Film byJonathan Romney
In the current issue of Sight and Sound, the credits alone for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace take up over one and a quarter pages, of which some six columns are devoted to the various technicians who worked on the film's digital effects. That's roughly three times as many as the magazine listed for Jurassic Park in 1992. What exactly does this prove? That the new Star Wars is the most artificial film ever made? That's plain the moment you look at it. That the digital realm of computer-generated imagery (CGI) is fast supplanting bricks-and-mortar reality on screen? That's a condition we've lived with for several years now. Watch any Hollywood blockbuster and you realise that we're already attuned to the textures of a numerical, immaterial cloud-cuckoo-land, in which images, even at their most solid, often have the most fluid, vaporous presence.
In the trade press, what's most often at stake in discussions of the digital explosion is the industrial implication. As ever more spectacular effects can be created by boffins sitting at workstations, will the old trades disappear - will stunt artists, set designers, even stars become redundant overnight? But a more immediate question, as far as viewers are concerned, is the aesthetic one. We know that any spectacle imaginable can be created digitally and look more or less real. But that's very different from looking effective or possessing a real imaginative tangibility. The new Star Wars is a good example of this. Some of its images are too familiar to have much effect - its breakneck pod-race sequence is the Ben Hur chariot routine remade as state-of-the-art arcade-game whizz-bang. And some of its aliens might as well have been made the old-fashioned way. Its already much-loathed clown, Jar Jar Binks, is created through motion capture, whereby the gestures of a real actor dictate those of a chimera, yet Jar Jar still has the feel of a floppy latex Muppet. There are, however, true wonders in The Phantom Menace - some grisly deep-sea behemoths, a glowing underwater city that resembles a hyper-kitsch furniture store specialising in 1970s light-fittings, and the capital of the planet Naboo, an architectural marvel of cod-Byzantine Victoriana.
But we don't get to dwell on any of this for very long. George Lucas wants to throw in as many sights as possible, ushering us on our way, like a brisk theme-park guide. It's as if he's afraid that too much contemplation will reveal the magical castle as the conjuring of thin light that it is. But we should be given the leisure to enjoy it as just that. In fact the most interesting CGI films are the ones that exploit the plasticity and unreality of the images - recently Hollywood has provided few experiences of such crafted aesthetic density as the animation A Bug's Life. Some films make CGI's properties a subject in themselves. Last year's ragged but fascinating science fiction film Dark City was set in an imaginary world where every night a gang of aliens erases everyone's memory and changes the shape of everything. Like industrious stagehands, the aliens stretch rooms, move buildings, even change the inhabitants' clothes. Dark City's implicit theme is the new possibility - and the new irresponsibility it entails - of creating images of pure, malleable immateriality, with neither depth nor history. Its slender SF premise unfolds into an ethical argument about the way studio productions manipulate both the image and the viewer.
That debate is posed with greater acuity in the Wachowski brothers' current hit The Matrix. The matrix itself is a hallucination created by the robots that really rule the earth. In reality, humans are cheerfully dreaming the world as they unknowingly slop about in viscous fluid. The brilliance of The Matrix lies not so much in its razzle-dazzle FX as in its inversion of fakery and reality. The narrative doesn't really take place in a computer-generated world but is almost entirely set in a single location, the anti-matrix rebels' hovercraft: the film is really a chamber piece in which characters occasionally lapse into dream. All its martial arts sequences are given a strange piquancy by our knowledge that Keanu Reeves's character Neo is just imagining that he's fighting, while he reclines in a dentist's chair. Yet in reality, in order to shoot these scenes, he and Laurence Fishburne had to undergo extensive martial arts training.
In a roundabout way, solid physical effort finds its way back into the most immaterial film - as if the Wachowskis want to assure us that film can still provide hard, measurable value for money. The most acute joke about illusion in The Matrix comes when a heavy enjoys a large juicy steak in a restaurant. The restaurant's not real, and neither is the steak - both are hallucinations within the matrix. Yet the glistening red slab we see in close-up patently isn't the work of hundreds of effects artists, but a fresh cut straight from the butcher. Such moments turn illusion against itself to make us question not just the CGI revolution, but the nature of cinematic deception.
Both The Matrix and Dark City are old-fashioned parables of political resistance: they remind us that seductive images can be used to repress us and that, while we should enjoy those images to the full, we may as well understand how they're made. That's why The Phantom Menace seems so dull and distant. It's too concerned with denying its own construction, with appearing seamless, which is why its castles seem built of air. But The Matrix and Dark City want us to know precisely what sort of air they use. The most daring moment in The Matrix comes when Neo sees what the world is made of: a corridor decomposes and turns into glowing green strings of digits, as if seen on a VDU. All at once you realise that these, rather than the opening weekend figures, are the numbers that the new Hollywood is really built on.
"Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace" (U) opens on 16 July. "The Matrix" (15) continues at cinemas nationwide
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
