Seeing is believing … on the screen

By BILL CHAISSON
I am guessing it is the steady improvement in quality and decrease in price of computer-generated imagery (CGI) that has swelled the number of fantasy shows being made. Fantasy is more difficult to depict than science fiction because in fantasy virtually anything can happen.

Science-fiction shows require making believable machines that do not exist and follow laws of physics that may or may not related to our laws of physics.  There are also occasional aliens tht present, most of whom are surprisingly anthropomorphic (if they need to be relatable).

One of the more difficult things to render believably on screen is the doing of magic. In the 1960s Elizabeth Montgomery wiggled her nose on “Bewitched” and  then they just jump cut to the effects of the spell. This generally involved people suddenly being in different clothes or in a different place or holding an object they didn’t expect to be holding.

There are now perhaps dozens of television programs that features magicians, wizards, witches, and other spellcasters. With the advent of sophisticated and nuanced CGI, we know watch the transitions from one state to another after the spell is cast.

On “Bewitched” the sound that accompanied a spell tended to be a single bright note or chord. On modern fantasy shows the transformation wrought by magic can constitute several bars of agonized music. You don’t just laugh at an instanteous change, but instead empathize as the spell wrests its object from reality into the realm of the fantastic.

One of the more impressive advances in the fantasy film and television arts is the evolution of imagined landscapes. 

In 1939 “The Wizard of Oz” managed to be scary as all get-out when it came to the flying monkeys. You could see the wires and their faces didn’t move, but … Oz itself on the other hand, wasn’t much of a place. It wasn’t even convincingly outdoors, never mind another place.

Hollywood went  through several decades of painted backdrops and shooting scale models of places before entire landscapes could convincingly be presented. The development of fractal algorithms meant that surfaces became very convincing. They were first used in 1982 in “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.” They are now routinely deployed in many television shows, although series like “Game of Thrones” have a big enough budget to shoot at actual exotic landscapes.

In 1989 “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” introduced digital compositing to film audiences. This involves layering and joining multiple digital images to create a final composite.

In 2004 “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” became the first movie to have all CGI backdrops and live actors.

I recently watched “John Carter” when it appeared on Netflix. I saw it in the theater in 2012. The film was a box-office flop, as the critics savaged it. Shortly after it was pulled from theaters . It was one of the biggest bombs of all time and needed to make $600 million to be in the black. It only grossed half that.

None of the marketing mentioned the words “Mars,” “Barsoom,” or “Edgar Rice Burroughs.” Furthermore there were no big stars in the film; the star was the spectacular CGI landscapes and characters, none of which were featured in the marketing trailers or posters.

I remember enjoying the film when it came out — although I have never read the Burroughs’ Mars books — and I found it, if anything, more charming this time around. It is a mash-up of science-fiction (specifically, steampunk), fantasy, Western, sword-and-sandal, and romance genres. 

Actual Utah landscapes were used as a starting point, but they were gorgeously augmented with entirely fantastical cities and creatures. There is even magic in the form of the Therns, a league of control-freak wizards who start wars for their own purposes.

Finally, “John Carter” includes a bad-ass female lead who, although she does get rescued, is also quite good with a sword and a scientist to boot.

It didn’t lean on a comic book either. Instead it is based on a 100-year old magazine serial written by the writer more famous for creating Tarzan.