Quote Originally Posted by Bugbear View Post
Yea, but gamers mostly seem to want more. Tell them their character can punch or just swing a weapon and they are unhappy at best. Tell them their character can go all "Lightning God Blaster" like Thor or Captain America in Avengers Endgame and they get all excited to play.
You're still over-generalizing and making a lot of assumptions I disagree with. Some people do that, others do not.

Quote Originally Posted by Bugbear View Post
And a LOT of the 'gritty' movies are fake with CGI: people jumping or falling form heights, people impossibly dodging and shaking off hits. Plus the wacky "jump in the air, kick three other people, spin around in midair, somehow 'fly' backwards several feet, land on a wall sideways several feet off the ground, then jump sideways through a window, and land on a passing moving truck.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here. This sounds more like something that would happen in a wuxia film or a super hero movie like Captain America than something grounded like James Bond.

But yes, even James Bond or Jason Bourne surely use some CGI. That's part of the movie magic. The difference is in how it's used and what it depicts. You can use CGI to help show gritty things just like you can use it to help show fantastical things.

Let's take Die Hard as an example, because I find it interesting how it's changed over the years. In the 80s and 90s, Die Hard was a very practical action franchise featuring a very down-to-earth hero. Then in the last couple films in 2007 and 2013, John McClane suddenly became a larger than life action hero. In one sense, that could be seen as a logical progression of his character, but it feels like a departure from the series' roots. The latter films use CGI to make plane crashes and explosions more exciting, but that's because CGI has become much cheaper and easier to do since the earlier films were made.

Despite that, jumping out of CGI airplanes doesn't stop John McClane from continuing to be a gritty action hero who punches bad guys and feels pain when he gets shot. He's not a super hero who flies through the air and spin kicks the bad guys, or whatever. He may have more skills in driving and flying helicopters, but he's still a basic Fighter-type hero who shoots guns and punches the bad guys without any extra fancy moves. He's just higher level than he was before, with more knowledge and experience.

I don't have any problem with a character like John McClane, who just gets incrementally better at punching/shooting bad guys and surviving life threatening injuries. Watching him or playing as him, he doesn't need to have magical abilities for me to have a good time. There is satisfaction in simplicity.