Why Movies Just Don't Feel "Real" Anymore

Take a look at this shot from the latest Jurassic World movie.

Now, compare it to this one from The Lost World.

Did you notice that difference? I deliberately picked some without dinosaurs because that’s not

what this is about. It’s not about CGI. It’s about a deeper level of immersion, a deeper feeling of

realness and vividness that is so often missing today. I mean, look at this movie, this was shot

in 1959, yet, it still feels like you could step right into the frame. And I love that,

you know, watching The Lord of the Rings made me want to visit New Zealand. Those movies made me

feel like I could actually stand in those same rugged landscapes. But The Hobbit… not so much.

And I know, complaining about modern movies looking kind of bland or fake isn’t exactly the

most original thing to do, and you might already be thinking, “well, that’s just because of digital

cinematography, it’s just bad color grading, bad lighting and also bad CGI, actually,” and you’re

right, these are all definitely relevant to the discussion, but they are also just

technical elements that in themselves don’t fully explain the essence of this problem. I always felt

like there had to be deeper philosophical and psychological mechanics at play here, like some

sort of first principles of cinematic reality and our immersion in it. And I figured that if

we truly want to tackle this issue once and for all, then we need to understand those as well.

First, to very briefly define the obvious: the idea of a movie feeling real is not the same as

a movie being real. We understand movies are staged, that they are constructed realities,

not actual ones. And yet, we can still be sold on the realness of their fictional worlds,

even if they contain fantastical elements like live dinosaurs or Terminators or aliens. And

that’s because despite recognizing movies as being essentially make-belief, we can still experience

them as perceptually real. “A perceptually realistic image is one which structurally

corresponds to the viewer's audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space,” film scholar Stephen

Prince wrote in a Film Quarterly paper. “Such images display a nested hierarchy of cues which

organize the display of light, color, texture, movement, and sound in ways that correspond

with the viewer's own understanding of these phenomena in daily life. […] Because of this,

unreal images may be referentially fictional but perceptually realistic.”

Simply put, according to the concept of perceptual realism, a movie feels real when it triggers the

same mechanisms through which we also construct and navigate our own reality. In this sense,

it’s actually kind of like being in Inception. You create the world of the dream,

you bring the subject into that dream, and they fill it with their subconscious.

As I was going back through some older movies that I remember feeling highly immersive,

that I remember having this kind of perceptual realism, one thing I noticed was just how much of

the image is often in focus, and how frequently they filmed from a distance to include a lot of

the environment around the main subject of the shot. Just look at how much of the background is

perfectly readable here, how clearly you can make out faces and objects in the distance,

the textures on the ground, and so on. Images like these really invoke a sense of place, of

three-dimensionality. As the renowned film scholar Noël Carroll also once said in an interview;

“[deep focus, long shot compositions like these] invite the audience to scan the frame for meaning