Posted by Gremlin [12.211.200.127 - 12-211-200-127.client.attbi.com] on 16 May 2003 at 16.57.52 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Well, since some fuckhead interrupted my game.... posted by Hunter on 16 May 2003 at 11.21.24 ZuluTime:

As overrated as Cadillacs may be [Quietly, we're doing very well; publicly, Jaguar and Lexus are beating the hell out of us], they're not entirely bad cars. At least they're not Asian; you won't be seeing many of them RICered with carry-along spoliers and 1.21-gigawatt Alpines.
     As for the one which, ah, fell apart so easily in the film: the last time I saw a car stand up to that much abuse and still move under its power, it was a Caprice Godzilla stepped on in 1998. Believe me: gimee a real Cadillac XLR; I'll have that thing reduced to atomic base in five minutes. Which is about how long it took me to fully destroy a Hummer a few years ago.

The 'black thing', if I'm getting the question, was a Ducati 998. Not quite as fast as the Ninja 1050 I reduced to atomic base at 185MPH in 1986. If I were willing to waste twenty thousand bucks on a 140 horsepower motorbike, this is the one I'd get.

About the, ah, Rave: the utter irony of that scene was that it took place outside the matrix. Where, here in reality, raves are pretty well thrown together in Visual Basic. What I'm not clear on is whether the laws in the film allow Zion to be shut down if a minor is found with ecstacy at this party.

As for the CG: it wasn't exactly bad. Insofar as there weren't a lot of bluescreen halos and that weird, Polaroid 2D plate look we had just a few years ago. For some reason, during the whole thing on top of the semi, I remembered--of all things--Sam Elliot hanging onto the landing gear of the plane at the end of Shakedown in 1988. Before you complain too much about the special effects in anything, just remember what this would have looked like if it had been done fifteen years ago. It could have been worse.
     Granted--and this is my own fault--there wasn't a single process in the effects I wasn't able to figure out. I know how each thing was done. Or, more accurately, could be done. I know what had to happen to make it work. And, in some cases, it was just unfair. Particularly the longshot with the NeoCam flying in from outside the city, and catching up with the truck, the guys fighting on top of it, the cars sliding into each other around it...do the whole thing in LightWave, and there's no problem but RAM; have a single LiveAction composite in that, and you're busy for the next year.
     That said...there were still a lot of physical problems. The same ones I've been seeing for ten years now, starting with Jurassic Park. Whether you're cutting from a LiveAction lawyer to a generated avatar being picked up by a tyrannosaur or a LiveAction agent cutting to an avatar being thrown fifty feet up and back into a building, it never quite works right. LiveAction people are bound to physics; the CG isn't. And, no matter how careful you are with it, there's still that little jump in inertia.
     Which, again, isn't nearly as bad as watching something like King Kong beat up an allosaur. It's just...still a bit unreal.

I guess what I really wound up thinking about with this film was Final Fantasy. Partly because they're so similar: great to look at, as long as there's no sound. The funny part is that Final Fantasy was more physically realistic. Probably because, generated though it was, most of the action was MotionCapture. Which would have come in handy here. Not only does it save a lot of time, but it keeps the physics honest. Not that the physics are supposed to be that honest, according to the plotline; the whole idea is that you've got these people in this virtual world who aren't bound by the physics. It's just weird to see it, whether it's explained or not.

As for the FanFic thing...I tried to read it. But that didn't work out very well. So I stopped trying.