Category: Personal Favorites

The Lost World: Jurassic Park – 1997

This movie wasn’t perfect, but its special effects weren’t too bad.  They were consistent and interesting.  The problems I had with the movie were in the script and not in the visuals.  So, we’ve all seen Jurassic Park and marveled at the super-realistic dinosaurs.  Well, here in the second installment of the franchise, we get several new dinosaurs to dazzle us.  Spielberg also put them in new locations and situations just to add a little more interest.

But that being said, the good things were great.  The new dinosaurs that I really liked were the Stegosauruses, the pack of Compsognathus, and the Pachycephalosaurus.  But of course, the main villains were the T-Rex and the Velociraptors, though the Raptors were somehow less deadly than their predecessors in the first Jurassic Park movie. 

This time, instead of a single T-rex, we had two of them and their child.  The baby Rex was designed to be almost cute, that is, until his mother prods him to tear the main human villain to pieces.  Unfortunately this took place off camera.  Funny, the death of the man who was devoured by the tiny Compsognathus herd took place off camera as well.  We are shown how dozens of the little monsters chased down and attacked the guy, which was pretty cool, but the killing surge was not shown.  This was strange because when one of the good guys was ripped in half by the two adult Tyrannosauruses, we got to see it all.

This movie had the distinction of having professional hunters going up against the dinosaurs.  They had modern guns, high-tech jeeps and equipment, and actually managed to capture several dinos, even the adult male T-Rex eventually.  There was a cool scene in which the men in their trucks were racing along with the dinosaur herds and capturing them, and that looked cool.  And then, in the film’s climax, the T-Rex was brought to San Diego, where it destroyed property, caused car crashes, and devoured people.  I loved when it bit and mangled a traffic light.

The only really unbelievable thing that happened in the movie was when Julianne Moore, Jeff Goldbloom, and Vince Vaughn were trapped in an equipment trailer that the mother T-rex was pushing over a cliff.  With the rear section of the trailer already dangling over the edge, the humans are holding on to a rope that had been threaded through the windshield of the front section of the vehicle.  As the front half topples over the sheer drop, the trailer slips over the people like a sock falling off a stick.  None of them are even so much as touched by the interior of the vehicle, which is full of equipment, furniture, and electrical consoles.  Nope!  Not buying that one!  But again, that has to do with the script and not the effect itself.

But in the end, the visual effects in this movie were very good.  They were just more of the same effects we saw in the first Jurassic Park film.  Only the dinosaur breeds were different… well, some of them.  But it was enough to give the audiences things they had not exactly seen before, and I can appreciate that.

Dragonheart – 1996

These special effects were mostly good, though not all of them.  They were groundbreaking, but unperfected.  The movie’s big draw was the talking dragon, and for the most part, the effects were innovative and well done.  But sadly, the few flaws that were there just seemed very noticeable.  In a documentary included on the DVD, director Rob Cohen explained that they had a story they hadn’t been able to tell the way they wanted until they saw Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.

The CGI dragon was unique from any previous animated dragon.  The main thing was that it talked by using lips that very distinctly shaped its words, an impressive effect.  And I just want to give a quick shout-out to Sean Connery who expertly gave the dragon its voice. When you compare its image on the screen to the only other competently realistic dragon from the 1981 movie, Dragonslayer, it had incredibly smooth motion, a wonderful design, and depth and realism… usually.

The problem is that while they gave it skin texture, shadow, and depth, they were inconsistent.  As a result it looked like they were inserting footage of the dragon from various stages of its development, and I know that could not have been the case.  Sometimes he looked a little two-dimensional, sometimes he looked smooth, sometimes he looked rough.  I’m just not sure if this was intentional. 

Another thing that sometimes bothered me is that the dragon didn’t always appear to belong in the image.  He didn’t have any dark lines around him, but maybe it was the lighting that was off.  I’ll be the first to admit that my lack of education in filmmaking prevents me from putting my finger on what the problem really was, but I know when something doesn’t exactly look right.  To emphasize this, there is a certain scene I can recall in which Draco is walking next to Bowen who is on his horse.  They were moving through tall grass, but when the dragon took a step, he didn’t disturb the grass in any way, as if he was completely insubstantial. 

But I’m really being nitpicky.  The things they got right far outweighed the things they got wrong.   For most of the film, the realism was fantastic, and the fire breathing effects were perfect.  A couple of things that looked especially good were the little comic battle when Bowen first encounters Draco.  When Bowen gets caught in the dragons mouth, with his sword resting against its upper pallet, the little stand-off looked good.  I also liked when they showed the dragon swimming under the water of a lake.  Then when his head emerged into the open air, the dark, wet texture of the dragon’s hide was really awesome.

There were a couple other unique effects like the Bowen being dragged along by a rope attached to Draco’s ankle.  He is towed through a forest, banging into trees as he goes.  There were a few battle sequences between soldiers and peasants that brought a little action to the movie.  And there was the film’s climax where Draco dies and turns into a magical golden mist that floats away into the sky, there to become a new star.  In all, the effects helped to make this a fun movie to watch.

Moonraker – 1979

This was a dumb movie with a smattering of competent special effects, though even they had their failings.  Unfortunately, the bad seem to outweigh the good.  The most believable special effects are the ones that first, don’t look like special effects, and second, ones that pay attention to details like physics or… you know, reality.  Moonraker failed to pay attention to these two guidelines.

For example, somebody needed to teach the special effects artist what zero gravity actually means.  It does not mean walking around and doing judo moves when your feet are supposed to be off the floor.  Also, if you have a space station that is creating artificial gravity by spinning, people in the center of that wheel would still be weightless.  Weight would increase the further out from the center you went, but only if you were angled so that the bottoms of your feet were always facing the outer ring.  The movie 2010 a Space Odyssey got that one right eleven years earlier.  Also, because there is no oxygen in space, there cannot be lingering fires.

And the ridiculous way they tried to simulate weightlessness when Bond stopped the space station’s rotation made me really roll my eyes.  All they did was have the actors tip-toe across the floors as if they were lighter than air, and slow down the speed of the film.  But they were still walking.  There were a few brief shots of people slowly falling off high walkways towards the floor that looked pretty cool.  There, they actually did a little wire work, and the shots were from a wide angle, so the wires were too far away to be seen.

I mean, I understand that the James Bond franchise was jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon.  There were hand-held lasers that were never used as weapons again in any other Bond film.  There was the space battle where teams of combatants wearing space jet propulsion packs were shooting at each other as if they were on a battlefield.  I might not be an expert, but I don’t think that battle was entirely realistic.  It was almost like a cowboy shoot-em-up in outer space.

But those things only made up about the last half hour of the two-hour movie.  Like all other Bond films, there were daring stunts, things blowing up, high-speed chases, hand-to-hand combat, close escapes, and lots of nifty gadgets.  And as utterly stupid as it was, there was a gondola on the Canals of Venice that changed into a hovercraft that Bond drove through the streets of the famous city.  At one point he even has to battle a giant python in a pond.

For all that, the stunts were good enough, though some of the blue-screening was still a little obvious.  For example, when James uses a hang-glider to fly to safety, the background looked really fake. Still, I will admit that in the scene where Bond and Jaws fight on the top of a suspended gondola, the blue-screened background was pretty good.  But alas, as I mentioned in my review for another James Bond film, his ability to seduce every sexy woman he meets cannot be counted as a special effect.  Sorry James, but that was just as unrealistic as your space battle.

Earthquake – 1974 (WINNER)

The next movie in the era of disaster films is Earthquake, in which a seismic event that was over a seven on the Richter Scale devastates Los Angeles.   The special effects are an integral part of the plot, and once again, it was the only film even nominated for the award.  It was a give-away.  In fact, the previous year didn’t even have any nominees.  But did it really deserve the honor?  For the most part, yes, it clearly did.  However, there was a particular effect that really fell flat and had me rolling my eyes.  I’ll explain.

The film’s big earthquake scene actually lasted nearly ten whole minutes.  It was a non-stop effects extravaganza.  In most of the scenes, the crumbling buildings and toppling power lines were done perfectly well.  They were obviously scale models that were destroyed and then composited into real cityscapes, and that all looked very good.  There were also a lot of great shots of people getting showered with rubble and dust, and in some cases, even getting buried under tons of broken concrete.  There was a disintegrating dam that, when it finally broke, released a flood of water that obliterated everything in its path.

The actors, extras, and stunt people were subjected to shaking sets and incredible dirt and blood makeup.  There was a shot of a woman getting rained on by shattered glass, and when she turned to the camera, we could see large shards of glass protruding from her bleeding face.  We saw green-screened people falling out of skyscrapers and plummeting to their deaths, people being washed away by rising water, and people getting buried under dirt.

There were also several great composited wide shots that showed the large scale of the carnage and devastation caused by the earthquake.  They were great images that looked like war zones with ruined buildings making up the skyline, fire and smoke rising into the air, and dead bodies littering the streets.  Those effects were more than enough to earn the film its Best Special Effects Oscar.  And no, I’m not going to count Victoria Principal’s ridiculous wig as a special effect.  It was really just a sign of the times.

But then there was the ridiculously executed elevator scene.  In a film where everything looked more realistic than your average effects, we are treated to a badly done effect of a freefalling elevator that killed everyone inside.  As the elevator hit the bottom of the shaft, hand-painted blood got splattered onto the screen, as if the inside of my television is getting covered in gore.  First, what that did, is remind me that I’m watching something through a camera, disrupting my immersion into the story.  Second, it was like a cartoon of blood.  It was a flat, uniform color with a black outline that didn’t look anything like real blood.  But aside from some other minor transgressions like stretching the image in a really cheesy way when the quake began, in order to disorient the viewer, I have no real complaints about the effects on the whole.  They were actually done pretty well.

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?

Krakatoa East of Java – 1969

The special effects for this film were actually very good despite the strangeness of the script.  It was a good movie, but it felt a little directionless at times, like it wasn’t sure what kind of movie it was trying to be.  And there is a reason I’m commenting on the film as a whole in a review that is supposed to be focused on its special effects.  According to my research, things were done backwards.  The impressive special effects were all filmed before the script was written, and the script was then put together based on that footage.

There is no doubt that the effects were good.  The volcanic eruption that destroyed an entire island was appropriately violent.  The smoke and the lava, the fiery rocks, the flaming projectiles, and the massive explosions were staggering.  The sequence where the little ship had to slowly escape to the open ocean while molten rock rained down on it was exciting and full of intense action.  Then, having survived the escape, our heroes had to batten down the hatches as a super-massive tsunami wave is generated.  The tidal wave submerges an entire coastal city where a few of our less fortunate characters flee for their lives.

It was all very cool to watch and but I noticed something strange.  There were a few shots that were re-used several times in the film.  In it, a spray of smoking rocks and fire shoot out of the mountain, and a small black rock is hurtled from the left side of the screen to the right.  I saw that same black rock sail across the screen three, maybe four times.  Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

Anyway, there were more effects than just the spectacular eruption and the tidal wave.  There was a sequence in which a hot air balloon is blown into the volcano just before it explodes.  First the carriage, and then the balloon itself catches fire.  The two men have to leap from the burning basket into the ocean.  Meanwhile, a man in a diving bell is lowered into the sea to search for a sunken ship.  When his air hose is compromised, two men in old-fashioned diving suits are lowered into the water to save him.  Four pearl divers also leap into the waves to help.

There were effects of all kinds on display, and as much as the movie tried to be a musical, a romance, a drama, and sometimes a comedy, all at the same time, there is no doubt that it was primarily  an action/adventure film.  The skillful use of miniature models, moderately passable blue-screening, seamless compositing, stunts, and practical effects, all combined to create some pretty impressive visuals.

Incidentally, this was right around the beginning of the era of the big-budget disaster film.  Coming up in the list of nominated films are others such as The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Hindenburg.  After that, we’ll arrive at the era of more modern science fiction movies like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Aliens.  I’m really looking forward to revisiting these films that entertained me so much when I was a child!

1967 – Doctor Dolittle (WINNER)

Sigh…  I’ll make no bones about the fact that I don’t like the film.  Test audiences in the 1960s didn’t like the film either.  This movie was geared towards a target audience between two and six years old.  That being said, I’m trying to be as objective as possible about the quality of the special effects.  But even then, I can find few things about the effects that were done well.  And yet it won the Award.  It won.  If you ask me, it was a ridiculous win, and here’s why.

First of all, I have to assume that the academy considered trained animals to be a special effect, though I don’t.  But aside from that, there was a brief storm at sea that supposedly destroyed a ship without hurting, or even inconveniencing, the passengers, a two-headed llama with four shapely human legs, a whale that pushed a very fake looking scale model of an island across the ocean to rejoin it with the coast of Africa like a puzzle piece, and a giant moth.  The trained animals was really all the movie had.  Oh, and I almost forgot about the Giant Pink Sea Snail, made of what appeared to be paper machete over a wire frame.

So, let’s focus on that snail for a moment.  One of the things that has always bothered be about it was that it was so much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.  I’m attributing this glaring flaw directly to the special effects team.  He looked pitifully fake from the outside, and about the size of a large truck or minivan, not nearly big enough to house four people, each with their own separate sleeping chamber.  But this made no sense.  They could have easily made it appear big enough with green-screening, just like they did with the giant whale earlier in the movie, when he was talking to Dr. Dolittle.  All they had to do is apply the same technique to the snail.  But no, the small Sea Snail was a colossal disappointment.

This movie originally had a budget of $6 million.  By the time the film was completed, it had inflated to around $18 million, which was a lot of money in the mid-60s.  The animatronic snail was supposed to be the driving force behind the film’s entire plot, as Doctor Dolittle was on a mission to find the mythical creature.  You’d think that some of that budget could have been devoted to the fantastical creature when he is finally shown at the end of the movie.  But no.  And as far as the rest of the animatronics used in the movie are concerned, mechanical creatures like the whale with the slow-moving tail, the giant moth with the slowly beating wings, , the cartoonish octopus, or the fox that looked alright, but moved like something in an old Disneyland attraction, they were pretty poorly done.

The fact that this movie won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects was almost a joke.  The effects were as bad as the plot and the acting.  But I suppose the trained animals were cool enough.  I mean, in what other movies do we get to see a man riding a giraffe?  And I guess that the trained chimp and the parrot were fun enough, though nothing I’d consider impressive enough to earn the film its nomination, let alone its win.  I just don’t get it.  

The Birds – 1963

This was one of those movies that I have not seen in a long time, but I remember enjoying it. Not only did it have an interesting story, but it also had a bit of action, a thin but palatable romance, and some pretty unique special effects. Never before have I seen so many blue-screened birds seamlessly composited together on the screen at the same time. Of course, there were are few times when the blue-screening effects looked a little obvious, but most of the time, the birds were flying around so fast that the eye didn’t have time to focus on those minor flaws.

The plot was about the coastal town of Bodega Bay that is plagued by great flocks of birds that begin attacking and killing humans.  Just as a side note, I love that the movie never explains why. Hitchcock used a combination of live animals, puppets, and animatronic birds to create the illusion of killer swarms of seagulls, crows, and sparrows. There isn’t an academy award for animal handlers or trainers, but I think that maybe they should be included in the special effects category.

In the scene where they attack children at a birthday party, there were several examples of animatronic birds as they were attached to the kids’ necks and shoulders. You could see the wings flapping mechanically, or beaks pecking repetitively. But then, through the use of a couple of quick cuts, live birds replaced the puppets before being batted away by adults. The transitions were smooth and well-done. But it had to be more than that because there were shots of gulls swooping in and landing on the children.

Hitchcock was an incredible director. One of the things he did in this film reminded me of one of the most highly praised scenes of his career, the shower scene from his 1960 movie, Psycho. He flashed a confused series of images in quick succession, implying a lot of motion. It is a very jarring and chaotic technique that doesn’t actually put the actor in the middle of a maelstrom, though they very much seem to be. So Tippy Hedren is alone in a room and is attacked by dozens of birds. There is actually very little movement in the individual images that flash across the screen. Her head turns here. Her ankle is bitten there, a scratch appears on her cheek here, her hand is bitten there. But watch the individual images.  Some of them are almost still shots.  It was so innovative! So masterfully done!

But birds attacking people were not the only effects in the film. There was a dead man with his eyes pecked out, a really great action sequence in which a mass of seagulls attack the townsfolk, a gasoline fire, and a man being burned to death. And then there was the film’s final chilling scene in which the birds have trapped our protagonists in a house.  They have to make their way to a car through hundreds of birds that could resume their attack at any time. Just getting that many live birds to cover the ground, the roof, and every other available surface must have been a challenge in itself.  But it all looked real enough.  I say, well done, Mr. Hitchcock! Thanks for giving us something we had never seen before!

Sorry, I cant find this one.

Air Force – 1943

Air Force was a very good movie that had a lot of really intense battle sequences.  To its credit, the movie had only one main plot.  It was about the adventures of a B-17D Bomber, named the Mary Ann, and its fearless crew.  There was no love story to bog the narrative down, though there were still some very touching moments when friends and family of the crew are injured or even killed.  In fact, even several members of the crew are killed in various ways.

The story took place around the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, and Clark Field in the Philippines.  The action was almost non-stop.  The bomber arrived at, or actively engaged in, one battle after another, constantly putting the lives of the brave soldiers inside her at risk. 

As expected, there were a lot of rear projection shots, but they were cleverly done and really thrilling to watch.  When a gunner was firing at a target, we got a POV over the man’s shoulder, looking down the barrel of his machinegun.  We see the projected Japanese planes bearing down on the Mary Ann, intent on bringing her down.  But then we see the enemy planes either catch fire, or violently explode as the gunner does his job.  Very awesome to watch!

There were stunt flyers creating exciting aerial battles, ground forces fighting with the attacking Japanese invasion forces, and a final climactic scene in which several squadrons of American fighter pilots engage both the Japanese airplanes and a naval invasion task force heading toward Australia.  Bombs were dropped and battleships exploded in balls of fire.  Japanese Mitsubishi A6Ms, called “zeros” could be seen going down in flames into the water.

This sequence was also notable for its use of real battle footage.  It was only used a few times, but it was quite obvious when the sharp, clear images produced by the Hollywood cameras switched to the unsteady, grainy, hand-held images of the newsreel footage. 

Another thing that Air Force did that caught my attention was something that was done to the images on the screen during the ground battles.  To draw the audiences into the action just a bit more, whenever a bomb exploded, the focus shook for a fraction of a second.  It was a very simple, yet completely effective trick, giving just a touch more realism to an already realistic scene of chaos and carnage.

And I have to say that the cast, among whom the biggest name was veteran actor John Garfield, was really put through its paces.  The rolls were physically demanding, and they all did a fantastic job.  This movie’s effects really strived for realism and I think they achieved it.  It was a worthy nominee, and I’m sure the Academy voters had a tough time picking the winner.  If not for Crash Dive, I think this movie might have won the Oscar for Best Special Effects.