Contact was one of the first DVDs I ever bought and the one that got me hooked on commentaries. Listening to Zemeckis and the special effects guy talk about the different shots was fascinating. CGI either creates the reality (a la Jurassic Park) or it should be non-obvious. Contact had a lot of shots of the non-obvious type. One I thought was interesting was a scene in which the young girl playing Jody Foster as a child is talking on a ham radio. According to the commentary she’s on a sound stage in Los Angeles. The camera pulls back out through a window and though we can still see her we can also see the exterior of the house which is somewhere like Connecticut. That’s a neat effect and one I wouldn’t have noticed or thought about.

Then you have other shots such as the skies that Jammer mentioned. Some of the scenes in Contact were filmed at the Arecibo radio telescope in Costa Rica. The dish at Arecibo is quite weathered and has a “dirty” look. Zemeckis had the special effects guys clean it up and (if memory serves) it’s pretty white in the movie. To me that smacks of trying to make things a little too perfect.

Perhaps then movies like Beowulf and A Christmas Carol are a natural progression for someone like Zemeckis. I mean if someone points a camera at a beautiful blue sky in New Mexico and says “Let’s try and make that look better” then 100% CGI gives them the opportunity to attain perfection in their medium.

Then Jurassic Park arrived in 1993.

The minute I saw a living breathing dinosaur rendered by CGI towering over Sam Neill and Laura Dern, filling a 30-foot screen, it was like a new world opening before my very eyes. John Williams’s score helped to fill that sense of wonder. I’ll never forget that first time.

I have no problems with CGI. The way it’s used depends on the mood of the story. Polar Express worked because the animation reflects that cartoony christmas feel. Christmas Carol is a natural evolution to that, while Beowulf took an entirely different direction. It felt as real as it could get

Can’t say I share the same opinion about Final Fantasy; I thought that was already a dreadful story that no amount of CGI could possibly save; videogame movie adaptations DO NOT WORK.

I don’t know if Zemeckis plans to return to live-action, but I won’t blame him if he sticks to animation. It works for him, the way it often works for Tim Burton.

Personally, I think these films have been improving. Polar Express was step one, Beowulf was quite leap, and Christmas Carol took another one as well.

CGI is still an evolving technology. Some movies end up looking dated faster, but I think it works, as long as the story is involving. It worked for the Star Wars films.

It even worked on the Star Trek TNG films. Generations was the first film to push the CGI envelope, through the Enterprise models and the Nexus effects. First Contact and Insurrection went even further. It even affected Voyager and DS9, midway through their run.

You couldn’t do a Jem’Hadar/Cardassian fleet swarming DS9 at the end of season 5 in any other way. You can only do so much with practical visual effects. CGI is necessary, both in terms of visual sequences and cost issues.

“Check out “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” to see how lifelike they can make people/living things look in pure CGI.”

Actually, it gets worse the more lifelike looking the CGI dolls get. Google the term Uncanny Valley. That’s why the scaled back the realism and details for Fiona in the movie Shrek. Zemekis has taken a wrong turn into the Uncanny Valley years ago and doesn’t seem to notice.

And as for the comments about Polar Express and the technology being too far behind, I disagree strongly. Check out “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” to see how lifelike they can make people/living things look in pure CGI. It’s so lifelike that it is jarring to hear the voices of various famous actors/actresses coming from “people” that look nothing like them. For Polar Express, I think the look was either a conscious choice and/or them being too cheap to make it look as good as it could have.

Zemeckis is one of my favorite directors. It must be tempting for a lot of film maker’s to play with all the new, rather boundless capabilities of CGI. Like kids in a candy store, allowed to let their imaginations run wild and actually do all the things the could never have thought to attempt even five years ago. I can understand the fun of indulging that.

“Forrest Gump” will always be > than “A Christmas Carol,” however.

When I read “A Christmas Story,” I initially thought he was doing a CGI remake of the 1983 classic. Then I realized it was supposed to be “A Christmas Carol.”