I do think I have a reasonably good eye for (poor) CGI that attempts to depict a familiar, real-world event. E.g., if a CGI car crash seems to have wonky “mass,” “physics” or “inertia,” this is a dead giveaway. Reason being: audiences have seen many actual/live-action car crashes in movies and can make the comparison. OTOH, I have no idea what a super speedster (or the fantastical “speed force”) should look like in real life. So I tend to grant benefit-of-the-doubt; I’m more willing to suspend my disbelief.
I also think it can be a tad unfair to grab a still frame from an otherwise dynamic/frenetic sequence and subject it to minute analysis. For instance, here’s a still frame from Ben-Hur; and you can see that the CGI rendering of Chuck Heston’s face is a little dodgy. But played at normal speed, Chuck looks fine.
I completely understand your point of view, but I'm not sure people who have a problem with CGI here are really talking about that. In any case, I know I don't.
It's not about how they choose to "show" a superpower effect, but how the image is assembled from a technical point of view.
If a character looks like rubber, that's a shame... but it's even worse if you can tell that the wall behind him doesn't exist, then the floor, then that the lighting doesn't match, and so on. And this is where I'm personally taken out of the movie, even if the story is great. It's just too clumsy looking, "ugly".
What I find particularly unsatisfying in the trailer are the desert shots. Obviously, all the assets
(heroes, vehicles, background) are taken from different sources but that's the idea : it shouldn't be that obvious.
I really think
(perhaps wrongly) that just some touch up on levels, colorimetry, etc., could improve certain things. Even if it's just to accentuate the stylization that, at some point, can sometimes help sell a wonky shot.
It's also specifically because it looks so "unfinished" to me that I find it all a bit infuriating, as there was still time to fine-tune certain things between the trailers and the release. But at the same time, as some CGI artists say: in the end, it all depends on the director's choice.
So maybe it's just what Muschietti likes...
There used to be a time where CGi was inserted into real backgrounds and environments, and the effect was pretty good for a while.
The thing is nowadays everything is CGi. They just can't fool the eye. We know what's going on, we've been trained.
All of this.
We have a saying in French that
"too much choice kills choice".
I always come back to the making of
Jurassic Park. Because back then VFX were supposed to be done with time-consuming techniques like stop motion, sequences like the raptor chase in the kitchen were "locked" at the storyboard stage. They made sure that every shot, every image composition, etc. was as efficient as possible very early on in the process to be sure not wasting anyone time or money.
I
(modestly) think if things were still done this way, we'd probably see a lot less unnecessary CGI sets
(it's a shame to render things you can find on location or build, and studio have enough money for that) and, at least, the CGI artists would know from the start where they were going without having to radically change the design every month, etc.
)
Now keep in mind she is not a geek in any way, and has zero allegiance to anything and knows nothing about the stupid Snyder Bro Wars with reviewers. (I never bought into that stuff anyways and never discussed the film or cbms with her anyways) Then after the local review dropped I had her read it, she made it a paragraph in and said "this guy never went to the movie!" because he was talking about rumors that never actually came true as if they were in the movie. After that I realized none of these clowns know what they are doing and their opinions are no more important than my own. (that reviewer was later fired for plagiarism)
