Tora! Tora! Tora! – 1970 (WINNER)
Here we have another war film, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I have developed an appreciation for war films, especially when they’re done right. It’s just that when it comes to the special effects, there isn’t much to them. We have things blowing up, and people being killed. It has all been done before. So the first question is, how was the quality of the explosions and the action sequences? And as you might expect in a film that won the Oscar for Best Special Effects, they were pretty good. But what was it about the effects for this movie that made it stand out above its peers?
For me, it was in the effects that didn’t involve exploding miniature models. Let’s face it. By this time explosions are a dime-a-dozen, though this movie certainly had some good ones. But there was some pretty awesome aerial stunt flying that was really exciting to watch. You put those two things together and you have some pretty impressive effects.
The Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zeros were actually North American T-6 Texans, not that I would have known the difference. But the people who flew them were obviously skilled pilots! They must have had nerves of steel! They were flying at incredible speeds, weaving around each other in every direction. Every shot had to have been carefully choreographed and practiced. It was really very cool! Not only that, but there seemed to be very few blue-screened shots in the air. So, not only did the planes being filmed have to know what they were doing, but the camera operators had to be in aircraft with pilots who were just as skilled.
The first three quarters of the movie were all setup, but once the bombing of Pearl Harbor began, the action didn’t let up. It kept going and going, never giving me a moment to rest until the end of the movie. There were torpedoes being dropped into the water where they impacted battleships and cruisers. There were fires on the decks and in the water. The men on the boats were loading anti-aircraft shells, firing machineguns, and running for their lives. There were men on fire, men leaping into the water, men being gunned down on the decks. Then the Japanese started bombing the air field, destroying all the grounded planes except for two who made it to the air where they did some terrific dog-fighting.
But there was one thing that caught my attention as being poorly done, and it was only in one or two shots. The most effective special effects are the ones that you can’t see. But to illustrate this point, there was a sequence in which there are men on the command deck of a ship. They see torpedoes approaching them and wait for the impact. When it hits, they shake violently, the ship in which they are standing shakes violently, but the background through the windows remains perfectly motionless. It seems to me I would never have known that the background was not real if it had shaken along with everything else. It just looked… incredibly fake. Am I wrong?