Meh... CG in movies make for a whole new medium, and few have learned to master it well (as the prev. poster Keith has insightfully pointed out). It also helps to have decent voice-acting, and a compelling blend between each voice actor and cg mesh character. Some movies can pull it off, most cannot. It also doesn't help that much of what's come out of Hollywood lately... sucks. No, really - we're talking movies that induce either soma-like boredom, or you get the "sweaty, hairy, dismembered goat genitalia bobbing on the surface of your morning coffee" revulsion kind of movie nowadays. Critics, knowing this full well, want a good solid scapegoat (heh) to point at so they don't anger the producers and not get free movie tickets anymore... so it's off to blame the CG. As a bonus, it gives the flesh-and-blood actors something to point at and go "see!? you can't replace us! And it's not our fault the movies suck, either" (hint to most of 'em: yes it is your fault, among other things, so put down the 24 karat cocaine spoons for a sec and listen up...) It's not a conspiracy per se, but a sharp, solid convergence of a lot of what's wrong with Hollywood nowadays... all wrapped up and assigned to someone else for disposal. CG itself can prove to be a success. Toy Story, Final Fantasy, LOTR (1,2, and 3)... these have made for excellent movies with huge takes at the box office. Frank Herbert's Dune (not the sucky 80's version, but the SciFi Channel version) is an excellent blend of plot, story, and CG for television... with none of it really overpowering the other elements (get the DVD, watch it minus commercials, and damn it's good). Hell, Babylon 5 was packed with fairly (admit it) crap CG, but was pretty cool watching - at least until the plot began to sour like a carton of month-old milk left out on the kitchen counter in Jamaica under a noonday summer sun... Battlestar Galactica (before its plot went straight to Hell as well) was the same way (but with better CG). Firefly, Farscape - both had fair-to-middling CG (we're talking obvious faults visible any halfway trained eyeball), but again - good stuff. The trick was to either have CG the whole world (so you didn't notice it) or use it sparingly - make it subdued and/or limited (for the same reason, oddly enough). Either way, make damned sure it blended in as well as possible. Beowulf did the CG right, but let's face it - the plot was kinda formulaic, it went for the sex angle way too damned much, and no amount of CG or directorial wizardry will save you from crap voice-acting. Golden Compass I dunno about, but the previews present it as some little girl's fantasy thingy. Speakin' of which, a hint to Hollywood: Narnia, Terabithia, Last Mimzy, All the (blecch) Harry Potter flicks, and about half a dozen wannabees of the same stripe... ? The friggin kids-in-parallel-fantasyland-(with a sword) genre was somewhat delicate to begin with, so strangling it with an ever-flowing stream of crap knock-offs isn't going to help, you know? At least Beowulf tried to differentiate itself from LOTR and the D&D crowd by using actual mythology as a base...) whew okay... have I offended everyone yet? Ah, good... now let me bore you to tears, if I may... :) Personally, I like the way they did the movie 300 - it was at least halfway based on history (The battle of Thermopylae to be precise... "The Hot Gates" is a literal translation of the name), and they didn't veer off into some formulaic bullshit with it. The hero dies. His buddies die. You didn't know when or how (nor does history). The movie went out of its way to accurately portray how a Sparta boy became a soldier. The only thing they did that veered from complete accuracy (aside from the creatures serving under Xerxes, obviously) was that they all but stamped out the homosexual nature of the Sacred Band (the aforementioned 300 Spartan soldiers). But as far as movies go, it was damned accurate all the same. The CG was subtle, and used as an adjunct, not the focus. Now for the penultimate crap use of CG? Transformers. Not that it wasn't good CG, and it was even mechanically plausible. But c'mon - the CG was literally rubbed in your face (almost as bad as it was in Hulk). Watching the CG animation in that movie was like watching it trying to fit into a formal-dress party wearing nothing but a neon orange jock strap, a purple clown wig, and a pair of bright red latex high-heel boots with white LED lights twinkling along the sides of them. But yeah - blame the CG, instead of the poor use of it. Good game on the critics' part.... not. /P