Category: Best Visual Effects

What Dreams May Come – 1998 (WINNER)

First off, I have to say that I love this movie, so I’ll be the first to admit that I might be biased towards its wonderful effects, though I’ll try not to gush.  A lot of the visual effects were accomplished through some pretty spectacular production and set designs.  In this movie, the afterlife, both the beautiful and the terrible, are depicted as a fantasy world that is as vast and varied as the souls that reside there.

The first real special effect took place after the main character, Chris, is killed in a car accident.  He is visited by a spirit who helps to guide him into the afterlife.  The spirit dances through the world of the living in a blur of color and motion.  He slowly becomes clearer and clearer, as Chris learns to accept his own death.

When he finally leaves Earth, Chris awakens in a vast fantasy, a painting that his wife created.  And this is where the movie really earned its Oscar for Best Visual Effects.  The world is full of beautiful color and motion, and is made entirely of paint.  The vibrancy of the colors, the way everything looked like paint, so much so that the brush-strokes are clearly visible.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  At one point, he imagines a fantastic bird into existence.  It flies through the gold painted sky, streaking the paint as it passes.  Chris decides to give the magical bird fanciful turquoise and mauve feathers, and the color just bursts from it in mid-flight.  It all made for a beautiful contrast when the painted world was ready to become real.

The only thing that took me out of the story at this point was when Chris first arrives in the painted world.  He grabs a painted flower and crushes it in his hands.  The vibrant blue of the flower glows with a sparkling, glistening light of its own.  The paint squishes through his fingers and drips to the painted ground.  But then in the next cut, as Chris is looking at the mess of real paint in his hands, it is a dark almost black-blue that had lost its magical quality.  I think his hands should have been covered in the same vibrant color of which the flower had been made.

In many scenes, people and spirits floated with grace and ease.  They made it look as natural as walking.  The same could be said for when Chris could breathe under water.  There were scenes with floating people in beautiful fantasy outfits, a storm in a violent sea where damned souls swamp the sailboat, a field carpeted with the tortured upturned faces of trapped souls, and a plethora of fantastic imagery that combined all the skills of the movie-makers to give us one dream after another.  Even the fiery entrance to Hell was filled with dark and disturbing images that held their own kind of terrible beauty. 

The entire movie, aside from being a wonderful love story, was a just feast for the senses.  There was a kind of a gothic aesthetic about the imagery that carried an air of fanciness and nobility.  It was a style that really appealed to me.  I think this movie really deserved the Oscar it won.  The visuals were bold and innovative, giving the audience a grand epic full of effects that had never been done before.

Mighty Joe Young – 1998

I have to say that I was a little underwhelmed by the effects in this movie. First it is important to note that this is a Disney remake of the 1949 RKO Special Effects nominee of the same name, and they did a fine job of modernizing the story.  It goes without saying that the effects are far superior than the stop-motion animation that was used in that film, though for all that, the 1949 film’s effects were pretty awesome for that time.

But now we have CGI to help create a gorilla with gigantism, as opposed to a giant gorilla like King Kong, and blue-screen to replace the rear-projection of the 1940s.  The problem is that this movie came out in 1998 and I expect better compositing from a big-budget blockbuster from Disney Studios.  That’s not to say all the blue-screened shots were bad, but enough of them caught my attention as to merit mentioning.  Sometimes Joe just didn’t seem to belong in the environments in which he was placed.

And there was the scene in which Joe picks up Bill Paxton by the leg and shakes him around a little.  I can’t put my finger on exactly what looked wrong with the image in motion, but there was a jerkiness about it that made Paxton look just as fake as the gorilla holding him.  They would cut to a close-up shot of Bill’s face as he hung up-side-down, and he looked fine.  But then they’d cut back to the wide shot, and he looked a little fake again.

In my research, I learned that most of the shots of Mighty Joe in the film were accomplished using a man in an elaborate monkey suit with a very realistic radio-controlled animatronic gorilla mask.  The man inside the suit, John Alexander, acted in front of the blue-screen with lots of miniaturized sets and props.  For the most part, he did just fine as he mimicked the movements and mannerisms of a real gorilla.  But there were too many times in the film when the animal moved a little too much like a human.  Sure, he was supposed to have near human-level intelligence, but his body was still supposed to be that of an ape.  But I’ll be the first to admit, this didn’t happen often and it is a minor complaint.

So the fifteen-foot, two thousand-pound gorilla was really the movie’s big thing.  But there were other effects that were notable.  The scenes where Joe is running through the streets of Los Angeles were pretty cool, as was the helicopter chase.  The unnecessary sequence where Joe demolishes a car was interesting, though not particularly special.  The climax found Joe at a carnival where a fire breaks out, as opposed to an orphanage, as in the 1949 film.  The climb to the top of the burning Ferris Wheel to save a trapped child was cool, as were the shots where it came crashing down. All in all, not bad but also, nothing to get too excited over.

Armageddon – 1998

This was a really stupid movie with some pretty decent visual effects.  Director Michael Bay has gotten himself a reputation for making movies in which there are exciting action sequences with high-speed chases, and a lot of things getting blown up.  There were all the Transformer movies, The Island, Pearl Harbor, and the Bad Boys films.  But Armageddon was one of his early efforts and I can see why his reputation was earned.

Another common trait of his directing style is the use of quick cuts that are often more confusing than effective as a story-telling technique.  A fast-paced action sequence ends, and you are left wondering what exactly just happened.  I learned that Michael Bay got his start as a director in filming commercials and music videos.  In those mediums, the goal is to get as much information about a product onto the screen in the shortest and most direct way possible.  So in light of that, his hyper-fast pacing that breezes through story and character development in order to make way for the action sequences makes a certain amount of sense.

In this movie where a planet-killer meteor the size of the state of Texas is on a collision-course with Earth, there were two main things that took up the bulk of the special effects.  First, there were the meteor showers that assaulted New York, Shanghai, and Paris with amazing accuracy.  Even though most of the earth’s surface is covered with water, only these three major cities got hit. 

But for all that, the destruction of these cities was impressively done.  From what I’ve read, the effects were mostly accomplished through the clever blend of scale models and CGI.  One of the coolest icons to be taken out was the Chrysler Building, which was cut in two by a meteor so that the top half of the structure crashed to the ground in a fiery explosion.  In Paris, I wanted to see the Eiffel tower get a similar treatment, but this one only had a gigantic impact with an expanding radius of destruction.

The rest of the effects took place in outer-space.  Two space shuttles were sent up to land a team of oil drillers on the monster meteor, drill into the structure, and then drop a nuclear warhead into the shaft.  The result was that the meteor broke in two and each piece sheared off to either side of the Earth, missing us by a narrow margin.  Could a single nuclear blast break the entire state of Texas in half?  I don’t know, but it stretches believability a bit for me.

And then there were the sequences in which the shuttles were flying through space with the maneuverability of fighter jets in the Earth’s atmosphere.  Nope, I’m not buying that one either.  You can have the best visual effects ever, but if your story takes place in the real world, and you blatantly ignore common physics to this degree, then the illusion has failed.  Did they look great?  Sure.  Were they believable?  Not in the slightest.  But I guess Michael Bay never claimed that this action movie was scientifically accurate, did he?

Titanic – 1997 (WINNER)

This was, as I’ve said before, a movie befitting its name on a number of levels, and its visual effects were a huge part of its success.  And while I have the Special Collector’s Edition on DVD that has bonus features and the like, remarkably few of those bonus features focused on those incredible effects.  There was a very short featurette from which I learned a few things, but I was surprised at the lack of attention given to this movie’s spectacular special effects.

Now, I realize that most of the movie’s effects budget went into the sinking of the ship, but before I get into that, I want to mention a few of the effects that were shown before the big event.  Like I keep saying, the best special effects are the ones you don’t see.  I was surprised to learn that very few full scale sets were built, though it looked like there were many. 

For an obvious example, the engine room, with its five-story tall pistons, was a CGI set that was seamlessly composited with live actors, all filmed separately in bits and pieces.  But then there was a less noticeable scene in which some ladies are sitting at a table and having a conversation in a grand dining room.  It was apparently less expensive to create the room in a computer, and film each table in the background separately, as well as the couple walking behind the main characters, not to mention the main characters, themselves.  There were no black composite outlines, and not a single thing to give away the fact that the scene was made up of five or six different elements.  It really only looked like a single image.

That’s not to say that all of the CGI effects were perfect.  Every time I watch the movie, the shot where Jack and Fabrizio are at Titanic’s prow and the camera pans back all along the entire length of the ship.  The tiny CGI people on the decks move like bad Poser figures, stiff and mechanical, and like their feet seem to be sliding, ever so slightly, across the wooden planks they are supposed to be walking on.

But the climax, the actual sinking of the ship was beyond incredible.  This movie really earned its Oscar.  Every detail of Titanic as it sank into the Atlantic was meticulously adhered to.  Every nuance was given thought.  The actors, the lighting, the angle of the deck as it slowly but inevitably tilted from horizontal to vertical, the people falling into the icy water, all combined to create an illusion so realistic, you almost feel like you were there on the real Titanic.  Watching the boat sink can sometimes be an emotional experience.

There are two awesome little sequences that always catch my attention, every time I watch the movie.  One was that emotional little scene where the Captain dies.  The windows of the submerged bridge crash in and the unfortunate man is drowned.  The other is when the sinking Titanic breaks in two, just before its last moments in the open air.  The effects that made up the sinking of the ship, the super-detailed scale models, the perfect compositing, and the mostly undetectable CGI were flawless, and this juggernaut of a movie really deserved all its awards.

Starship Troopers – 1997

This movie is truly one of my guilty pleasure movies, and the special effects are a big part of that.  The movie, as cheesy as some of its script is, as bad as some of the acting is, is an awesome spectacle that is science fiction at its best.  The big effect in the film is the giant insectoid alien creatures that are waging war on the human race.  They are a perfect blend of practical effects, scale models and CGI, and they are very photo-realistically portrayed.  These insectoid aliens were big, monstrous, and appeared completely real on the big screen.

At first, we see them en-masse in a night-time setting, so it is difficult to see just how many there are and what they actually look like in a large group.  The good guys get their butts kicked in short order.  But the following scenes shows them in the daytime, and we can see just how massive their army is.  There are lots of action, guns, blood and guts, human slaughter, and lots and lots of giant bugs!

In fact, the over-the-top gore, the ridiculous carnage, the flying blood, and the sheer number of severed limbs is so crazy and chaotic that you just want more.  More!  MORE!!  It is like the special effects team went out of their way to make all the in-your-face violence and mayhem so spectacular, as to be almost cartoonish.  But honestly, that is what I loved about it.  It was so over-done that it was acceptable.  If you saw that kind of bloody a massacre in real life, it would be absolutely horrifying.

I also have to make special mention of the great use of sound effects that really enhanced the visuals.  When the army of alien bugs were moving, it sounded like the thunder of horse hooves.  The way they screamed was like the sound of an old movie monster.  It made for a pretty cool alien creature.  And again, I can’t say enough about the photo-realism of the creatures.  They looked good both in wide shots, and in close-ups.  Very cool!

And there were more than just the dangerous foot soldiers.  There were several different species of insect-like organisms.  There were the flyers that looked like giant dragonflies, great beetle-like behemoths that spit acid, and massive creatures with glowing sacks on their butts that shot blowing blue bolts of destruction into space to take out the Terran space ships. There were the little bugs that were the attendants of the big globular brain bug.  The design team did a fantastic job of making the different kinds of bugs look individual and distinct, while also making them all look as if they had evolved on the same planet.  Just fantastic.

And then there were those Earth ships that really took a beating in the space above Klendathu, the planet of the alien bugs.  Again, the design team did a really fantastic job and they looked cool as they were destroyed in great flaming explosions.  I happen to love this movie.  But if you want to really enjoy it, don’t pay too much attention to the acting or some of the cheesy dialogue.  Just turn your brain off and enjoy the great sci-fi visuals.

Twister – 1996

OK, putting aside the fact that the movie is about a grudge match between a woman and a mythical tornado, it is always a fun movie to watch for two main reasons.  First, the cast did a great job, and second, the special effects were spectacular.  Clearly, there was a lot of CGI work done, but as tornadoes tend to facilitate, everything was moving incredibly fast.  If there were any flaws, they were only on the screen for a spit second.  It was the utter chaos that was impressive.

So the tornadoes were what we all came to see, and they were fantastic.  The sheer power of the various twisters in the movie were awesome to watch.  I loved how they tore apart buildings and tossed around heavy farm equipment.  Well… except for the cow.  The poor flying cow was just thrown in there to add a little humor.  Just don’t look too closely at the cow, itself.  It looked pretty fake.  Then again, one does not often see a floating cow for comparison.  Still, little joke was pretty funny. The gag worked. 

They created big twisters and small ones.  There were skinny ones and fat ones. There was a really cool sequence where our heroes were in their truck on a land bridge in the middle of a lake, and two thin ropes of swirling air circled around them, spinning the vehicle several times before dissipating, leaving the passengers shaken, but unharmed.  Yes, the real name of the game is suspension of disbelief.

The film’s climactic F5 nightmare twister was, as described by a character in the movie, the finger of God.  It really is amazing how realistic CGI effects are becoming by this time in history.  It only makes sense that pretty much all the flying debris hurtling through the air as Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton try to run away from the tornado was computer generated.  Had it been real, they would have been shredded.  As it was, they escaped with nary a scratch.  They strap themselves to solid water pipes and let the twister overtake them.  It lifts their feet off the ground, and in a really great shot, we got to see the inside of the F5.  Very cool!

But there were also some great practical effects and some chaotic sets that put the actors in the middle of the action.  The scene at the drive-in movie theatre, where a bunch of people are huddled in the pit of a giant garage.  The tornado throws parts of the concessions building through the roof of the garage, not to mention a car that nearly crashes onto the helpless people.  I particularly liked when several hubcaps are thrown at them like metal Frisbees.  One of them hit one of the tornado chasers in the head, splitting his skin like the slash of a knife.  There were also a few great explosions, like when an oil tanker was picked up like a toy and thrown at Hunt and Paxton, exploding in a ball of fire when it hit the pavement.

All in all, it was an exciting film to watch with some wonderful visuals.  Maybe they stretched believability a little, but they were also intense and highly entertaining.  But what do you expect with a story by Michael Crichton, and also Stephen Spielberg acting as one of the executive producers?

Independence Day – 1996 (WINNER)

I went into this movie having seen it before, several times.  I have always enjoyed watching it, but I had forgotten many of the movie’s flaws.  Some of the acting was poor, the highly implausible script wasn’t very smart or even clever, and a lot of the dialogue was just dumb.  But its ok.  We went to see this movie for its fantastic action and special effects, and when it came to those things, this movie was great!

Hostile, technologically superior aliens arrive on earth.  They position gigantic, city-sized ships over every major city on the planet.  The arrival of the ships into earth’s atmosphere was really cool!  They created massive, dense clouds that were ominous and apocalyptic.  They cast dark shadows over iconic buildings like the Washington Monument, the White House, and The Empire State Building.  A repeating signal is detected between them and the mother ship, in which is found an electronic countdown.  The countdown reaches zero, and the real fun begins. 

They shoot glowing blue-green beams down onto the cities that erupt into expanding walls of fire and destruction.  This was really the film’s centerpiece.  To see the White House explode in a gigantic ball of flame and flying shards of debris was just phenomenal!  They showed several of these beams of devastation and the havoc they caused, and there were even a few great shots of the leveled cities.  I’m guessing they used miniature models and composited them with digital matte paintings.  The walls of fire were pretty impressive as they leveled the cities, throwing cars and people around like they were nothing.  I actually would have liked to see a few more locations around the world being destroyed in this manner, but this movie was heavily America-centric.

After that, the good ol’ U.S. of A fights back, because goodness knows no other country in the world knows how to kick butt like America.  There are a few cool aerial battles between our fighter jets and their alien combat ships.  I particularly liked the effect of our missiles hitting their shields.  These fast-paced action sequences were very exciting to watch, and looked fantastic on the screen.  Even the sequence where the two good guys in the stolen Alien ship escaped from the mother ship was great!

And then there were the aliens, themselves.  We only actually saw two live aliens in motion, if you don’t count the weird-looking CGI invasion forces all lined up inside the alien mother ship.  They were big and menacing with bio-mechanical armor and flailing tentacles on their backs.  Honestly, their faces looked like the faces of the underwater creatures in James Cameron’s The Abyss.

And finally, in the film’s climax, the Americans show the world how to beat the aliens.  Blowing up their big devastating lasers apparently makes their entire ship erupt in a spectacular series of explosions, killing all the bad guys and completely destroying their ships.  As implausible as that sounds for a technologically superior alien race, the visual effect was pretty cool, and well-worth the price of admission.

Apollo 13 – 1995

This was a wonderful movie that was robbed of a well-deserved Oscar by a talking pig.  This dramatization of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission was so perfectly executed that Buzz Aldrin thought they had found actual archival footage of events that had taken place in 1970.  Per Douglas Baily of the Baltimore Sun, “The second man on the moon unwittingly bestowed the highest praise on special-effects supervisor Rob Legato last month after viewing a preview of “Apollo 13.” Wandering over to director Ron Howard after the screening, Mr. Aldrin had some questions about the footage used in the film, particularly the stunning shots of the Brobdingnagian Saturn V rocket lifting majestically off the pad.  Mr. Aldrin had never seen those shots before and wanted to know from what NASA archive the film had been retrieved.  ‘He never guessed it was fake,’ says Mr. Legato.”

And it really was spectacular.  The launch sequence he was referencing was made using two different models, since building a five hundred-foot life-sized model was out of the question.  For the wide-angle shots, a five-foot plastic rocket was constructed.  But for the close-up shots, a detailed eighteen-foot model was used and it looked fantastic.  I particularly liked the detail of the condensed ice shaking loose and falling around the rocket during the blastoff.

The effect of the astronauts floating in a weightless environment was all completely real.  The scenes were filmed in a set that was constructed in a KC-135 airplane, the same craft which is used by NASA to train astronauts for space flight.  The plane flies in a parabola which creates twenty-three seconds of weightlessness at its apogee, the top of its arc.  To film the fifty-four minutes of necessary footage, the airplane needed to make the flight six hundred twelve times.  The plane is nicknamed the vomit comet, and I imagine the actors must have gotten pretty tired of making the trip over and over again to get so little footage for each round.

But the effects were so much more than those amazing things.  There were completely computer-generated environments and backdrops that replaced what only recently would have been matte-paintings.  There were also some pretty exciting exterior shots of the space crafts during the separation sequences and the explosion that caused all the problems. And the re-entry scene was incredibly realistic.  It was all in the details, and Ron Howard wanted everything done right.

Also, the compositing was all done in a computer, greatly improving the quality of the blue-screening technology.  For example, Mr. Baily’s article mentions three scenes that might not be recognized as blue-screened composite shots.  There was the one in which Jim Lovell is conducting a tour for politicians, another in which the astronauts are riding an elevator up to their place in the space-craft, and another in which a wide shot of the rocket on the launch pad is shown against an amazing sunrise.  It just goes to show you how the best effects in a film are the ones that we never even realize are special effects, the ones we see, but don’t notice.

1995 – Babe (WINNER)

The fact that this stupid children’s movie was nominated for best picture is baffling to me.  The fact that it took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects is a tragedy, especially since it beat out the incredible effects of Apollo 13.  I know that it may seem like my distain for the ridiculous nature of the plot is coloring my judgement of the movie’s effects, and I am certainly guilty of that in a small way, but I also have very definite reasons why the effects for Babe didn’t really deserve the award.

First, this movie’s effects were a one trick pony.  The big and magical effect that wowed the Academy voters was just the same effect used over and over again.  We got to see animals talk.  There was the pig, of course, but also dogs, sheep, a cow, a duck, a rooster, a horse, a cat, and three little mice.  Aside from the effect of making the animals talk in English, the movie had almost no effects at all.

And maybe that would have been ok, except that it wasn’t always done well.  The way the animation was done was to digitally map out the faces of the animals, then add CGI bottom jaws and lips.  Sometimes this was done to live animals, and sometimes it was done to animatronic puppets that couldn’t mimic human speech patterns by shaping vowels and consonants.  In some cases, the bottom jaws of the animals had to be flexible enough to bend in order to form the words.  In an effect where they were trying to make the movement look real and natural, it just didn’t work.  I’m not saying it never worked, but it was very inconsistent.

Sometimes, when an animal was speaking, the CGI mouths opened wide enough so that the background could be seen between its teeth.  But because the real animal, whose mouth was still closed, was between the camera and the background, there was a hole in the background where the closed mouth was removed.  When that happened, the animators had to fill in the empty space with CGI to match the hole in the image. 

And then there was the animatronic animals themselves.  As long as the puppets were completely motionless, they looked just fine.  But when they moved, they gave themselves away.  It was often far too obvious when a shot changed from using a live animal to a fake one.  It was terrible!  The three little mice that announced each scene in the movie by reading the title cards for the movie’s target audience, who were too young to read, were awful.  They were animatronic animals that didn’t move at all like real mice.  The desired illusion never worked.  Not once.

And that was it.  Aside from a shot where Babe sheds a few tears, and the climax of the movie where six sheep walk in perfect formation, there just weren’t many effects to speak of.  The problem is that the movie was geared toward audiences between two and ten years old.  They would be the only ones who would either not notice the really fake looking animals, or would not care.  And I’m sorry, but I have to say it for the hundredth time, because in this case, it really does tie into the film’s special effects.  Cute for the sake of cute is never cute.  Never! 

True Lies – 1994

Well, here we go back to the Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.  Beat ‘em up, shoot ’em up, blow ‘em up.  Lots of guns, lots of explosions, and a bit of comedy for good measure.  The effects were certainly ones we have seen before, but there was more than your general pyrotechnics.  Some of the fire was certainly computer generated, but it looked real enough.  And there was some pretty fancy flying with helicopters and Harrier Jets.

First, let’s look at some of the explosions.  The most memorable one was when Arnold and his wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, are trying to stop the trucks carrying the nuclear bombs from leaving the Florida Keys.  Arnold turns a fuel tanker into a makeshift flamethrower, setting a lot of bad guys on fire.  But the movie’s main villain, Aziz, one-ups him and fires a rocket launcher at him.  Arnold jumps into the water as the entire dock explodes behind him.  Very cool shot!

Then there was when the Harrier Jets blew up the bridge to the mainland.  This was one of the coolest shots in the movie because the missiles looked so realistic!  The effects were a combination of practical effects and CGI.  A life-sized replica of the jet was made out of fiberglass and suspended from a crane.  When the missiles hit the bridge, it was amazing!  As the truck was speeding along the pavement, three missiles explode behind him, each one getting closer than the last.  The fourth one hit the target, the bridge collapsed and the burning truck was launched into the air!

The fantastic stunt that followed was also really exciting.  With the bridge out, Arnold is in a helicopter, chasing his wife in the following vehicle, a limousine.  The driver of the truck is dead with his foot on the gas.  Curtis is reaching up out of the limo’s sun-roof while Arnold, hanging down from the copter’s landing strut, reaches down and pulls her out of the speeding car, just as it careens over the edge of the destroyed bridge, and into the water. 

And the film’s climax, while not in the least realistic from a logistical standpoint, looked great on the screen.  The final fight between Arnold and Aziz takes place high in the air on the outer surface of a hovering Harrier Jet.  In fact, the two enemies have a fist fight, Arnold flying the plane, the terrorist clinging to its side, while all the while, Arnold’s teenage daughter is straddling the jet’s nose.  The mock-up of the aircraft was on a computer controlled hydraulic rig, allowing for precise movements that could be exactly replicated as many times as needed, and in different filming locations.  But still, just to give the illusion of height more realism, the whole thing was mounted on the top of an actual high-rise building.

While the effects looked real enough, their farcical nature in an otherwise realistic movie sometimes had me rolling my eyes.  But that’s ok.  Just check your brain at the door and you’ll enjoy the film and its special effects, which were all done with James Cameron’s usual high quality.