Die Hard (the original)

[Mike Blakesley]

We are playing this one right now. Boy, I have missed action movies that you could easily follow the plot; that didn't require that you'd seen a dozen other movies to understand; and only had one "good guy."

Since the last time I saw "Die Hard," I had read that the scene in which Alan Rickman falls to his death was done by actually dropping him onto an air-filled cushion. The director told him he would count down from 3 - 2 - 1 and then drop him, but they actually dropped him when they reached "1" so the look of fear on his face would be more genuine. I think the result was definitely accomplished.

We had a smallish crowd last night but I heard people saying to each other on the way out, "Now THAT'S the way to see Die Hard!"

[Marcel Birgelen]

At first sight, Die Hard may look like one of those run-of-the-mill action flicks from the late 80s, but if you look closer, you'll see that they put a bit more effort into the script of this one and it shows. The result is still one of the most legendary action movies, even though the action could hardly compete with the high-octane CGI fest of today, where entire cities are pulverized in front of our eyes.

Bruce Willis as John McLane is a far more believable hero than most of those muscle-heroes we got in the 1980s. He's not all-powerful, but rather vulnerable. His mission hinges on a secret, that can be exposed any minute and at the end of the movie, he looks like he's gone through hell and back again. The script neatly positions him as the underdog and people tend to like the underdog. The scene where he has to step through broken glass, I guess we all could feel a bit of the pain John had to go through.

Because we care about the characters in this movie, the violence on screen feels real. Although it's all pretty explicit, the movie still manages to bring a somewhat lighthearted tone to it. The sarcasm of John McLane and his primary adversary Hans Gruber, together with the goofy interactions with McLane's taxi driver prevent yourself from emotionally digging in too deep into this movie and maintain a spirit of optimism, even when John McLane almost literally gets shot to pieces.

The success of this movie spawned some sequels, most of them rank somewhere between meh and awful... I guess the only other installment worth your efforts is the third one. Although most of it doesn't make any sense at all, the on-screen chemistry between Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson manages to carry the otherwise paper-thin plot to the end.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

There used to be a video on Youtube, but that's no longer there. IN leiu here is an article about it.

[Bobby Henderson]

It has been over 30 years, but my first time watching Die Hard still ranks as one of my favorite movie-going experiences.

I went to the Baronet theater in Manhattan with somewhat low expectations, partly because I found Bruce Willis kind of annoying at the time. I wasn't a big fan of the Moonlighting TV series and, IIRC, Bruce Willis was doing that "Bruno" lounge singer thing on the side in night clubs. Still, the John McClane character he played won over audiences. It was kind of a new thing at the time for a movie to have an action hero as more of a relatable every-man: a cop afraid of heights with a failing marriage to a woman far more successful than him. Contrast Willis' character to the bad guys: an international team of professional "terrorists" led by the sinister Hans Gruber. I think Alan Rickman did just as much to turn Die Hard into a hit as Bruce Willis. The movie had a great supporting cast. "Nakatomi Tower," which is Fox Plaza in Century City in real life, seemed like a character itself. The tower is iconic now. Just about everyone knows it as "the Die Hard building."

The TV ads for Die Hard in the New York market included the blurb, "in 70mm six track Dolby Stereo that will blow you through the back wall of the theater." With that kind of advertising one might have expected a lot of 70mm prints spread throughout metro NYC, but only one theater in the NYC area was booked with a 70mm print: the Baronet. I've never heard the Fox Fanfare (with CinemaScope extension) sound better. The drums were thunderous. The film's soundtrack was really punchy.

[Mike Blakesley]

At first sight, Die Hard may look like one of those run-of-the-mill action flicks from the late 80s, but if you look closer, you'll see that they put a bit more effort into the script of this one and it shows. The result is still one of the most legendary action movies, even though the action could hardly compete with the high-octane CGI fest of today, where entire cities are pulverized in front of our eyes.

Bruce Willis as John McLane is a far more believable hero than most of those muscle-heroes we got in the 1980s. He's not all-powerful, but rather vulnerable.

I don't agree that the action can't compete with today. It looks WAY BETTER than today's action because it's more realistic. You know they had to really blow up some kind of explosives to get those effects, and part of the wonderment of it is how they did it without major property (or personal) damage. The cartoony violence of today is so fantastic that you can't relate to it, and it lessens the amount of care you have for the characters.

The vulnerability is definitely what's missing from today's 'hero" movies. People don't care about saving "the planet," "the world," "the universe" or "the galaxy" near as much as saving, say, your wife or a group of your friends, because they can't possibly relate to it. That's why the first Superman movie was so effective -- because he was saving whole cities, but his main driver was to save ONE person - Lois Lane. Everyone wants to protect a loved one, but nobody in real life is ever in the position of saving the galaxy.

The success of this movie spawned some sequels, most of them rank somewhere between meh and awful... I guess the only other installment worth your efforts is the third one.

I'd have to disagree on this, I think the second one is better. Roger Ebert even gave it the nod as one of the best movies of the year. It doesn't have the awesomeness of the original, but still fun to watch. The scene where the bad guys hack into the air-traffic-control system and "adjust" the height of the ground to cause a plane crash is pretty chilling and given today's hacker climate, easy to imagine being possible. Once again... relatable.

The one scene of Die Hard that drives me nuts (because it's so UNrealistic) is the scene featuring the LAPD dispatcher being so clueless. I can't imagine any dispatcher, hearing what she was hearing from Willis, not taking it seriously. I always thought that scene could have been handled better somehow. Maybe I've been watching too much "Adam-12" lately.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I don't agree that the action can't compete with today. It looks WAY BETTER than today's action because it's more realistic. You know they had to really blow up some kind of explosives to get those effects, and part of the wonderment of it is how they did it without major property (or personal) damage. The cartoony violence of today is so fantastic that you can't relate to it, and it lessens the amount of care you have for the characters.

If you realistically look at special effects today, then it's clear that modern special effects, given sufficient budget and care, look way better than anything we could achieve back in those days. The problem is that many of those things are very hard to relate to. While we have an idea what it looks like when a big building explodes, we have very little reference of how it would look like when an alien atomizes an entire city. But the best special effects probably are those you don't even notice. You'd be absolutely shocked how much CGI there is in almost any modern Hollywood movie, most of which you don't even notice.

I don't know if it really matters if SFX are done via real good CGI or real good practical effects to be honest. Look at a movie like Tenet for example. It contained more practical effects than CGI, by grace of the director, but could you really relate to the stuff happening on screen? Especially the end-scene, was complete SFX-overdrive in fast-forward and reverse to me, my "care-factor" dropped below freezing during that entire scene, even though it was real buildings they were blowing up and not just some computer-generated fairy dust.

I guess we agree on the fact that all this SFX-overload hasn't led to better movies in overall. Instead of using the technology for what it's good, it's all too often used for completely absurd scenes, where all physics left the building years ago. That's probably why I don't really care about all those super-hero movies anymore. None of their actions really has any "heft" to it. By the grace of CGI, they can do whatever they want to do. So, no matter if they save the day, city, planet, galaxy or universe, we don't really care.

I'd have to disagree on this, I think the second one is better. Roger Ebert even gave it the nod as one of the best movies of the year. It doesn't have the awesomeness of the original, but still fun to watch. The scene where the bad guys hack into the air-traffic-control system and "adjust" the height of the ground to cause a plane crash is pretty chilling and given today's hacker climate, easy to imagine being possible. Once again... relatable.

The problem I have with this movie is that it has so many plot holes, it's not really believable anymore. While this scene is shocking, I do know a bit how ILS works. It uses fixed, mounted antennas and you can't just move the glide path a few hundred feet below ground. And even if you could do so, all those planes would've radar based altimeters, they would've been warned of the approaching ground.

The one scene of Die Hard that drives me nuts (because it's so UNrealistic) is the scene featuring the LAPD dispatcher being so clueless. I can't imagine any dispatcher, hearing what she was hearing from Willis, not taking it seriously. I always thought that scene could have been handled better somehow. Maybe I've been watching too much "Adam-12" lately.

Have you had to deal with "big city" police departments before? If so, this scene feels utterly connectable.

[Mike Blakesley]

Good arguments all, and I will have to plead ignorance on the big city police department thing. I suppose they get enough crazy calls from goofballs that when a real unusual thing comes in, they have to take it with a grain of salt..

This sentence says it all for me:

Instead of using the technology for what it's good, it's all too often used for completely absurd scenes, where all physics left the building years ago.

It drives me nuts when things happen way too fast, or too slow, or they don't seem to have any weight to them. Or they have too much weight. I don't care if the badass hero (or villain) is 300 pounds of muscle, he's still not going to crack the pavement when he jumps 30 feet off a building. And Superman could NOT pick up a bridge by one end, either. (He was even doing that in the cartoons and I remember thinking it didn't seem right even then.)

[Leo Enticknap]

The historical angle of the movie makes an interesting time capsule, too. The Cold War was coming to an end, and America's new adversaries are perceived to be Europe (as embodied by Alan Rickman's character and the repeated quotes from Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the soundtrack, which had recently been promoted as an unofficial European "national anthem") and Japan. And the threat is now economic, not military. At the start of the movie we are led to believe that the plot is about conventional political terrorism, before it is revealed that the motive of Rickman's gang is in reality economic - the scene in which he rattles off a list of 1970s sounding terrorist organizations whose jailed leaders he demands the release of, and then, when the call is over, making it clear that he couldn't care less about them: he just wants the money.

But traditional American values can still save the day against these new threats, in the form of Bruce Willis and all the Western references. There is also a healthy dose of Reaganite mistrust of big government, expressed through the FBI being the constant butt of the joke, culminating in the infamous "Yippee ... just like Saigon!" line (i.e. the ultimate act of stupidity - actually celebrating the Vietnam War) in the helicopter.

[Bobby Henderson]

It drives me nuts when things happen way too fast, or too slow, or they don't seem to have any weight to them. Or they have too much weight.

IMHO, too many modern movie productions do way too little to maintain suspension of disbelief. They do a piss poor job of convincing the audience of the "reality" their story is sort-of trying to convey. The problems are present in the ridiculous story beats. And they're also present in the CGI.

The capabilities of modern high end computing technology is pretty staggering. But in motion picture visual effects the capabilities are often being used to just churn and burn out content as fast as possible. Being innovative or reaching new quality levels is not a big motivator in visual effects for movies today. The industry is coasting on auto-pilot. The end result is reasonably well-rendered visuals, but visuals that still look clearly artificial. Human actors in the same shot seem like they're interacting with a cartoon. And it's a cartoon not as believable as the interaction between humans and "toons" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? GC renderings of people are especially suspect, particularly with super hero movies. Again, the end result looks like a well rendered cartoon rather than something real.

Back when most visual effects were produced with "practical" methods it seemed like far more planning went into the effects shots. I did not care for Die Hard 2: Die Harder all that much. To me the story seemed plodding and the cast of characters not nearly as good as the first installment. One thing I did like was the practical effects by ILM. The passenger jet crashes and explosions were pretty believable looking. That was all thanks to ILM being very nit-picky about details when planning the sequences.

One of the most impressive practical visual effects I've seen was what turned out to be a model helicopter in the movie Explorers from the mid 1980's. When I first saw that movie I thought it was a real helicopter hovering around this home-made spacecraft made by kids in the movie. I didn't know it was a visual effect. The helicopter was a large model on a moving arm against a blue screen. One detail that sold the effect was the model's rotor blade. ILM did the math to shoot the model at the right frame rate to catch the rotor giving off that weird spinning helicopter blade illusion. They had a spot light effect on a different film plate. The whole thing looked convincingly real.

Even in early CG sequences, like those in The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park a great deal of planning went into each sequence because the budget and time constraints didn't leave room for second chances. They needed to do everything possible to get the shots right before starting the final render.

Today there doesn't seem to be as much sense of discipline in planning and designing such effects sequences. They just crank it out to "good enough" standards.

[Stefan Scholz]

way to see it, is a 70 mm blow up, just for the soundtrack. The mix is incredible, and one of the best "Sensurround", if I am entitled to say so for the gorgeous explosions tracks. Lots of fun.
The 35mm, in comparison, sucks in sound and image quality on our print.

[Marcel Birgelen]

IMHO, too many modern movie productions do way too little to maintain suspension of disbelief. They do a piss poor job of convincing the audience of the "reality" their story is sort-of trying to convey. The problems are present in the ridiculous story beats. And they're also present in the CGI.

The capabilities of modern high end computing technology is pretty staggering. But in motion picture visual effects the capabilities are often being used to just churn and burn out content as fast as possible. Being innovative or reaching new quality levels is not a big motivator in visual effects for movies today. The industry is coasting on auto-pilot. The end result is reasonably well-rendered visuals, but visuals that still look clearly artificial. Human actors in the same shot seem like they're interacting with a cartoon. And it's a cartoon not as believable as the interaction between humans and "toons" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? GC renderings of people are especially suspect, particularly with super hero movies. Again, the end result looks like a well rendered cartoon rather than something real.

If you look at a lot of those big budget movie productions of the last 10 or so years and you simply judge them on the special effects and "world building" part, then it's often mind blowing how much work and dedication has gone into many of it. Yes, there are plenty of examples of horrible special effects, even in modern movies. But if you take the average Disney/Marvel production, there is so much stuff going on, it's not something you crank out of a computer on auto-drive. Hundreds if not thousands of very talented people worked on this, to make it happen. If you have ever worked on such a process, you'll easily see how many man-years are required to pull it off. Even if it's "just CGI", it's not like it just rolls out of the computer. All the stuff on screen still has to be modeled, textured, animated and composited into the final image. That's also why CGI isn't always cheaper than practical effects.

A lot has happened over the years, that allows us to insert SFX into much rougher footage. For early CGI effects like the water-face scene in the Abyss, perfectly still and perfectly lighted scenes were necessary. Nowadays we've got 3D composition software with camera tracking features and lightning correction, which essentially allows you to drop CGI into almost any scene in post-production.

The irony of all of this is that I often wonder what would happen if we would just spend 20% of the efforts which were put into the SFX part of such a production into writing the actual story of that same movie. It's like Hollywood hired the world's talent pool when it comes down to visual effects, but has most of their scripts being written and directed by a bunch of often politically over-motivated monkeys with a barely functioning xerox machine.

I guess that's part why so many of those movies end up like looking more like ILM's latest technology demo than like a real movie, with relatable characters and an engaging story line.

[Bobby Henderson]

If you look at a lot of those big budget movie productions of the last 10 or so years and you simply judge them on the special effects and "world building" part, then it's often mind blowing how much work and dedication has gone into many of it.

You would be surprised how much of the "world building" stuff is done with stock 3D models, scripting routines to auto populate and position the objects, basic digital matte painting work and regular photography. What important innovations are taking place? The "world building" we see in a new Marvel movie is hardly any different in principal than a Lord of the Rings movie from almost 20 years ago.

Including more models, more digital characters, more sprites, etc into a CGI scene does not automatically equate to making something look real. An effects shop can throw all that stuff in there and still arrive at something that looks like it is taking place in a video game console or a cartoon.

Yes, there are plenty of examples of horrible special effects, even in modern movies. But if you take the average Disney/Marvel production, there is so much stuff going on, it's not something you crank out of a computer on auto-drive. Hundreds if not thousands of very talented people worked on this, to make it happen.

Again, that's nothing new. Go back 20 years or more and the same thing was happening. Except back then the various firms doing the work had to get things done using far less advanced hardware and software. They didn't have as much room for error because the render times were far longer. Another major difference is most of the CG work back then was being done domestically. Today a great deal of the grunt work is getting jobbed out overseas to people working for far less money. Budgets overall aren't dropping; the people at the top are just getting paid more.

The difference in computing technology today and just 10 years ago is huge, even in more affordable mainstream computers. Despite all the improvements most effects-driven movies are still be produced in 2K, if even that. The studios are continuing to use the leaps in computing horsepower to crank out content faster, not better. When it comes to creating visuals that successfully cross the uncanny valley to look real, it requires the people doing the creative work to sweat all kinds of extra details. In today's rushed production environments the creative workers often don't have that luxury.

Under those conditions it's rare for me to get impressed by effects shots in modern movies. Too often I feel like I am watching an elaborate cartoon. Once in awhile I'll see something that does seem impressive. In Terminator: Salvation they did a pretty good job digitally re-creating a 1984 version of the Arnold Swarzenegger terminator. But such moments are fleeting.

A lot has happened over the years, that allows us to insert SFX into much rougher footage. For early CGI effects like the water-face scene in the Abyss, perfectly still and perfectly lighted scenes were necessary. Nowadays we've got 3D composition software with camera tracking features and lightning correction, which essentially allows you to drop CGI into almost any scene in post-production.

Even in The Abyss the CG elements were composited into camera shots that were moving. I think CGI really hit its full stride with Jurassic Park. Many of the shots with CG dinosaurs were composited into live action plates with a considerable amount of camera movement (be it hand-held or Steadicam), like the shot where the T-Rex goes chasing after Jeff Goldblum.

[Geoff Jones]

I'm planning to introduce my 13-year-old to DIE HARD in the next few days.

I wish I could show it to her in the cinema, where it belongs. (My 16-year-old got to see it on the big screen a few years ago.)

Anyway to prep the second kid, I made sure to show her this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fagq3CgSe4A

[Marcel Birgelen]

Even in The Abyss the CG elements were composited into camera shots that were moving. I think CGI really hit its full stride with Jurassic Park. Many of the shots with CG dinosaurs were composited into live action plates with a considerable amount of camera movement (be it hand-held or Steadicam), like the shot where the T-Rex goes chasing after Jeff Goldblum.

Always keep in mind that the "water alien" scene of The Abyss was always considered an optional scene and that Jurassic Parc had just 4 minutes of CGI dinos. They worked more than a year on those 4 minutes. They had to match the camera angle to the CGI material for each and every frame. It still was a breakthrough though, because it definitely showed that CGI could be used for realistic, complex special effects. And the CGI in Jurassic Park ended up looking better than those CGI effects in many movies that followed it.

I think that stuff like scripting, modern inverse kinematics and even the introduction of AI help to create more realistically looking CGI, without someone needing to adjust stuff on a frame-by-frame basis is a good thing. It speeds things up and makes it more accessible, even for lower budget productions.

Regarding using stock 3D art... Yeah, it happens and sometimes I even spot some of those. But then again, Hollywood has been the master of illusions all along. How many movies share the same generic "New York streets" of that WB or Universal backlot? How many times haven't we seen "Hill Valley" with a bunch of different facades? How many times haven't we heard Wilhelm fall of a rock?

In the end, CGI is just a tool. Like practically all tools, it can be used to do good and bad. Personally, I don't think that it's CGI that has ruined Hollywood as we knew it. It's more complex than that. CGI was just a side-effect. Someone discovered that "wow-factor" and "recognizable franchises" was an easier, less risky way to sell movies than likeable characters and a compelling and engaging plot, at least for a while...

[Bobby Henderson]

Always keep in mind that the "water alien" scene of The Abyss was always considered an optional scene and that Jurassic Parc had just 4 minutes of CGI dinos. They worked more than a year on those 4 minutes. They had to match the camera angle to the CGI material for each and every frame. It still was a breakthrough though, because it definitely showed that CGI could be used for realistic, complex special effects. And the CGI in Jurassic Park ended up looking better than those CGI effects in many movies that followed it.

I don't think you're getting my point. Back then, in those early, ground-breaking days of CGI, the crews planned the shots with discipline. They sweated all kinds of small, seemingly meaningless details in advance. They did that because they knew there was no room for do-overs. Even in the "analog" days with practical effects there was often just one chance to get the shot right. When the shots did work or successfully final render there was a big emotional pay-off and real sense of accomplishment.

Today the ethic is more about cranking out shots as fast as possible in standards good enough to get by. A modern big budget movie may have hundreds or even thousands of effects shots. But when things are done churn-and-burn style it does tend to show. The sense of realism can be easily lost when a production is rendering shots in terms of volume and speed rather than quality. There may not be any better proof of this than the artificial 2D>3D conversions we were seeing years ago following the success of Avatar (a native 3D movie). Some 2D>3D conversions were not all that bad, but a bunch of them were freaking garbage and an insult to movie-goers paying the $3 or more premium per ticket to watch a fake 3D movie.

There is nothing especially challenging in CGI anymore for movie productions, or even series TV. The computer systems and software have grown advanced enough to allow a lot of TV shows to do CGI and digital backlot work on a limited budget especially when they can farm out some of the grunt work to India or wherever. It's as if a dumbing-down of the industry has been taking place. Lord knows, it has been happening in other fields within the graphics industry. I see a lot of garbage quality work in the print industry. And the sign industry, at least here in the US, is utterly infected unqualified people passing themselves off as "graphic designers." It's no wonder so many cities and suburbs are adopting ever more strict, sweeping sign codes. We're causing the anti-signs backlash to happen by not giving enough of a damn about the quality of work we are producing. Again, at too many sign shops it's just a churn-and-burn attitude.

In the end, CGI is just a tool. Like practically all tools, it can be used to do good and bad. Personally, I don't think that it's CGI that has ruined Hollywood as we knew it. It's more complex than that.

I didn't say that CGI has ruined Hollywood as we knew it. But churn-and-burn style CGI is just another example of how Hollywood studios are increasingly phoning it in rather than putting in a full, legit effort on any given project. Look how dependent Disney has become on Star Wars and Marvel ideas. They're rarely taking chances on anything new. And even if the movie isn't based on a previously existing piece of IP the script is going to be run through the Save the Cat formula machine.