2022 – Top Gun: Maverick
This Top Gun sequel had some pretty incredible visual effects. The Stunt flying, the incredible compositing, the design, everything, was put together to create a film that was far superior, both in the script and the visuals, than its predecessor. Of course, as you might expect most of the visual effects were all about the fast flying fighter jets, the dog-fights, and the exploding planes. Not only did they look awesome in motion, but they looked pretty cool on the ground, too.
For example, one of the effects of note in the movie was right in the opening sequence. The Darkstar, the allegedly fictional jet, which reached a speed of mach-ten. Even seeing it in the hangar, just the design of the aircraft was pretty cool. Apparently, that was a real mock-up when we see it before it takes off. But once it was in the air, it was entirely CGI. It was partly designed by real engineers that work at Leckheed Martin along with their Skunk Works Division.
And I would never have known that most of the airplanes in the film were composited. Wikipedia explains it pretty, saying, “In an interview with aviation YouTuber C. W. Lemoine, one of the VFX artists on the special effects team, Fred Lyn, stated that the use of CGI was extensive in the film with the F-14 and Su-57 visualized entirely by computer. Lyn also said that the F/A-18 scenes predominantly involved a single jet, which was then put through CGI to create the dogfight training scenes that depicted multiple jets. The four-jet strike force at the end of the film was also created through CGI from a single F/A-18.” And I would have sworn that they used four jets with four pilots.
But the effects were so much more involved than that. Of course, even though the actors were put through a boot camp so they would be able to act under extreme g-force conditions while a trained professional pilot flew their jets, the actors also had to learn to operate the camera equipment, which makes sense, since there would have been no room for a camera operator in the cockpits of actual aircraft. And all that effort was for the purpose of enhancing the realism of the visuals.
But there were also plenty of practical effects in the movie. It wasn’t all CGI. There was some pretty impressive actual stunt flying. In the third act of the film, four jets are flying through a canyon, low enough to avoid enemy radars and missiles, a tactic which put them dangerously close to the ground with mountains less than a hundred feet beyond either wingtip. If anything went wrong, the actors could so easily have died, and again, I call that impressive. And of course, Tom Cruise, the main character took on most of the screen-time, doing most of his own stunts, and even doing some of his own flying, as he is actually a pilot capable of flying fighter jets on his own. Well done, Tom!