you might want to make a cuppa!

In the same way Die Hard changed everything for action movies, Star Wars changed everything!

Right from the off, that thunderous moment the mother of all mothers of all ships filled the screen with an awe-inspiring presence, we knew we were in for something different. The bar was being set. The universe being created. Space itself had never looked so real let alone everything else that was roaring around in it. From that moment on everything felt plausible. Disbelief surely suspended.

From the sets to the models, the intricacy of every moment seemed undeniably designed to make you believe what you were seeing was real; that somewhere this was actually happening, in a galaxy far, far away.

I’m not pretending they are anywhere near perfect. Let us not forget the amount of tinkering the movies have had over the years to improve the realism. I’m not talking special editions, just the tidy ups that have improved the likes of bleeding over the backgrounds over the frames of ships windows. But what I am saying is that never before and since do I believe a whole other universe has been created that has pulled us audiences in so deeply.

Lucas’ scripts were never brilliant, mind, and no one was expecting much when Episode I was released. What we did have high hopes for however was the visual aspect of the film. After creating such an awe-inspiring tangible hive of activity in Episodes IV-VI, with advances in technology, we were in for one heck of a treat. Weren’t we?

Unfortunately not. Instead, we looked out across a vista of completely unrealistic CGI environments. I – III are nothing more real than Bob Hoskins in Toontown or Michael Jordan with his Looney Tunes buddies.

And so it lost me completely from then on and never got me back.

It is bizarre to believe that one of the greatest cityscapes ever created on film would be from a movie released in 1982. The opening scene to Blade Runner is simply jaw dropping. With the advent of HD, a lot of older movies have suffered in the transfer to the format and due to the accuracy of the print look worse than perhaps they may have by being masked in standard def. Blade Runner manages to somehow look better. How is it then Lucas couldn’t replicate this. He couldn’t even come close. CGI, I believe, has actually taken us backward in this respect. I am all for new technology; I am a self-confessed gadget whore, but I believe that if you can’t do something better with it, then don’t bother. The prequels I am afraid have settled for this: second best and so buying into the universe they create is ever more difficult. Star Wars set the bar first time around and managed to lower it the second.

The heavy reliance on CGI characters, too, is enough to make you think you are watching an animated series rather than a film with actors (the wooden acting was pretty in keeping with the wooden performances of their CGI co-stars). This frustrated me right from the off and when the Clone Wars TV series launched I actually went the other way and thought “this works”. Characters and CGI environments worked in harmony with each other, not against. Textures and shadows matched, skin tones and earthy materials sat together without seeming layered on top of one another. Watch the final duel between Obi and Anakin in III or Kenobi’s visit to the clone factory in II and you will be hard pushed to imagine yourself in those places. Do you think you could touch the surface and feel the heat of the lava or the materials that made up the minimalist white arena of Kamino? I think not.

So whatever belief of worlds far, far away Lucas managed to create the first time around, he manages to completely undo the second!

Sadly, money is the deciding factor these days and when you look at how much these films have grossed in sales it is surprising how Episodes I to III performed considering the failings many of us think they have. Depending on where you look for the figures, some have them outperforming the original series (when not adjusted for inflation).

So you see, perhaps my argument is pointless and outdated, but does takings mean quality? Look at Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, or any of the Transformers… quality? I think not. Audiences, in my opinion, are too easily pleased these days and more accepting of the environments film makers create.

CGI is what people are paying to see and so long as this is the case, it is easy for studios to put out movies that need not feel real. In times gone by, movies were about making you believe. Now they are about making things possible that weren’t previously, whatever the cost and, for me, what has suffered most is the opportunity to go to the flicks and have our disbelief suspended.

Chris Bulman