Nowhere has this been more evident than in developments of computer-generated special effects over the last twenty-five years. As Michele Pierson explains, however, that period of synergy between the futuristic visions of science fiction and the futuristic quality of the new special effects is short-lived since the “phantasmagorical projections of the future often only achieve the glamour and allure of the truly novel in that brief moment before the techniques used to bring them to the cinema screen have grown too familiar” (102). Anderson when making Hollow Man (2000): “I knew they were doable, it was just a question of how we would do them” (qtd in Shay 108). 1 Films from Metropolis (1927) to Star Wars (1977), from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) to Starship Troopers (1997) have all forced FX artists to answer the question raised by Scott E. He calls for a “revisionist discussion that would start by attempting to rethink science-fiction film in film-specific terms, opting variously for epistemologically based or image-based criteria instead of source-based or narrative based assumptions that have so far shaped most discussions of science-fiction film” (“Diegetic” 35).įurthermore, the relationship between science fiction and special effects (FX) is often mutually dependent since the genre needs special effects to showcase its future worlds and technologies while the imaginative demands of the stories themselves have spearheaded new developments of FX technologies. Brooks Landon, in his discussion of contemporary digital effects, takes the argument further by suggesting that the medium is in fact the message and that the emphasis on the spectacle of film technology is enough to make a film science fiction regardless of its narrative content. As Kuhn suggests, “since the films themselves are often about new or imagined future technologies, this must be a perfect example of the medium fitting, if not exactly being, the message” (7). In the sf film, the narrative will often stop for the contemplation of the spectacular special effects being used to represent the depicted world. As Annette Kuhn has argued, the genre is ideally suited to display technological advances and developments through its futuristic narratives. Recent genre theorists have attempted to rethink this dismissal of the sf film by reconsidering how the genre makes film technology its subject. (1982)as representing “the essence of Wonderland Today,” becoming ever more “dazzling, more extravagant, more luxuriously unnecessary” (166). Robin Wood has described the use of special effects in such sf films as Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T. As Geoff King has argued with respect to the contemporary blockbuster, this association with spectacle has often led to accusations of the impoverishment of narrative and depth (2). At least thirty of the effects listed came from films that can be categorized as science fiction, demonstrating that ever since George Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902 Trip to the Moon), the sf genre on film has been indelibly linked to special effects. The February 2005 edition of SFX magazine produced a list of the “50 Greatest Special Effects” voted upon by their readers. Anderson Visual Effects Supervisor on Hollow Man “There were a lot of concerns about just what these invisibility effects would look like.… I knew they were doable, it was just a question of how we would do them-and at the time we had no clue.” Scott E. Final Frontiers: Computer-Generated Imagery and the Science Fiction Film
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