Why the Na’vi Are Making Me Blue (Essay)

“There’s a bumper crop of science-fiction wow-porn either currently or recently in movie theaters. We have James Cameron’s majestically tottering blue gelflings in “Avatar”; the truculent Kirk in “Star Trek”; fight-y robots in Michael Bay’s “Transformers” franchise; and the refugee insects of “District 9,” plus their rather splendid floating mothership.

One of the main reasons for the success of these products is public curiosity over the visuals. This is most obvious in the case of “Avatar,” whose publicity materials more or less consist of peremptory orders telling us all to Be Amazed.

Even those of us exhausted by yet another overlong mawkish gush — let alone one which reiterates the old cliche of Going Native and Leading Them to Freedom by Becoming the Most Awesome (White) Mohican™ — can admit that the special effects are impressive. But that’s a very long way from liking them, or thinking they’re a good thing. That computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rotting science fiction from the inside.

In the relentless search to produce the most ostentatiously spectacular scenes possible, CGI, which once had the potential to be a useful aesthetic tool, has become a mannerist absurdity. It is straightforwardly untrue that CGI “looks real.” Are we yet at the point in history where we can all agree we could totally see the digital seams whenever Gollum walked onscreen? Can we stop pretending that the Na’vi and rendered landscapes of Pandora in “Avatar” don’t immediately stand out from the real physical actors, moving as they do with the unpleasant, jarring, parabolic precision of all CGI?

CGI may have been supposed to “look real” once, but not for a long time — quite the opposite, it draws attention to itself. It’s become crucial that CGI is visible, so the audience can obediently coo at it. The Herculean efforts of the digital wizards is endlessly cited as if it were a badge of quality. It is not. It is at best a piece of information.

It’s not just nostalgia to insist that none of these effects have the vividness of, say, Ray Harryhausen’s incomparable stop-motion monsters. Maybe the recent return to such techniques in films like “Coraline,” and the economically-driven sidestepping of the whole digital paradigm in low-budget sci-fi like “Moon” bespeaks a shift away from this deadening foregrounding of the digital. It would be nice to think so. Though on the whole, I don’t.”

China Miéville is a best-selling science-fiction writer and the author of the coming novel “Kraken.”