Sfdebris.net

Now this has me excited. Loved the original as a kid in the 80s, they're using Jim Henson's practical effects.

Nothing more but a teaser yet, but I am loving this renaissance of physical movie props and characters over CGI.


youtu.be/OGzVYyV_Jsg

I don't dislike CGI, but I don't like it being used when there's no good reason to.

Jurassic park has always been my personal benchmark of good use of CGI and practical effects. The movie is 25 years old and still looks great.

Overuse of CGI when you're using real actors leads to them looking lost and divorced from the world around them.

The best stuff I see tends to be when they use CG to tweak and repair the flaws in a practical effect. Like taking a puppet, and using CG to smooth the movements in places so they look more natural, or using CG fill in the gaps and fix wrinkles/seams in a rubber suit or appliance. Stuff that positions the strengths of each to cover the weak spots of the other.

In this specific case though, it would feel deeply, deeply wrong to use anything other than pure puppetry, regardless of whether it looked fully real or not. Because that's so deeply a part of the Dark Crystal's style. It'd be as wrong as doing a ballet dance or a kung-fu fight with CG: completely missing the point. Saying "but it doesn't look real enough" would be like criticizing the stop-motion characters in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" for not looking like live-action: completely missing the point.

So I guess you can say that NetFlix is...

bringing Skeksis back.

Some directors use CGI as a crouch, a cheap and easy way to do just about anything. Good CGI is often used as a stop gap measure, doing only what could not be done with practical effects.

The Terminator series did a very good job with this. Even before CGI they used a bit of stop-motion-animation but only sparingly, most of the time even in 2 & 3, its animatronics or animatronics and CGI together.

The Dark Crystal was made as an experiment, Henson wanted to make a film with no human characters, all muppets. This is think is a big part of why it is such a cult classic is because it looks so different. Not surreal, not weird, not tripy or psychedelic, just different. The story is not poorly written but its not spectacular, basically a simplified version of the hero's journey. People like to talk about the Skesis because they are great villains but they are the only really memorable part of the film.

So i am curious what they are going to do with it. I am not hoping it will be good or bad, but like the film it is based on it will be interesting to see.

Can't wait. The Dark Crystal is not a masterpiece, but it is interesting. As Phantom correctly noted, the big problem with Dark Crystal was its story and by extension the main characters. They're not bad, but they're not particularly compelling either, which means they get completely overshadowed by the world and visual imagery....which is fantastic. Taking those elements and giving them a better story and cast has the potential to create something truly marvelous. Color me excited.