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# How movies became unreal and why games always have been
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/how-movies-became-unreal-and-why-games-always-have-been/
- Published: 2012-09-28T16:30:09.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T14:52:18.000Z
- Description: J. Hoberman, exiled from the Village Voice, hits one out of the park at The New York Review of Books with his discussion of the introduction of CGI into film. – – – In short, whether as a source of visual data or as a delivery system, computer-generated imagery has introduced a radical impurity into
- Author: Joseph Bernstein
- Tags: News, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/tron_evolution_video_game_image_01.jpg)

J. Hoberman, exiled from the Village Voice, hits one out of the park at The New York Review of Books with [his discussion](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/26/trapped-total-cinema/?utm%5Fsource=feedburner&utm%5Fmedium=feed&utm%5Fcampaign=Feed%3A+nybooks+%28The+New+York+Review+of+Books%29) of the introduction of CGI into film.

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> In short, whether as a source of visual data or as a delivery system, computer-generated imagery has introduced a radical impurity into a motion picture apparatus that, save for the introduction of synchronous sound, remained markedly consistent for a hundred years. Thus, *The Matrix* (1999), written and directed by the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, represents a landmark hybrid in its combination of live action with frame-by-frame digital manipulation. No previous animated film had so naturalistically represented the physical world. “Once you have seen a movie like *The Matrix*, you can’t unsee it,” a Los Angeles exhibitor told the *New York Times* in 2002, referring to the ways in which CGI had altered the action film, in part by allowing serious actors to perform impossible stunts.[*The Matrix*](http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/movies/art-architecture-if-the-cityscape-is-only-a-dream.html?ref=killscreen.com), as film critic David Edelstein would note the following year, “changed not only the way we look at movies but movies themselves.” *The Matrix*“cut us loose from the laws of physics in ways that no live-action film had ever done, exploding our ideas of time and space on screen.”  
>  

His argument, that CGI moves film further and further into the land of unreality and dissasociation, a world in which every frame is manipulated, obvious calls to mind the total-world creation of the videogame. What took the movies almost a century to arrive at, games have been doing since their inception.