C.G.I-don't-have-to-do-anything...

 I'm not sure when the movie going public first became aware of CGI, as a concept. Obviously, with hindsight, the water tentacle in 1988's "The Abyss" was done with computers, but I'm not sure how many people realised it at the time.
 Audiences in 1993 almost certainly assumed that all the dinosaurs that escaped from the shoddy fences in Jurassic Park were robots or puppets.
 Whenever it was, ever since CGI became part of the public consciousness, people have been complaining that it's ruining movies.
 I'm no stranger to this myself. Bad CGI breaks the spell of a movie like nothing else I can think of. It's the 21st century equivalent of a boom mike dipping into shot, or a corpse cracking one eye open to see if they're still in shot.
 Even the good stuff, however, comes under fire for ruining an entire generation of films. I disagree with this, but I do think it might be ruining a generation of actors.
 First and foremost, movies are about spectacle. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded. Whilst dramatic, dialogue-driven entertainment can be fantastic spectacles in terms of acting, the simple truth is that cinema surpassed the theatre as the most popular form of entertainment because you can do more things in a movie than you can on a stage. In terms of the give-and-take, you can film "12 Angry Men", but you can't have a stage play where giant lizards crush Tokyo.
 This need for spectacle has been met in different ways for different generations. Initially, the very idea of moving images was a draw. A single train moving towards the screen was enough to excite a roomful of terrified Frenchmen, or, as they're historically known, Frenchmen.
 Then came sound, and colour, but even before that, the limits of technology meant that the cinema had to rely on something unique for spectacle: Talented stars.
 I don't want to drum up sympathy for the rich and famous - especially as the rich and famous have a habit of being assholes off screen - but look at what stars of yesteryear were put through: Buster Keaton once broke his neck throwing himself off a train for a comedy bit, and ignored the injury for so long that when he found out about it, it was already healed. Yakima Canutt got himself run over by horses so often that his blood type was sugar lumps. It continued for decades. For one dance number in Singin' In The Rain, Debbie Reynolds danced so long and hard that she ruptured blood vessels in her feet, at which point Gene Kelly decided she still wasn't good enough and over-dubbed her tap moves himself. In the same movie, Donald O'Connor was required to do a scene in which he ran up three walls in succession, completing a backwards somersault at the top of each one. An 80-a-day smoker, he collapsed after filming the scene and, a week later, was told that they'd lost the negative and he had to do it all again.
 As better effects eventually came in, stars could impress with their realism, as much as their physical abilities. Increasingly, it became a case of one or the other.
 Either you were Al Pacino or Bruce Lee. Ten years later, you were Robert DeNiro or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
 Nowadays, however, you really don't have to be anything, and it's all the fault of special effects.
 Shia Laboeuf is the greatest living example of this. He's not a dramatic powerhouse, known for his brilliant performances in taxing roles.
 He's also not physically capable of anything more impressive than the next guy.
 But he's a gazillionaire, chiefly because he lives in an era where you can have giant robots punching each other through skyscrapers all around him, and all he has to do is stay out of the way.
 Same with superhero films - Mark Ruffalo, who is admittedly a talented actor, doesn't have to do anything when he becomes the Hulk. He can just toddle off to the catering truck while someone with a Mac creates merry hell with his green-skinned alter-ego. And even though he is talented, nobody is going to see that movie because Ruffalo would have made a decent "Hamlet."
 It doesn't even have to be the big stuff that's all done in post-production, either. It's child's play these days to have a stunt man perform a scene and then digitally glue an actor's face onto him afterwards. You often don't even need the stunt man, as he can be added later on. With the actor's face.
 We're already ten years past the first movies where all actors have to do is say the lines, and someone else makes a CGI person to go on screen and say them.
 In an age when celebrity exists as a sort of self-perpetuating symbiote of stupidity, where morons are famous in the eyes of the stupid for being stupid morons, it's hard not to long for a time when stars could act, or sing and dance, or do anything other than stand there while someone renders pixels around them. Or, in some cases, in place of them.
 Sadly, the best way for non-entity celebrities to get movie careers is going to involve a lot of talented computer guys, and the second half of a deal with Satan that many of them have already clearly signed. Think about it: Would you see a movie with Jedward in it?
 Course not.
 Would you see a movie with Jedward in it where photorealistic dinosaurs fought robots on the surface of Mars?
 Probably, yeah.
 With CGI cataclysms drawing the people in, actors don't need to have any talent anymore.
 It's not the movies that are getting worse because of computer graphics. It's the lazy actors in them.