Blade II (film)
First, I want to be clear on one thing: this was a terrible
movie. Despite liking Wesley Snipes (and I do!), the script was
perfunctory, it was shot like a horror movie, not a comic-book or
an action movie, and the alleged romantic theme was laughable.
That said, like the first film, there was one aspect of this movie that
was ahead of its time. I remember watching it for the first time and
thinking that the CG spliced into the fight scenes was distracting and
stupid, not to mention that they used a liberal dose of pro-wrestling
moves in the choreography (I don't have to tell you how much that bored
the crap out of me). But on a second viewing I realise that, despite an
only mediocre execution, the F/X department actually used a lot of the
same techniques of animation that made Spider-Man 2 so good.
Specifically, in Blade II they started thinking outside the box, or
perhaps outside the lense. They stopped animating the CG bits as if they
had a camera on set and a couple of performers who were capable of, shall
we say, a "ridiculous aerobatic display." They actually allowed the camera
to travel around the CG figures and freely slowed down the shots and sped
them up again without 'cutting' back to normal speed. It's as if they
applied the concept of morphing to camera speed.
The action movie benefit of CG is that they no longer need to worry
about th1e logistics of getting shots or getting actors to execute
choreography. It's no accident that superhero movies are using this to
their advantage in excess of some others. After all, a comic-book panel
can capture any angle of any scene, and the characters' actions are
limited only by what the artists can conceive of and draw. I konw it's not
'in style' with current artistic theory (the post-structuralists would
have my balls for this... if they weren't constantly with ideological
indecision), butt he more I examine different artistic media, the more I
think that the technology and the creativity are holistically joined. In
art, there are no coincidences, though there are certainly a lot of
accidents.
