C omputers have ruined a whole genre of movies for me. Because of their capacity to produce extremely realistic footage of the most spectacular effects, I can't seem to enjoy science-fiction or fantasy films unless I'm virtually blown away by the special effects. I am jaded in the worst way.

After watching Manhattan's skyscrapers bowled over like toothpicks as a 1,000-foot tidal wave washes over them in Deep Impact, I could barely stifle a yawn. I realize that this is unfair to the myriad technicians who probably labored for countless hours over scenes like that one, but it seems that computer magic has become an addiction, and I simply need much, much more to support my habit. That scene had a counterpart in a much earlier film, When Worlds Collide, and I assure you that the relatively cruder scene from the 1951 film seemed more realistic at that time than the new one does now. Why is this? It's simple: I needed to be transported to a visual reality that the new film just couldn't supply. It wasn't real enough for my Model-1998 CPU.

Watching Independence Day a few years ago for the first time, I bought the whole farm when it came to those scenes where the jets fought with the alien craft. It never occurred to me that those jets were entirely computer generated. They were real as far as I was concerned. Similar feelings accompanied my watching the creatures in Alien when Sigorney Weaver first encountered them, as well as the holographic map display in 1984's Starman. Sensibility may have tugged at my sleeves, saying "this is bogus", but the visuals were enough to compensate.

In 1981, a film called Looker introduced, among other things, the interesting concept of completely realistic footage of actresses being entirely computer-generated based on stored images of the real people. The filmmakers could then place them in whatever scenes they wanted, have them do whatever they wanted, and enhance them however they saw fit without ever using the real people anymore. Much to what I suspect is the Actors' Equity Union's dismay, this concept is no longer fiction at all. I expect that a company like Pixar, who created Toy Story, or George Lucas's ubiquitous Industrial Light and Magic will soon produce a motion picture whose actors and scenery and events originate entirely from a lot of zeros and ones. They'll be able to do absolutely anything, indistinguishable from reality. Perhaps then I'll be satisfied.

Fortunately, science fiction and fantasy are only a part of the movie-going experience, and I don't have to even think about what computers can or can't do when I go to movies like Good Will Hunting or Little Women, or when I watch actors like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino or Susan Sarandon. What better way is there to break the habit?

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