…but because it represents just how good ‘bad special effects’ have gotten.
Seriously. Consider this: SPACE WARS: THE QUEST FOR THE DEEPSTAR has better special effects than BABYLON 5. I say nothing about the plot, dialogue, and particularly the casting, mind you. I am just nothing that we now live in a Golden Age of digital accessibility. Even the crappy stuff gets to be polished.
Moe Lane
#commissionearned
But does it matter?
I’m not inclined to think so.
Actually, I’m inclined to believe that this will make movies and shows worse.
There has only been one time that bad FX have thrown me out of a story I had bought into.
That was Night off the Demon/Curse of the Demon (same movie, different titles, because executive meddling). It’s a great movie right up until the end, when you see the reaction shot, and then the camera jump cuts to what they’re reacting to—which is a guy in a rubber suit wildly flailing around.
But the thing is, it wouldn’t matter if the FX were top notch. Showing the demon breaks the movie. It’s a sanity-blasting abomination. A Thing Which Should Not Be. You can’t capture that on film without it becoming an inadvertent sight gag.
Or take Jaws. It was as effective as it was, because the fancy mechanical shark they’d rigged up kept bloody sinking. So they could only use it very sparingly.
Spielberg didn’t set out to make a masterwork of suspense and imagination. He wanted to play with a mechanical shark. And if he’d been able to, we’d remember it as schlock.
“We’ll fix it in post” will always be a meme, and a sign of bad production values.