Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're

Often there is a choice between not showing a thing happen on screen because it wouldn't be practical/economical, or using VFX. Now suppose for instance you're making a disaster movie about a tsunami hitting NYC; your options are doing it with scale models (which will look fake or limit you to very quick shots of the disaster), doing it with computers, or not making the movie at all. That sort of effect for that sort of movie isn't really negotiable. But when the effect isn't critical to the movie and not having the effect was a perfectly valid choice? Like for instance, a character throws a cigar and the director thinks it would be cool to have the camera follow and spin around the cigar as it's flying through the air. Maybe you could do that for real with a sophisticated robot arm holding the camera, but that's expensive. In a previous era, the director would forget about that idea, it wouldn't get into the movie and nobody would care that it wasn't in the movie. But now that computer imagery is cheap and abundant, a director can have that gratuitous effect. And if it doesn't look like crap when the movie is released, it will almost certainly look like crap a few years later. The movie would have been better off without the effect in the first place. But because VFX is so cheap, it is now used for nonsense like this all the time and it makes movies worse on the whole. One of the first movies I noticed this in was Fight Club. At the start of the movie when the MC is in the office, there's a long scene of the camera flying in between garbage in a garbage can. It's all CGI; there would have been no way to get a real camera flying around in between empty cans and donuts wrappers. It's an impossible shot to do for real, but they could do it with CGI. It also looks like crap, completely fake. I saw this movie in theaters and it looked fake then, and even worse now. In an era before CGI, the director could have settled on having a macro camera pan across a pile of trash without flying and twisting around inside of the trash. A real camera filming real trash. It would not have been as dynamic, but it would look real and continue to look real forever. Basically, the cheapness of VFX seems to blind many directors to cases in which less-is-more. Now we have more-is-more movies packed to the brim with every gratuitous effect anybody can think of and it all ages like milk.