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I think that's a good question. What's wrong with CGI? Listening to some "Star Wars" fans, you could get the impression that extensive use of CGI means the death of good cinema. Some James Bond fans have suggested the same thing, mostly following the release of "Die Another Day."

So, what's wrong with it? My own feeling is, probably nothing. The process works nicely, within its limits, and has advanced tremendously since the debut of "The Last Starfighter," which made cinematic history as the first film where all of the spacecraft were computer generated. Seen today, these efforts appear less realistic that what you can find in a lot of video games, but that doesn't detract from the historic value. It simply shows how far the state of the art has progressed.

CGI has been particularly useful in maritime adventure stories. When Wolfgang Peterson made "Das Boot," he wanted to eliminate the oversized water drops that always made models seem so obviously fake in rough weather scenes, or just when rushing through the "ocean." Some experiments disclosed that, in order to get the effect to work properly, the smallest useful model was about 42 feet long. With computer generated effects, this is no longer a problem. Real water doesn't scale, since the laws of physics determine the minimum size of a water drop, but CGI water scales quite nicely.

But there are still complaints. In "Star Wars," the complaints are mostly that the CGI effects are there at all. George Lucas' statement that advances in computer generated imagery now allow him to go back and complete the original three films the way he wanted to do them, but couldn't, falls on deaf ears. It's a bit like arguing with some fundamentalist Christians that the New International Version of the Bible is a better translation than the Authorized Version (King James). They don't care—they just want it the way it always was, even if that isn't as good as it could be.

The "added" scene with Han and Jabba in the Hanger in "New Hope" is an example. It "doesn't belong there," according to the purists. Yet those same purists seem to overlook the obvious, which is that the footage of Han exists, so Lucas obviously shot the scene at the time he made the first film, but left it out, probably because it would have cost too much to build an animatronic Jabba for a single scene in the first outing of an as-yet unproven property.

The James Bond fans' complaints, involving an entirely new film where the CGI effects were always there, are of a different nature. These are more along the lines of, "This isn't physically possible." What they're saying is that the CGI stunts violate what should probably be the first law of "realistic" effects. If what you're attempting to simulate can't be accomplished in the real world, you shouldn't be doing it in a computer.

This is the difference between "Spider-man," where the web-swinging effects are certainly outside the limits of real physical ability, but work because of the essentially fantasical nature of the story itself. Comic book characters, especially super heroes, even when portrayed by live actors on film, aren't bound by the limits of human performance.

Cars, among other things, are. When Bond did a barrel roll in a car while jumping across a canal, people watching the film might have though it was a fairly unlikely stunt, but since someone had to actually do it to get it on film, it worked. Jumping a motorcycle over a hovering helicopter, while equally unlikely, was also accomplished in the real world. Stunts, frequently spectacular, have been a Bond staple. But once the stunt limits were pushed beyond the physically possible, with CGI people replacing the live stunt performers, they stopped working.

Spider-man is a cartoon, even when performed by a person. James Bond is a real person, despite the fantastic situations he finds himself in. The rules are different.

I have to say, in the proper context, CGI effects definitely do belong. It wouldn't have been possible to make "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" effectively without those effects. But, in that film, no one was doing anything that couldn't have been duplicated, at out rageous expense and, probably, the lives of a lot of stunt personnel, in the physical world.

The Bond producers might want to keep that in mind next time out. CGI is fine, but keep it within actual physical limits.

After all, at least on the web I'm definitely a CGI kind of guy.

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