2021 – Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Not only were the visual effects for this Marvel movie incredible, but it was just a good movie. It was full of fantastic action and bright, glowing colors, which I like, but it also had a great story and some dramatic depth. Color was a very important part of the story telling, not only in the sets and costumes, but also in the visual effects. In fact, the difference between blue and gold, when it came to the actual Ten Rings, was a plot point, and the two opposing powers looked great on the screen. They were bright and flashy, and beautifully designed!
There were so many things that the visual effects people did right on this film, but there are four in particular that I’d like to mention. The first is that the CGI creature effects were top-notch. There were actually a lot of digital creature effects, the most notable of which were the two dragons in the film’s climax. There was the Guardian Dragon and the big-bad Dweller-in-Darkness Dragon. The snake-like Guardian Dragon had this beautiful red and white color scheme going and was just gorgeous. I especially liked the shots that were close-ups of his face. The black dragon looked terrifying and properly menacing! They looked so realistic from every camera angle, every focal distance.
The second thing that caught my attention was the water effects. Now, you might say that we’ve seen CGI water effects before, but not like this. As part of the narrative, the Guardian Dragon could control water, and used it as a violent weapon to ensnare its enemy. The water looked so real! The texture, the consistency, the lighting, the spray, the foam! It was all so perfectly rendered! And lest I forget, the whole magic water-map scene was fantastic!
The third effect that caught my attention was the compositing, which, of course, was consistently good throughout the entire movie. The fantastic environments that were a seamless combination of real set pieces and digital environments were beautiful. I especially liked the land of Tao Lo. It was gorgeous! I imagine natural, outdoor environments must be harder to create. Cityscapes have all the hard lines of buildings, roads, signs, and the like, to make compositing easier, but because of my lack of knowledge about the mechanics of digital compositing, I could be wrong.
And finally, I have to make mention of the digital face replacements and CGI people. I know that it is now becoming pretty common-place, especially in action films, to have a stunt man doing the difficult physical movements of a character, and to then replace the stunt man’s face with the actor’s face. But it is also just as common to have an actor doing his thing, and then changing his entire body into a computer generated image to do all the physics-defying acrobatics, and we, as the audience, never even notice the transition, and Shang-Chi did this perfectly!