The human touch

There are growing signs that film-industry bosses are trying to defeat the SAG-AFTRA-WGA strike -- and to destroy the bargaining power of writers and actors more generally -- by going all-in on "AI".  Several companies are advertising high-paying "AI" jobs.  There has been talk of using bots similar to ChatGPT to "write" film scripts, and of making scans of an actor's face and body which could then be animated to create a digitized performance in a movie -- thus eliminating the need to use (and pay) writers and actors at all.  Indeed, such plans predate the strike, and part of the unions' goal is to limit the use of such technology.

It is all fundamentally a scam, of course.  Even the film companies acknowledge that a bot-written script would require some editing to get it into an optimal form, for example.  That is to say, the "editor" who produced a usable script from the junk churned out by the bot would be the real writer, but wouldn't be paid as much as a writer.  As for using fake CGI-generated actors, we've seen "deepfakes" that imitate real people doing simple things for a few seconds (here is one of the more impressive examples I've seen), but that's a far cry from replicating everything a skilled actor does to breathe life into a full-length film performance.  It's another case of the grey men in grey suits who rule over a creative industry having no clue what the creative people who generate all the value really do, regarding them as just disposable utensils and the industry itself as just one more interchangeable mechanism for generating profits.

Perhaps more to the point, though, the bosses are at risk of budlighting their whole industry, taking it in a direction diametrically opposed to what the customers want.  To exemplify what I mean, consider two recent films.  First, The Flash:



You can see this was basically just one more generic, interchangeable superhero movie like we've been getting for years now, except that (start about three minutes in) it went even further in the direction the bosses want to take the industry by using computer-animated stolen likenesses of actors who are long dead and thus cannot speak out against their legacies being exploited like this.  And in a year littered with failed remakes and superhero epics, The Flash was the worst flop of all, losing at least $200 million despite critics gamely doing their best to push it.  An over-complicated story and a pronoun-weirdo star with a well-publicized criminal record were also problems, but the lunge into usage of CGI instead of real actors certainly didn't help.

Next, Barbie:



Many reviewers have noted this film's use of real, physical sets instead of the CGI which a more typical production nowadays would have used, and how vivid and tactile everything looks as a result.  Even for scenic backgrounds, they hired real artists to paint real matte paintings -- and the difference truly shows on the screen.  For the sequences of travel between worlds, Barbie used mechanical effects which look almost quaint -- but what you see on the screen has a charm and solidity that CGI could never have matched.  Then there's the quirky and highly original script, an almost jarring blend of comedy and existentialism that somehow works perfectly.  The human touch shows in every aspect of the movie.  And none of this was excessively expensive.  The budget of $145 million was on the modest side for a project of this scale today.

The reliance on practical effects also helped enable the bright, colorful imagery which is part of the film's appeal.  There was no need to resort to a dark, murky look to hide the crappyness of CGI effects.

We've seen the results.  Barbie is on track to be the biggest hit of the year, a huge success all over the world.  This is what audiences want, what they were waiting for to swarm back to theaters.

Hollywood has mostly settled into a pattern.  Studios churn out generic assembly-line movies with a dreary, gloomy, and unreal look to them, endlessly rehashing tired old ideas in a wasteland of franchises and remakes and reboots -- and audiences stay home.  The grey men in grey suits want to take the industry even further down that path, literally using fake computer-generated scripts and fake computer-generated actors.  Unfortunately they won't be able to create computer-generated audiences to spend real money watching the resulting rubbish.

Do they really want to destroy what's left of the industry, just to avoid paying actors and writers properly?