Hacker Cinema
Jason and the Argonauts
1963 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Don Chaffey
Jason, a fearless sailor and explorer, returns to his home land of Thessaly after a long voyage to claim his rightful throne. He learns, however, that he must first find the magical Golden Fleece. To do so, he must embark on an epic quest fraught with fantastic monsters and terrible perils.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
> > The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
> Says who?
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props, and stuff like that. (as if I'm not already aware of that stuff, LOL) That's where most of the CG is in movies for the last decade or so—they're right about that. It's replacing prop construction, set design & construction, and location shooting.
> This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
No, I'm just not impressed when CG successfully (I disagree it's successful as often as proponents say, and to them I say "give it ten years and a lot of this 'good' stuff will look awful to you", as it's the same ride we've been on with CG the entire time so far, the "look, CG's finally entirely convincing!" movie seems about as convincing as Jason and the Argonauts' stop motion a few years later) does something mundane that wouldn't even have been an effect before.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
> People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over, it was a pretty brief window between "you can always tell the model is a model" and "now it's all computers".
(This should irk you too: CG blood spatter harms every single action movie where it replaces squibs, the movie may survive the harm but that part is terrible every time)
As an audience member, you’re expected to maintain some suspension of disbelief. At a musical no one would say, “no one would actual sing what they could just say!”, or reading a book “those letters could have been scrawled by any kindergartener!”
At that point of the movie the thing the protagonists thought they killed is resurrected in an even more frightening form and dread is elevated. Obviously the viewer is not at risk, so how that is implemented has little bearing on the impact of the scene.
On the other hand, if you are interested in the technical details of how this creature appears next to actors, knowing Cameron’s history in the model department on low budget movies and Ray Harryhausen’s similar technique used in Jason and the argonauts would allow you to appreciate how it was made.
I don’t buy that the late reveal was due to effects limitations. It’s really to take an audience that may have allowed themselves to relax to be immediate brought back to an even higher anxiety level than the proceeding chase.
The political intrigue was interesting. The zombie apocalypse was a singular lack of imagination - how many zombie movies has Hollywood produced? 200? 300? There are even multiple miniseries about zombies. There's simply nothing interesting about them.
Even Lord of the Rings just had to bring in a zombie army at the end, but fortunately didn't spend much screen time on it.
The only one I like was the Jason and the Argonauts one where the hero fights a group of skeletons. The herky-jerky Harry Harrison animation is a pleasure to watch. And it was original.