In retrospect, we should probably blame Gollum.
If Andy Serkis hadn’t been so capable at inhabiting the creeping skeezer in the “Lord of the Rings” films, maybe we would have realized 10 years ago that most CGI motion capture performances are good for nothing more than drawing a lot of traffic to the Wikipedia page for “Uncanny valley.” But he was, so now we’ve been stuck with a decade of weightless dead-eyed freaks, as director after director attempts to recreate that original magic.
Recently, it appeared the trend had been quarantined, safely limited to the filmography of Robert Zemeckis. But now, with the trailer for “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn,”* it appears the motion-capture sickness has infected Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson as well**. If disappointing box-office returns can’t kill off the motion-capture trend, can anything?
*Does every film title need a colon now? It’s like they’re being written by the people over at HuffPost!
**Yes, we know that the motion capture is an attempt to recapture the
look of the original Tintin comic books, while still bringing the epic
scale that filmmakers seem to think 2D is incapable of. But it still
looks weird.
