Category: Best Visual Effects

Tenet – 2020-21

This movie’s visual effects really deserved the Oscar they took home, and for several very specific reasons.  The visual effects were obvious when they were shown on the screen, which usually is a bad thing.  Normally, some of the best visual effects are the ones you can’t see.  But here, the opposite is true.  As part of the movie’s fantastic plot, you are supposed to be able to see everything, and they made all the strange and unnatural images look perfectly natural and realistic.  And due to the nature of these effects, it was an amazing feat of filmmaking.

What I mean is that some images in the film were moving forward in time, while others that were on the screen at the same time, were moving in reverse, which the film called inverted.  The hole in the glass becomes whole before the gun is fired, and the inverted bullet shoots back into the barrel of the weapon, while at the same time, a non-inverted man ducks to avoid the reversed shot, knowing where the bullets are coming from, because of the holes in the wall.  It was honestly, a little confusing from a plot perspective, but also from a visual perspective.

And speaking of perspective, we’ve all seen movies that show you a scene from one perspective, then later in the movie, we see the exact same scene from a different perspective.  But here, this is done with one going forward in time, and one going backward.  The perfect example is shown in one of the film’s most exciting action scenes: a car chase on a motorway.  The drivers come upon a crashed car which picks itself up and flips back onto its wheels, then starts speeding in reverse in the same direction as the drivers.  Later, we see the same scene from within the un-crashed vehicle, as it is driving forward, and the other cars are moving in reverse!

But it all looked pretty… natural.  So how was it done?  How did they film a fight scene with a regular man and an inverted man?  One trick they used was to decide, in a given shot, which actor had to fall.  Since that can’t be actually done in reverse, they had the other actor do the scene in reverse.  Many actors and stunt teams had to learn their movements backwards and forwards.

There was another great scene near the film’s climax in which a building is both exploded and imploded at the same time.  To accomplish this, two buildings were constructed, one of them an exact replica of the other.  They were both detonated and filmed from matching camera angles.  Then they played one of the films in reverse, and composited it together with the other footage.  Mesmerizing!

But for all this movie’s amazing visuals, very little CGI was used, compared to its contemporaries.  Most films of this genre use about 2,000 effects shots.  This one, thanks to director Christopher Nolan, only had around 300, which makes the Oscar win that much more impressive.  The rest were just amazing practical effects. 

Mulan – 2020/21

So, I must confess myself a little… disappointed in the visual effects for Mulan.  I knew going into it that they had changed the story and added the character of a supernatural witch, so I was expecting some eye-catching imagery, and there was a little of that, but not very much.  There just wasn’t enough that caught my attention as either innovative or interesting.  Then I did some reading in an attempt to see what I was missing.  But the articles I read didn’t give me much to go on.

I even watched a three or four minute breakdown of the visual effects for the movie, and most of what they showed was fancy compositing and set extensions.  There were also a few CGI animals, some of which actually looked a little fake, like the rabbits running along with Mulan’s horse near the beginning of the film.  Even the magical phoenix had moments where it looked too cartoonish.  I mean, it looked alright, and I can’t put my finger on exactly what was throwing my eyes off, but there was something that made it look less than real.  That being said, the CGI chicken the young Mulan is chasing was not bad at all.

The effect that the video breakdown and the articles really pushed was the compositing to build the vast backgrounds and the enormity of the Imperial City, and I have to give them credit for those things.  The best visual effects are the ones you don’t see.  I would never have guessed that many of the shots were done against green-screens.  For example, the shots where the Huns are riding their horses towards the City walls, had a composited background.  Apparently, the landscape where they actually filmed the riders was too flat, so they added a far distant mountain range in the distance, and some dust to be kicked up by the horses.  That was well-done, and I would never have known.

But the effect that really impressed me was the avalanche.  To my inexperienced eyes, it seemed like it wouldn’t be hard for experienced digital artists to create, but it looked great on the screen.  The way the snow and ice slid off the mountain, turned into powder, and flowed like a cloud onto the unsuspecting Hun army was pretty cool.  And then there was the new character of Xianniang, a shapeshifting witch.  She changed forms, turned into a flock of birds, made the long sleeves of her clothing come to life and attack her enemies, and that sort of thing.  And both she and Mulan did a lot of physics-defying acrobatics by means of extensive wire-work.  It looks cool enough, but it is certainly nothing new.

And overall, I guess that’s my main complaint about the visual effects of this movie.  They were all effects that we have already seen far too often, and in better films.  This movie had the potential to be so much more.  I suppose I was just expecting more, and for me, the visual effects seemed to be struggling to deliver.

2019 – Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Here we are with chapter nine of the main Star Wars franchise.  And when it comes down to it, I believe that, as pertains to the visual effects, being the culmination of the Skywalker Saga has both its advantages and its disadvantages.  So I must do my best to leave the shortcomings of the script aside, though I actually liked the script more than most people seem to.  On the plus side, they certainly gave us that big epic visual climax that we wanted.  But on the minus side, it is Star Wars.  How visually stunning is yet another lightsaber battle going to be?

As you’d expect, the laser-sword effects were up to the franchise’s normal high standard.  They looked great, but why wouldn’t they?  They’ve had eight other films to practice the same effect to get it looking fantastic.  I think they actually had it perfected by the time The Return of the Jedi came out in 1983.  In other words, nothing new there.  There was a really cool scene where Rey and Kylo Ren had a lightsaber duel while they were both in different places.  I loved how it kept cutting back and forth between the two locations, mixing and blending them together in a visually awesome way.  However, as I think about it, that probably had more to do with some pretty innovative directing and great editing, than mere visual effects.

And the same could almost be said of the space ship battles, though I think those were looking pretty darn good in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980.  They were just as expected – fast paced and thrilling.  The Millennium Falcon looked as cool and iconic as it always does… in five other Star Wars movies, six if you count Solo: A Star Wars Story.

But I think what this film had to offer was the new and unique digital environments that served as fabulous backdrops for the lightsaber battles and the spaceship battles.  For example, she saber duel on the narrow platform in the middle of the raging ocean was really cool.  The way the splashing water interacted with the actors and the sabers was awesome.  And the final ship battle where thousands of small ships arrive to fight against the fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers was something that we had never seen before, and I appreciated that.

And I have to make mention of the really unique way they used the evil Emperor’s force-lightning effect.  You see, here, he has become so powerful that he is able to shoot his blue bolts of electricity from the surface of a planet up into space, destroying rebel space ships.  If that’s not grand and epic, I don’t know what is.  And when it was turned back on him, it looked fantastic – so much better than when the same thing happened in Episode III.  It was so much more realistic.  Here, you can actually see his flesh burning away, not just a shriveled head.  In all, the effects were perfectly executed, even if we’ve seen a lot of them before.

The Lion King – 2019

First, I’m just going to say that this movie was kind-of a one-trick pony, the trick being photo-realistic CGI animals.  Second, it’s the same trick that was used in Disney’s 2016 film, The Jungle Book, and while the technological superiority may have been better, I couldn’t really see much difference between the quality or realism of the talking animals between this movie and that one.  And third, the very nature of the film, hyper-realistic talking animals, as opposed to cartoon animated talking animals, triggers a disconnect in my brain that often destroys the very realism the filmmakers are trying to achieve.

When it comes down to it, I’ll admit, I didn’t really care for this movie, and that disconnect was a big part of my reasoning, though it wasn’t the only thing I didn’t like.  But this isn’t a review of the movie, just its visual effects.  Did the animals look real?  Of course they did.  They looked incredibly real.  But again, this is nothing new. So what else did the visuals of the movie get right?  Well, all the environments were digitally created, as well.  In fact, I think I may have been more impressed with the realistic scenery than I was with the talking animals.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that was the filmmakers’ intention.

One of the new technologies that was used to make this movie was actually pretty interesting.  When making a modern movie, it is now pretty common practice to have roughly animated pre-visualizations made.  It is almost like an animated story-board.  But here, they went a step further, using virtual reality equipment.  The incredibly detailed 3D environments were all created ahead of time.  Then the director, John Favreau and his production crew would put on VR headsets and explore the virtual sets, setting up shots and camera angles.  I’m guessing this eliminated the need for location scouting.  And if they wanted anything in the environments changed in any way, it could be done fairly easily – remove that rock there, make the angle of that slope steeper, that kind of thing.

And there are other advantages to having a 100% CGI movie.  For example, you never have to deal with actual nature.  There are no delays due to bad weather, bad lighting, or uncooperative animals.  In fact, the animals all behaved exactly as they were made to.  Unfortunately, I think that was also a point against the realism of the film.  The characters may have looked real, but they didn’t behave real.  Talking aside, they didn’t always move like real animals.  The perfect example is when they sang The Lion Sleeps Tonight.  The fact that they were dancing made them look so fake.  I tried to use my suspension of disbelief, to accept that animals in this world could dance and sing, but because the animals looked so real, I just had such a hard time believing the scene.  So I suppose this might just be an inherent problem with CGI animals that look real but don’t behave real.

The Irishman – 2019

Ok, I’ll say it right off the bat.  The visual effects in this movie were nothing more than a one-trick pony, though the trick was, I’ll admit, a masterful one.  The only real effect in this film that was noteworthy was the de-aging of the main actors.  The film was in the style of an epic that took place over a long period of time.  The three main actors, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci were shown at various ages over the course of 50 years.  In the past, this was generally done with either makeup and prosthetics, or finding other actors that resembled the stars that we all know and love, but here it is done with CGI.  And, unfortunately, that was it.  That was its one claim to greatness in its visual effects. 

So lets explore that one effect a little.  The film’s director, Martin Scorsese didn’t want the actors to have to wear dots, or golf balls, as he put it in interviews, on their faces.  He needed his actors to be able to interact with each other without the normally required facial prosthetics getting in their way.  A visual effects designer named Pablo Helman, along with the people at ILM, developed a new technology. 

A new kind of camera was created that was equipped with a row of three lenses.  This gave digital artists and renderers the same image from three slightly different angles.  In addition to that, the outer two lenses captured infra-red images.  Then they went through the archives of the three actors’ films so they could intensely study what they looked like when they were younger.  They also had the actors sit in front of a camera and go through an extensive range of facial expressions, giving the digital artists even more data on how their individual faces moved.

Finally, they analyzed the newly-filmed performances, and allowed their computers to recreate the actors, using all the images collected from the three-lensed camera, the archival images, and the data from the moving facial expression sessions.  Special software was then used to analyze the lighting from the filmed footage, and recreate it on the digitally created images.  In the end, they didn’t try to create younger versions of the actors, but rather, younger versions of the characters they were playing.  The result was pretty remarkable, though I will say that there were one or two shots that looked just a tiny bit wonky.  I couldn’t put my finger on what was off, but my brain perceived something that was not quite right.

The only other prominent visual effects in the films were in the form of exploding cars, people getting shot, with the appropriate splashes of blood, of course, and a car that got riddled with bullets.  Also, the really old-age makeup was pretty incredible, though that would fall under the category of Best Makeup.  I can see why The Irishman was nominated for Best Visual Effects, but I agree with the academy’s decision not to award it an Oscar win.

Avengers: Endgame – 2019

Ok, so as you’d expect, the visual effects for Endgame were top-notch, phenomenal, incredibly photo-realistic, perfectly executed, elaborately designed, highly detailed, and visually stunning.  The fact that the film was the culmination of at least 10 major Marvel properties, and sporting a character list comprised of nearly 35 super-powered heroes, not to mention all the great villains, was not lost on me.  That meant that all the great visual effects that we have come to associate with these beloved characters had to be either duplicated or improved upon.

So what was there to improve, you might ask?  I can think of several examples just off the top of my head.  There was the awesome blending of Bruce Banner and the Hulk, which gave him a completely new look.  There were the never-before-seen powers built into Iron Man’s suit.  There were new trick arrows for Hawkeye.  And they made use of the relatively new technique of de-aging actors like Michael Douglas and John Slattery, not to mention the extreme aging of Chris Evans.  Even Stan Lee was de-aged 45 years for his obligatory cameo.

And it all looks fantastic.  Even the costumes that the Avengers wear during the Time Heist sequence were visual effects.  Yes, apparently, when the day of filming arrived, the special white and red suits that they wore had not yet been designed.  The visual effects team were given the task of digitally adding the costumes in post.  I would never have known just by watching the movie.  And the same was also done for Captain Marvel, every time you see her on the screen.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my favorite characters in the MCU, whose look was also upgraded for this movie – Thor.  The character has had to endure unbelievable losses, and so he lets himself go, physically.  Interestingly enough, this wasn’t accomplished with CGI.  It was an incredibly convincing prosthetic suit worn by Chris Hemsworth.  The only concession was a seam in the suit’s back that had to be digitally removed when he was shirtless.

And, even though I already mentioned it in my review for Avengers: Infinity War, I’m going to mention it again.  The fully CGI character of Thanos was perfection.  Played by Josh Brolin wearing a motion capture suit, facial capture dots, and a camera mounted on his head, his incredible performance was brought to life by the digital animators in such a way as to make me believe it was a guy wearing purple makeup and prosthetics.  The emotions the digital artists were able to bring out of Brolin’s performance were done perfectly.  Just amazing!

But I think the biggest standout of the film’s visual effects was simply the scale.  The gargantuan scale of the epic film, especially in that final action sequence, was what I seem to remember most, when I think about this movie.  Yes, we’ve seen battle sequences this big before, but none, I think, with one side of the conflict being made up of such unique and individual characters, each with their own looks, way of fighting, and super powers.  It was just a phenomenally well-made epic film.

1917 – 2019 (WINNER)

The visual effects for this movie, hands down, deserved the Oscar they took home.  They showed audiences something that had never been seen before.  This was innovative and gripping story telling at its best.  Director Sam Mendes had a vision of a film experience unlike anything that had ever been attempted, and he achieved that vision in a remarkable way. 

So this is a war film, and as such, it had its fair share of battle sequences, bloody death, and explosions, offering up a respectful amount of the horrors of war.  But what this movie did that was so remarkable was the fact that there was only one place in the film where there was a cut, a transition.  The entire film is made up of two continuous takes, each lasting around an hour.  The characters had to undertake a journey that crossed great spans of distance and time, and wherever they walked, the camera simply followed them, shooting them from different and unique angles, swinging around them, rotating from back to front, but never cutting.  It made for a fascinating and immersive visual experience.

Now clearly, this could only be done through the magic of visual effects.  It would be impossible to do this entire film in only two takes.  The visual effects teams had to find innovative and believable ways to seamlessly blend the separate cuts in such a way as to make them completely invisible.  To achieve this feat, this was the first film in which a specialized camera was used, called an Arri Alexa Mini LF Digital cinema camera.  This was critical, as it allowed the filmmakers to keep the camera in constant motion, sometimes being passed from cranes and wires, to being hand-held by a camera operator, and back again.  I’m guessing there were few or no stationary or fixed camera shots in the entire film.

The camera angles and movements had to be meticulously planned out and executed with a certain amount of precision.  This allowed the effects artists to stitch together the different cuts.  One of the film’s visual effects supervisors, Guillaume Rocheron, was quoted as saying in an interview with Computer Graphics World, or CGW, “Some of the stitches are simple, where a natural piece of landscape or architecture was used to disguise and blend the transition. Others were extremely complicated, where we switched to a digital set with digital actors because it was the only solution that would give us the exact throw of the camera, and as a viewer, you would not question it.”

There are several scenes that stand out to me as really amazing.  There was the scene where two soldiers are nearly killed by a bomb in a bunker, another where an airplane crashes to the ground.  After one of them dies, the remaining soldier escapes a bombed out city by jumping off a bridge into a river.  And finally there is the scene where he sprints across a battlefield amid exploding shells and charging men.  This amazing film somehow blurred the line between a simple entertainment and a work of art.  I’ll say it again.  This film really deserved its Oscar win.

Solo: A Star Wars Story = 2018

Contrary to popular opinion, I liked this movie.  The film may have been an unnecessary addition to the franchise, providing answers to questions nobody was asking, but it was a fun adventure, and a big part of that was the way it looked.  It brought back several characters we all know and love from the original trilogy, and introduced several new ones.  And it explained how Han Solo was indirectly responsible for the start of the Rebel Alliance…?  OK, I know, that’s all about the occasionally clunky script, not the visual effects, but I had to get it off my chest.

The movie had all the benefits of a big-budget blockbuster, and it showed in the special effects.  All the CGI heavy action sequences, all the strange aliens, all the sentient droid robots, all the high-speed space battles, and even a giant space creature, combined to form an aesthetic that perfectly fits into the style of every other Star Wars movie. There was an expected realism to everything that appeared on the screen, no matter how bizarre.  I especially liked the alien character of Rio, a snarky six-limbed monkey-like alien, and the super-giant space squid.

There seems to be a bit of a trend going on with visual effects, and that is to film as many effects “in camera” as possible.  All that means is that directors are using as many practical effects as they can, and enhancing them with CGI.  I can think of two significant ways in which Solo did this.  First, there was the character of L3-37, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  This droid character could have so easily been a fully computer generated character.  She was a bipedal robot with many of her inner mechanisms and wires exposed.  Waller-Bridge wore a green body-suit on set along with robotic coverings over her arms, legs, and bit of her torso, with a small piece covering part of her head.  The animators were often able to use the visible parts of the costume in the final shot, eliminating the need for a fully CGI image.  That being said, I couldn’t tell when she was full CGI, and when she was not.

Second, the visual effects team borrowed a technique that helped its competitor, First Man, take home the Best Visual Effects Oscar.  They sometimes filmed the actors in front of a giant curved LED screen that provided the background like a modern version of a rear-projection screen.  I really like the idea that the actors actually get to see all the high-speed environments they are supposed to be in.

And all the fast flying action was fantastic!  The train heist sequence was awesome and the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in 12 parsecs, escaping both a glowing red gravity well and the space squid was very exciting to watch!  See, here’s the thing.  I have no problems with CGI imagery if you can’t tell it’s there.  But too often, there is an indefinable unrealistic quality to CGI.  And I know I’m skipping movies within the franchise, but I can usually tell the difference between CGI Yoda and puppet Yoda.  Was the CGI badly done?  No.  But the puppet always looked more tangible, more real.  Less mobile?  Of course, but more real.  All in all, this was a fast-paced fun space adventure that looked great on the big screen.

Ready Player One – 2018

First off, I’m going to try not to give a biased opinion of the visual effects in this film, just because I really liked the movie.  There were two worlds in the film that have to be treated differently, from a special effects point of view.  There was the real world, and the virtual world.  The virtual world took up the bulk of the screen time, and every bit of it was CGI, from the characters to the environments.  All the action and all the drama, every single pixel, was made in a computer.

But that was as it was supposed to be.  One of the biggest plot points of the movie was that people spent too much time fantasizing in the virtual world, and not enough time living in the real world.  The virtual world was basically a big video game, and thus, it was appropriate when the CGI world looked like a cut-scene in a video game.  It wouldn’t have fit the story if it looked too realistic.

All the primary cast in the movie had to have their virtual avatars, for which the standard motion and facial capture techniques were used.  But because it was a fantasy world, there were certain things they could do that looked really cool.  For example, the avatar of Art3mis had oversized eyes.  Both she and Parzival had colorful facial markings.  Aech had a non-existent stomach, held together by metal support cables, resembling something out of the film Ex-Machina.  But it was the expressiveness in their faces that really sold the emotional content of the movie.  And the avatars of the bad guys had the same level of detail and emotiveness

The two action scenes that stood out were the first car race scene, where the competitors had to avoid things like giant swinging wrecking balls, a T-rex, and King Kong.  But even that sequence was nothing compared to the final battle, in which hundreds of characters and items from every aspect of pop culture, or one might proudly say, nerd culture, at least the ones director Stephen Spielberg could get the rights to, like Batman, Halo, The Iron Giant, Mechagodzilla, He-Man, Krull, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Back to the Future, Street Fighter, Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, and Gremlins, just to name a few.  Apparently, there were so many unique and individual characters on the screen at the same time, fighting in one massive battle, that a new software had to be developed to make it all work.  And it all looked… just unreal enough to be recognizable as the film’s virtual world.

And in the real world, the three most notable effects were also pretty impressive.  First, there was the Stacks, a giant slum neighborhood made of mobile homes stacked up on top of each other like metal-framed towers.  Next was the destruction of one of those towers, though our hero had to use the Prometheus school of running away from things when it fell towards him.  The third was the hologram of Parzival’s avatar being projected into Sorrento’s real-world office, made of sparkling pixels of projected light.  But I can’t forget the digital recreation of the Overlook Hotel from Stanly Kubrick’s The Shining.  The sheer number of pop-culture characters and reverences in this movie was just impressive!

First Man – 2018 (WINNER)

The visual effects for First Man did not, for the most part, impress me… that is, until I did a little research to learn how they were done.  Then my respect for them grew a little.  However, the first and biggest problem I had with these effects was that we’ve seen most of them before in other excellent films like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, between which, there were noticeable improvements in the effects.  And while they looked good in this movie, I don’t see how the visuals here were significantly better than those other films which came out in 1983 and 1995.

But what made these movie’s effects impressive was that they were all practical effects… well, kind of.  What I mean is that director, Damien Chazelle, used all practical effects, up to a point.  There were no green or blue screens, there were miniature models in various scales for wide or close shots, there was actual NASA archival footage that was used and enhanced, and there was minimal CGI.  So how did they get the shots of the Apollo 11 launch, the earth from outer space, and the moon landing?  The tried and true method of rear projection.

But it wasn’t your typical rear projection technique.  They constructed massive 35 foot tall, 60 foot wide LED screen that they put the actors in front of.  Now, the images being played on the screen were a combination archival footage and CG images.  So when the camera was recording, it picked up all those images without having to composite them together.  This had the added advantage of allowing the actors to see the backgrounds and environments their characters were supposed to be in.  Also, when you see images reflected in the helmets of the astronauts, many times, they were actual reflections that didn’t need to be added in post. 

So the real challenge that the effects teams had to deal with was preparing all the CGI images that were to appear on the LED screen.  Obviously, it all had to be ready before the actual filming began, as opposed to after filming was complete.  Also, depending on the kind of shots needed, different LED images need to be at different resolutions in order to make the shots believable.  And it wasn’t just a small amount.  They had to create around 90 minutes of background content, which is the size of a feature in its own right.  And I have to say that the best effects scene in the movie was the climax, the actual moon landing.  It was an event that has not often been depicted in films, and certainly not in such a realistic way.

So all the in-camera filming that was done added a certain level of realism to the movie, which I appreciate.  But that isn’t to say that there was no post-production work.  In the end, the practical effects were enhanced by minor CGI effects.  Also, the LED backgrounds were sometimes adjusted to better suit the needs of the scenes.  All in all, it was a very interesting and innovative approach to modern filmmaking.  But did this movie deserve its Oscar?  I suppose so, if only because of their innovation, blending an old technique with modern technology.  It was a new and effective way to show us things we’ve seen before.