So, Tom Cruise wants to do Top Gun 2, but only “if there’s no CGI on the jets” and if the film relies, instead, on practical effects.
“If I can figure it out, if all of us can figure it out, it’d be fun to do. I’d like to fly those jets again, but we got to do all the jets practical, no CGI,” Cruise, who starred as Maverick in the 1986 original, told Extra. “I’m saying right now, no CGI on the jets. If we can figure all that out, and the Department of Defense will allow us to do it, that would be fun.”
Cruise is smart to take this line. Now that CGI no longer electrifies audiences as it once did, where bigger is not necessarily better, and where film-makers and cinemagoers favour masterpieces of a pre-digital kind, saying no to special effects looks like the way forward. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise has scaled the Burj Khalifa skyscraper and hung out of a plane during take-off. His tendency to perform his own stunts has earned him a reputation as a daredevil; perhaps it’s time his daring was taken more seriously.
Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu avoided using CGI while creating The Revenant, despite harsh conditions on location. His film tells the story of a fur-trapper (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who must survive in the wilderness after being mauled by a bear. Iñárritu wanted the wild to feel real. “If we ended up in greenscreen with coffee and everybody having a good time, everybody will be happy, but most likely the film would be a piece of shit,” he told Hollywood Reporter.
He did, however, admit that conditions became brutal after temperatures on the shoot in Canada dropped to -25C. “Everybody was frozen, the equipment was breaking. To get the camera from one place to another was a nightmare,” he said. According to the production company New Regency, The Revenant faced unprecedented difficulties to achieve realism.
Perhaps Iñárritu took things too far? While the producers of The Revenant say safety was not compromised during filming, crew members have described conditions as “a living hell”. Evidently, Iñárritu believed that special effects would compromise the film, but maybe CGI is worth it if it avoids making your crew miserable?
What lies behind Iñárritu’s unwavering aversion to computer-generated effects in The Revenant? His knowing use of CGI in the notably self-aware Birdman sheds light on this. In Birdman, Iñárritu tells the story of an actor turning away from a popular world of showy, overdramatic action movies in order to attempt real art. Through the film’s use of CGI, Iñárritu suggests that he can do flights and explosions, but largely chooses not to. The message seems to be that, while special effects can create startlingly fantastical sights, they distance us from realism, from what is human. These are the very things that make audiences connect to a film.
Jurassic World is a good example of how CGI can make and break a film; how it can add to and detract from emotional impact. For me, the film had a poor storyline and underdeveloped characters; the only redemptive feature was its incredible visual power – mostly because of the range of impressive dinosaurs. Only when the trained velociraptors and lovable brontosauri took centre stage did I find myself emotionally invested. But Jurassic World’s creators focused almost entirely on the dinosaurs, and the film suffered elsewhere.
Tom Cruise’s insistence on authenticity probably bodes well for a future Top Gun – even if making it will be tougher. He just needs to remember what The Revenant and Jurassic World have taught us: balance is key.
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