"With the CGI, suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion"
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Ford’s gripe isn’t nostalgia for rubber suits; it’s a warning about scale as a cheap substitute for stakes. When CGI turns six enemies into a thousand, the threat inflates but the drama deflates. A handful of adversaries has faces, rhythms, even a kind of personality. You can track who’s winning, who’s scared, who might die. An army dissolving into the horizon becomes visual noise: impressive, frictionless, and emotionally unreadable.
The subtext is a defense of craft and of the audience’s role as a participant, not a spectator. Ford’s best-known characters work because danger feels proximate and particular: a single fistfight, a close pursuit, a cockpit rattling like it might fall apart. Those moments invite the viewer to measure risk in human units. CGI crowds and endless set-piece escalation often sever that intimacy, replacing dread with spectacle-management. You’re no longer bracing for impact; you’re watching physics.
Calling it “like video games” isn’t a cheap insult so much as a cultural diagnosis. Games are built around kinetics by design: motion, feedback loops, escalating waves. Movies that borrow the surface language of games without adopting their interactivity can end up with the worst of both mediums: constant movement with no felt consequence. “Soulless” lands because it’s about labor, too - the quiet loss of actors, stunt teams, and directors solving problems in-camera, where danger has texture and timing.
Ford is arguing for legibility: not less action, but action you can emotionally parse. Kinetics without emotion is just screensaver adrenaline.
The subtext is a defense of craft and of the audience’s role as a participant, not a spectator. Ford’s best-known characters work because danger feels proximate and particular: a single fistfight, a close pursuit, a cockpit rattling like it might fall apart. Those moments invite the viewer to measure risk in human units. CGI crowds and endless set-piece escalation often sever that intimacy, replacing dread with spectacle-management. You’re no longer bracing for impact; you’re watching physics.
Calling it “like video games” isn’t a cheap insult so much as a cultural diagnosis. Games are built around kinetics by design: motion, feedback loops, escalating waves. Movies that borrow the surface language of games without adopting their interactivity can end up with the worst of both mediums: constant movement with no felt consequence. “Soulless” lands because it’s about labor, too - the quiet loss of actors, stunt teams, and directors solving problems in-camera, where danger has texture and timing.
Ford is arguing for legibility: not less action, but action you can emotionally parse. Kinetics without emotion is just screensaver adrenaline.
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