A fifteen foot “hulking” monster leaping across the desert. Three women “wire-fu”ing their way across a Tibetan monastery. Paul Walker attempting to act. I’ve just given you three failed examples of special effects that haven’t connected with audience members in the last month of cinema.

We as audiences have been told that we expect, nay, demand, the “Big Bang” theory of moviemaking to take hold of our imagination during the summer months. We “want” to check our brains at the door after purchasing a ten dollar ticket. Between the ticket booth and our seat in the theatre, we get a seven dollar popcorn and a five dollar latte; we can then drop off our dry cleaning, sample some perfume, and test drive a car. The cinematic lobotomy, however, isn’t working. Film after film this summer has fallen prey to the “second-weekend drop off”. Both “Hulk” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” have seen their box office takes drop 2 fast for their studios’ liking. The newly-dubbed $50 million dollar benchmark proved too much for “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” even in its first week, amassing $2 million less than its predecessor did in November.

So what gives? Why the lack of long-term interest on the part of audiences? Why are some “sure things” quickly fading from the cineplex faster than you can say “The Core”? In short, there is too much of a good thing, Toto. The above movies have all fallen under the “Matrix: Reloaded” umbrella of fare which inspire shock and awe, but not appreciation, in their audiences. Whoa, indeed. The movies are so eager to entertain that they have forgotten how to engage. No one has entered these movies expecting art-house dramas, but in each case, these movies have forgotten to add a little “art” to their “artifice”.

Take “Charlies Angels: Full Throttle”. (Please, cry Women’s Studies Departments nationwide!) Whereas the first paid homage to wire-fu fighting, the new movie basically mocks the entire genre. The first movie celebrated the limitless of female empowerment via unbelievable moves that were not technically possible according the laws of physics that I once studied. The new movie, however, throws out any believability whatsoever in search of a way to get the ladies out of a series of ever escalating (but beautifully shot) scenarios. The girls need to escape? Have them grab planks of wood and surf down a rope. Have them find a flame-thrower in the middle of the street to blast an Irish hang. An audience will quickly lose interest in a movie where every scene has a deus ex machina on its side.

Take “Hulk and see how much more attention was paid to the CGI-Hulk versus its living, breathing co-stars. I hesitate to even lump a CG character in with the “cast”, but Ang “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” Lee clearly thinks otherwise. My only guess is that, in the original treatment to “The Ice Storm”, Ang called for a 15-foot monster who smashes everything in sight, but due to budgetary constrictions, he could only get Joan Allen. No disrespect to Ms. Allen; I’m just pretty sure she can’t outrun an Apache helicopter. (And I think we’ll all agree that’s for the best.)

The first hour of “Hulk” plays to the nervous, contained rage found in “The Ice Storm”, so much that you’re lulled into forgetting you came to see “Hulk” at all. When the creature finally erupts, it’s so out of place with the chamber drama that preceded it that you can’t quite adjust to what you’re seeing. (Then again, if you did, and you can explain the last five minutes to me, I’ll pay for your dry cleaning after the movie.)

I’m not here to argue the merits of the “reality” of special effects. Special effects are not “real”. They are, hwoever, tools to help tell a story, and in the correct hands are employed as such. That’s not the point here. The point is that effects will never replace good old-fashioned story in audiences’ eyes. A three-mile jump will never match a quiet character moment. People bought Drew Barrymore hugging “E.T.” more than her riding a dirt-bike in “Full Throttle” because of the emotion imbued in the former. No one cared that she was groping the World’s Scariest Muppet; the story and the character work of that movie made the audience move past the artifice of the film and into the truth of the emotion itself. The “look, but don’t touch” attitude of “Full Throttle” and “Hulk” titillate but ultimately repel the audiences. Since the effects in these two movies largely serve themselves, and not the story, then no one has a reason to come back and see it again.

There’s nothing wrong with a movie that only wants to blow things up for ninety minutes. But by the same token, movie studios have yet to realize that a simply artificial film will yield artificial first-week results. The fact that “Hulk” grossed $25 million more than “Full Throttle” says nothing about the comparative merits of the film, but everything to do with the marketing campaigns. The almost 70% second-week box-office drop of “Hulk”, however, speaks volumes about what audiences thought about the movie. As much as we’re told the opposite, we as audiences actually want to care about the people near these explosions. We want to get lost in, not admire from afar, a fight scene. “The Two Towers” showed us how to care for a fully-CGI character in the form of “Gollum”; all that “Hulk” showed us was that eugenics on French poodles is a really, really bad idea. Audiences are smart enough to know the difference, and they demonstrate this difference via their wallets.

The lesson to be learned, as Hollywood executives may be gleaning already, is that a little bit can go a long way to ensuring the box-office success for their major investments. No one pays $10 for “Hulk” and expects to see “The Cherry Orchard”, but we don’t expect to need a few Red Bull to make it through the first hour. We don’t pay our hard-earned cash to watch Cameron Diaz engage in an ultra-realistic ‘Fight Club”-esque throwdown, but we do expect that the laws of gravity apply to her as well as the nameless henchman she’s kicking.

In the end, it would do these executives good to look at the domestic top-three grossing movies of time: “Titanic”, “Star Wars”, and “E.T.” The success of these films testifies to the fact that there exists a very large market for movies which play across a vast canvas while taking care to focus on the most intimate of details. A big star, a buxom babe, and a blue screen can no longer guarantee large coffers for a studio. Audiences demand more. They’ve seen better. Sadly, given the fare in the theatre lately, those types of movies seem to all have happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.