A Few Words on Editing (Or, "Are Special Effects Ruining Movies?")

This weekend I, like many others, saw the new Indiana Jones movie. I won't make any jokes now about how Harrison Ford is really old (he is) or how upsetting it was to see Cate Blanchett doing a bad fake Russian accent (very). Instead, what I'm dying to talk about as the film floats around in my mind, is what special effects have done to the way movies are made.

Special effects can be awesome (duh). The upset comes when power-crazed directors (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, et al.) decide that now that they can turn anything they imagine into a scene, they should turn it into a scene. Lucas couldn't reel in his desire for superfluous special effects when he shot the Star Wars prequels, Peter Jackson (who did just fine controlling himself for the Lord of the Rings films) can't stop himself from spending too much time on dinosaurs and giant insects in King Kong, and Spielberg allows bloated special effects setups to drain all of the fun out of his latest Indy outing.

Of course, now that we have the capacity to create them, special effects should be utilized. Directors simply seem to have forgotten about an important step in the storytelling process: editing. If (SPOILER ALERT) giant, man-eating ants aren't necessary to the plot of your film (and trust me, Spielberg, they weren't), CUT THEM! Precious moments of my Sunday afternoon could have been better spent if directors could simply learn to control their desire to CGI the charm out of their films.

When the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films were created, perhaps Lucas and Spielberg sat around lamenting the fact that their precious visions of elaborate galactic senates and mysterious otherworldly temples couldn't be realized on the big screen. But, at least the movies were about stories and characters instead of aging tech-geeks high-fiving each other behind-the-scenes for their ability to create fake bugs.