Are Special Effects in Movies Today Worse Than Ever?

Special effects have long been a mainstay in the craft of filmmaking. Every generation seems to produce another leap forward in the technology and ability to create on film a realistic depiction of something that is inherently impossible in reality. And it is that definition of the use of special effects that leads one to question if special effects in movies are currently at their worst level ever. In the past, Hollywood moviemakers turned to special effects only, or at least more often than not, when it was simply not within the realm of possibility to film the scene any other way. In other words, you couldn't just go out and find an enormously tall gorilla to play King Kong, nor you could make people fly or disappear. By contrast, in today's films scenes that would in the past have been created completely outside the camera are composed within a computer. There has always been an economic element to the decision to engage in a special effect, but today that decision trumps artistry every time.

Some will laugh at the suggestion that today's special effects are worse than ever, offering up cheesy 1950s science fiction films where the strings holding up the spaceship can be seen. How can those special effects compare to today's science fiction special effects? For one thing, those 1950s space operas were B-movies or worse. They had special effects budgets that even back then would have been less than just the salary of a big star like Liz Taylor or Rock Hudson. What most moviegoers today don't realize is that 90% of the movies they will watch in a theater this year would have been considered a B-movie fifty years ago. Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter are all movies whose subject matter would have made them low-budget quickies back then. So to compare the special effects of low-budget movies to the special effects of today means you must take into consideration the budget allowance for those effects. And when you consider that today's special effects add tens of millions of dollars to production costs, those visible strings don't seem so bad.