Pete’s Dragon and the End of Actors As We Know Them
OK, it’s a kid’s flick but, it teaches an important lesson — CGI creatures are more interesting than real ones — even real humans.
Pete’s Dragon is a big budget, competent remake of an already successful film. It fields a wonderful cast and features a wonderfully detailed rendering of a digital dragon, and it’s Disney right — Disney!
So why was this less than the summer’s big thing for kids? Was it too digital?
No. In fact, it failed because it wasn’t digital enough. It failed because everything else on the screen paled in comparison to the digital dragon.
It certainly wasn’t for lack of on screen talent.
Robert Redford’s fans will remember how he dominated the films in which he appeared. They’ll remember not remembering whatever or whoever else shared the screen with him, unless it was Paul Newman.
Not this time, and not because he’s older, he’s still Robert Redford, he still looks like Redford, he still acts like Redford, but because the real Robert Redford is playing against a character that isn’t real, that doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics or physiology, that’s more than real.
In the digital world real humans are at an insurmountable disadvantage.
Nothing will make that more clear than watching Disney’s remake of Pete’s Dragon, watching Redford, Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley and Oona Laurence deliver good, competent performances that all but disappear in the presence of a computer generated image of an imaginary creature. As soon as the CGI dragon arrives the actors become living scenery for a nonliving figment of our imagination.
One might think Bryce Howard would know this, having played a very human villain opposite a wonderful cast of other humans in The Help, and several less memorable heroic humans opposite the computer generated images that ended up being the actual stars of Terminator Salvation and Jurassic World.
Does anyone even remember the people in Jurassic World? Maybe Howard knows this. She’s a director too. Maybe she realizes sharing the screen with computer generated stars is now the only major film game left until she makes the transition, and becomes CGI herself, in the not too distant future.
Oakes Fegley is fairly new, we had no expectations of him, so we’re not surprised that, even though he gets lots of screen time, whenever the CGI star appears, he disappears into the foreground or background, but Oona Laurence is established. She has commanded attention in other films. She’s played real humans opposite a real Jake Gyllenhaal in Southpaw, opposite some all too real mothers in Bad Moms and opposite a seriously flawed, creepy real human in Lamb, but impressive as she is, she suffered the same fate as the others. These actors are someones but, they might as well have been anyones, unless they were incredibly bad anyones, and in fact, the truth is, they could have been — no ones.
Our attention isn’t only captured by digital fantastic creatures, digital humans, even cartoonish digital humans command the screen too, in a way real humans can’t. Real humans simply aren’t as interesting as digital ones. They can’t run, jump, bend, or stretch the way digital humans can, and their real faces can’t be as expressive as digitally rendered faces can be.
Sure, the Incredibles don’t look real, but real is not what we want to see or feel. If we wanted real we’d skip the lines and stay at home with families and friends. Obviously, we’re after something different than, or more than real.
What we want is unreal, better than real, sometimes surreal, but more and more often, what we’re looking for is the ideal; we want to watch an ideal character give an ideal performance, and more and more often that character isn’t, and in the nearer and nearer future likely won’t be generated by Central Casting. Instead he or she will be generated by a computer.
Take, for example, Oona Laurence, who can tug at your heartstrings and who someday will undoubtedly grow taller and blonder; and compare her to Elsa, who’s already, in a digital flash, done both. Oona’s undoubtedly one of the most talented young actors around, but she’ll never have a Disney princess’s preternaturally large eyes, that dew up in exactly the right way, precisely on cue, nor will she cry a tear that maintains an unnaturally cohesive perfection as it runs down her cheek. Oona’s real. Elsa’s not, she’s better than real.
I’m not saying Oona has no future. She does. She’s old enough to grow up on screen and make a live action mark before CGI takes over entirely, allowing her to become one of the real models upon which we’ll build future ideal characters, and she’ll spend her time doing voice work — with Kristen Bell.
Until we figure out we don’t need real humans to generate voices either…
By then, with some luck Oona will be able to fall back on free college tuition and learn to code, so she can be the one generating non-human voices with perfect pitch, timber and tremulousness in every language on earth, no more voice overs or subtitles, for the digital characters based on our memories of her pre-digital on-screen image, or — she’ll be selling flowers and pencils on San Julian with the rest of the SAG.
“But,” you say,” it won’t be the same!”
You’re absolutely right, it won’t be the same, it will be better.
Movies will be fake fakes, digital fictions of intellectual fictions. The digits on the screen will never have been images of real things, they’ll have started out as digits.
Instead of paying Tom Cruise $12 million to play Ethan Hunt, we’ll be paying a teenage computer nerd $12 an hour to generate an Ethan Hunt that looks just different enough from Tom Cruise to avoid a lawsuit, an image that, like Cruise, will do its/his own stunts but unlike Cruise, won’t have scheduling conflicts, won’t need a trailer, and won’t require real motorcycles, planes, trains or world’s tallest buildings to do them; he and they will all be digital.
If the digital Ethan Hunt loses his grip, and falls off the Burj Khalifa, it won’t matter, we’ll just sweep up the digits and rework our angles and algorithms or write a few more lines of code and do it again —
— something less than likely had Tom taken a tumble, or even broken a bone.
Call me soft, but if Tom ever does buy it on film, I’m not watching. I might not even watch if digital Tom buys it, OK, maybe the out-takes, but will we be as attached once our heroes, instead of being real idealizations of things we imagine become mere digital fabrications of things we imagine?
Maybe not but, it won’t matter — movies will be much easier to create, and more flexible, even customizable! We won’t need shared cultural heroes because we’ll be able to choose them, to build our own individual heroes.
We’ll be able to pick our cast, if not our plots. If we want to see an image that looks almost like Bradley Cooper (just beyond the legal range of Bradley Cooper’s copyrighted image) get the girl, we’ll be able to or, if we feel like comic fantasy and want to see an image that looks almost like Rob Schneider get the same girl, a few keystrokes and we’ll be laughing; a computer will rerender our choice into the film while we wait or while it streams. Either way, the images we see on the screen will be the ones we choose, not necessarily the ones our friends or neighbors choose.
The next big thing in movies will be characters on demand.
OK, currently it applies almost exclusively to non-human characters, but that’s going to change, soon, very soon we’ll be watching digital humans with as much interest as we do the real ones, maybe more.
Remember Beowulf, digitally altered Angelina Jolie dripping gold?
Her real image was made less real to accommodate the quality of the other CGI images in the film. Were we filming it now, that wouldn’t be necessary. Our computer generated images are almost as perfect as her…almost.
In fact, when Paul Walker died while filming Furious 7, the producers used his brothers and another actor as stand-ins and digitally altered the images in post-production, inserting Paul’s face. They did it because much of the film had already been shot and because Paul Walker had a fan base established over the first six films.
Universal et al paid Walker over $15 million for his appearance. Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Walker and Michelle Rodriguez together are rumored to have been paid over $70 million for Furious 7. Why not, if you’re starting a new film, with new characters, no established traditions and no fan base, keep the $70 million and generate your own heroes and villains?
We’re rapidly approaching the time when rendering software will allow us to start with nothing but our imaginations and construct digital images that will appear as real, as human as the human Angelina or human Paul Walker.
It’s only a matter of time until we either can’t distinguish digital humans from real humans or, we decide we prefer the digital humans, the ideal, to the real.
And once that happens, sorry Robert, Bryce, Oakes and Oona, it’s game over for actors, even exceptional ones.
