In advance of what may be the most ambitious and risky film of their career, the notoriously press-shy Wachowski Starship are on a press blitzkrieg right now, with a profile in The New Yorker and a fairly lengthy interview over at Hitfix. During their appearance at Fantastic Fest, the filmmaking pair teased their forthcoming return to the sci-fi action realm with “Jupiter Ascending.”
While talking about the difficulty of world-building in science fiction, Lana Wachowski mentioned that the duo have come up with “a big visual idea” or hook for the upcoming film that would be “the evolutionary jump from bullet-time.” However, she cautioned that in the end it may prove impossible due to the high degree of difficulty and the financial expense that the effect would require.
The Wachowskis have never shied away from attempting to utilize different forms of aesthetics (see: 2008’s incredibly divisive “Speed Racer”) but we wonder, with all the advances of technology, if there really is any digital effect that would truly be too “expensive and difficult” to pull off at this point. At the release of “The Matrix,” films that utilized CGI to the extent of James Cameron’s “Avatar” or “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes” would have seemed like pipe dreams. However, in this age of bloated blockbusters with increasingly bloated CG effects, the truly mesmerizing effects of the past few years have largely been rather low-key in nature, like the spinning hallway and zero-gravity fight in “Inception,” which were achieved with a more practical approach.
What do you guys think, are you interested in seeing what comes after bullet time? Can any effect have as much of an impact at this point as those seen in the Wachowskis' ground-breaking "The Matrix" in 1999? (Remember, not only did it influence filmmakers, but a slew of videogames adopted the style as well). Have we reached the CG frontier?