Mutiny on the Bounty – 1962
I have two things to say about the special effects for this movie. First is that they were very good in a number of ways. Second is that they were not as good as they thought they were. Nothing says that both of those statements cannot be true. And to be sure, there were a lot of special effects on which to comment. But the movie had a sense of self-importance that I cannot get out of my head. The film seemed to think it was the best movie ever made, and while it was indeed good, It wasn’t flawless.
The bad effects were few, so I’ll cover them quickly, and then go on to the good ones. I didn’t care for the quality of a few of the blue-screen shots. Some of them looked really obvious. A few of the scale models looked a little too fake. And lastly, there was, for the most part, nothing new or innovative about the visuals. But that was about it. Still, even those things were never really terrible.
There were two big scenes when it came to the movie’s money shots. There was the storm that threatened to sink the ship when they tried to go around Cape Horn, and the second was the fire that destroyed the Bounty at the movie’s climax. They were both incredibly intense, and the effects artists really earned their paychecks.
The storm was utterly relentless. The close-up shots of the actors on the deck of the ship were full of slanted floors, spraying water, wind, rain, and an out of control barrel crashing around the hold. There were men up in the ship’s rigging who were holding on to the ropes for their lives. Then there were the wide shots where a miniature model was being mercilessly tossed around in the water. The violence of the storm was so great that it looked as though the boat would surely be blown on its side. There were also a few really great shots of waves that appeared as big as the merchant vessel, itself.
The fire at the end of the film was pretty spectacular. There were actors that had to run amidst the flames, and while many of those dangerous-looking shots were clearly composited, not all of them were. There were great fires below the deck and above it. There were some really cool shots of the sails burning on the masts.
Other than that there was a gruesome scene where a man is taking twenty-four lashes with a flail, and another where a poor sailor is keel-hauled. And there was another great blue-screened shot where a man falls from the rigging onto the deck. They must have filmed that stuntman falling onto a giant blue air mat. I have to mention that while some of the blue-screened shots were not perfect, overall, they were better in this movie than they were in most other films that came before it. Obviously, filmmakers were continuing to perfect the effect technique. But too bad for Mutiny on the Bounty. It was up against The Longest Day. tentStyles