Picture the scene: Tom Hanks screaming hysterically amidst the rapturous applause as a computer hard drive is wheeled on stage to accept the Best Actor Oscar. Cue Tom's sweat-drenched, post-nightmare gasp.
With the release of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within", featuring near photo-realistic digital characters, the issue of actors being usurped by computerised counterparts has once again come to the fore. Yes, ethical questions may abound and, while a deeply troubled Tom Hanks may voice the fears of actors, it was FX pioneer Stan Winston ("Jurassic Park"), who captured the centrifuge of the issue: "It doesn't mean I don't want to see what Al Pacino's going to do. One doesn't affect the other, it's just another way of telling a story."
Exactly: telling a story. Bolstered with vivid spectacle. The very cornerstones of cinema. Especially in the case of blockbusters, audiences are only too eager to embrace a vivid spectacle, and in the last decade, we have marvelled at the likes of "The Matrix", where technology literally re-styled action cinema.
With computers, the physically impossible becomes possible, locations become limited only by imagination, and the heights of the fantastic suddenly become reachable, with digital characters perfect (and, debatedly, cost-effective) to enable such scenarios. George Lucas depicted alien worlds and creatures in "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" for a respectable $115 million.
While critics were non-plussed by "Final Fantasy" 's actors, there was no denying the magnificence of the spectacle. True, digital actors are obedient, free of ludicrous salaries, perks, and tantrums. Yet actors and acting will always retain their necessity. Human performance comes with an unpredictability that cannot replicated digitally, becoming the hook for the audience to embark on the story and the spectacle. That, and could you see a computer humorously blubbing at the Oscars?
