Robert Zemeckis Helped Revolutionize Visual Effects – and Then Visual Effects Ruined Robert Zemeckis

https://www.slashfilm.com/what-happened-to-robert-zemeckis/

It’s a song you’ve heard before, though, with Zemeckis: a filmmaker so focused on the perceived possibilities of special-effects technology that he misses the CGI forest for the character-driven trees. Zemeckis’ career is defined by his adoration of technological breakthroughs, but it often has come at the expense of good filmmaking. Here’s the rub: it all started with what is arguably the best film he’s ever made, and arguably one of the most important and influential films of the last 50 years: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Saying that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a masterpiece is a pretty uncontroversial cultural argument to make. Though it may have some detractors, the film’s place in modern popular culture is stronger than ever. The 1988 film asked more of its actors, including the masterful Bob Hoskins, than previous special-effects extravaganzas may have, simply by asking them to act opposite animated characters who would only exist in the post-production phase. But the difference is that Who Framed Roger Rabbit doesn’t hinge entirely on dazzling its audience with technological tricks.

One of the film’s most effective moments is dialogue-free and has no moving animated characters. It’s an expository tracking shot as we watch the hungover Eddie Valiant (Hoskins) sleeping off a rough night of drinking at his desk in the seedy detective agency he runs in Hollywood. Hoskins says nothing, but we learn much about Eddie’s past life as a cop and the heartbreaking loss of his brother to a murderous Toon. It’s up there with the opening-credits tracking shot of Back to the Future, where we learn through background details about Doc Brown before we even meet Marty McFly or learn of their strange friendship.

The success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, coupled with the Back to the Future sequels, led Zemeckis largely down a computer-generated path that’s afforded him – for the most part – the ability to pursue whatever passion projects are in his head. Since the last Back to the Future adventure, Zemeckis has hit some major highs. Forrest Gump won Best Picture, among other Oscars, and was a wildly popular film in its own right, becoming as unavoidable as a pop-culture reference machine as anything else he’s made. Contact and Cast Away both do a much better job of balancing an effective story with effective trickery. (The latter, of course, relied heavily on the physical transformation of Tom Hanks, but…well, it helps if you’ve got Tom Hanks as your leading man on a deserted tropical island.)

But there’s a flip side to this, starting with the 1992 black comedy Death Becomes Her. The film has its defenders (and is still mordantly funny in spots), and unlike many special-effects-laden films of the 1990s, this one holds up pretty well. The very premise of the film all but assured its eventual Best Special Effects Oscar: two rivals (Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn) take an immortality potion that comes at the cost of their personal lives and eventually their physical bodies. Some of the effects here are still ridiculous to behold nearly 30 years later. But the toll was obvious on the actors, including Streep. At the time, she said, “You stand there like a piece of machinery—they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out. But it’s not fun to act to a lampstand.”

It may not be fun for actors like Streep, but it’s fairly common among Zemeckis’ future films. Gump, which has become a bit more divisive over time in spite of its initial success, isn’t just a decade-spanning adventure in which its title character floats along like a white feather (the opening shot is itself a “Hey, look at this!”-style CG trick). It’s a film in which Zemeckis got to show off special-effects tech that allowed Hanks to seemingly interact with real-life figures like John F. Kennedy. The tech ends up feeling like an effective demo for future use instead of a natural part of a story.

The true low point of Zemeckis’ fascination with technology was in the mid-2000s with a trio of motion-capture-animated films that range from disturbing to terrifying. A number of high-profile actors signed on to help bring his warped visions to life, from Hanks to Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins to Jim Carrey. And yet The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol are among the most uncomfortable films released by mainstream studios in the last 20 years, entirely because while motion-capture technology can be convincing and successful at creating depth and emotion, it can also send you straight to the uncanny valley. (Basically, if your name isn’t Andy Serkis, and you’re doing mo-cap, you’re playing a dangerous game.)

Each of these films was intended to make a very specific case for the viability of motion-capture technology as another animation option aside from hand-drawn, computer, and stop-motion. And each of these films failed at making that case.