MasUp, 1: The essay


Over Christmas holidays, I've written an essay looking at the arguments around whether nowadays films that utilising digital visual effects have a goal to wow the audience through amazing images, the spectacle, or try to tell a story, a successful narrative.

Though at first thought, it seems like most are, blowing the audiences eyeballs into a fantasy dimension where anything is possible. However I also tried to argue against that, discussing how the effects and spectacular images still served the narrative or the film, to have an emotional impact that drives the film through the many phases of the story it is trying to tell. One could argue that the stories are bollocks nowadays and lack depth and strength, an argument also presented in my essay. To that, I do kind of agree, for example in Pacific Rim, I argued that the director did not intend on telling a magnificent story, but rather try to convey and highlight other values e.g. the bonds between father and son, humanity working together as one when faced with an apocalyptic crisis,etc.

I'm not a big fan of essays, wasn't the happiest penguin when writing this, but it was a good exercise to get thinking about what's going on nowadays in the cinema with all these highly anticipated superhero films and eye-gasms taking a big part of our entertainment spendings.

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