Terrible Fire

Why do some of the most expensively made movies in history have trouble depicting a simple flame?

- Lane Brown

THERE'S A SCENE in the Jennifer Lawrence movie No Hard Feelings where her clothes catch fire. She's riding on the hood of a car as it speeds across a crowded beach and crashes into a barbecue, sending burning coals flying. But the flames don't look like any real ones that you've ever seen. They're plasticky and neon yellow, pointing straight up when they should be blowing back toward the windshield. Even in a low-effort comedy such as this one, the effect is distractingly flimsy. ¶ It's not an isolated incident. Computer-generated fires are breaking out everywhere, and they look terrible. Prominent house fires in last year's The Banshees of Inisherin and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery appear as if they've been scribbled onto the liveaction footage by hand. So do the kitchen fires on Hulu's The Bear and some wildfires on CBS's Fire Country. On Game of Thrones, the dragons' breath was created by mounting honest-to-goodness flamethrowers on cranes; on the spinoff House of the Dragon, the titular creatures are clearly spewing digital fire. Amid all the obvious effects in the latest Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, it's the fires-flat, over saturated, and motion-smoothed-that stick out most.

Not so long ago, there was no CGI, so the only way to put fire on film was to light a real one in front of a camera. For decades, Hollywood pyrotechnicians ignited scenery, vehicles, and stuntpeople, often within face-scorching distance of movie stars and children. Houses were burned down for deodorant commercials, and Pink Floyd once set a guy on fire just because they thought it would look cool on an album cover. In rare cases, there were injuries and even deaths, but that didn't deter filmmakers from embracing an effect that couldn't be achieved by any other means.