Cliffhanger – 1993
This wasn’t a bad movie, and I enjoyed it, for the most part. But I can see why it was nominated for the Best Special Effects Award. In fact, I think the effects were better than the movie itself. As I watched, I was specifically looking for the seams in the visuals, and I was pretty impressed that they were practically impossible to find. The whole schtick of the movie was extreme mountain climbing and Sylvester Stallone’s biceps, and there were plenty of each in the film, though it was the former that took up the bulk of the visual effects.
Mountain climbing is a really nerve-wracking activity to watch because there is always the possibility of a fall, and there were a number of spectacular falls in the script. The first scene of the movie had a woman fall to her death from a zip-line because her straps magically undid themselves. The camera gave us a really wide shot as we see her plummeting an impossible distance. Great effect! Or there was one really amazing close-up shot of Stallone stranded on the side of a cliff. The camera begins to pan out until we see just how massive the cliff is, and how tiny he looks, desperately clinging to the bare rock. Now that was an incredible shot, and from what I learned in my research, many of the shots of mountain climbing were real, and Stallone did most of his own stunts!
Once again, I have to lump the stunts into the visual effects, and there were lots of exciting examples. There was the scene in which Stallone was under the ice in a frozen Rocky Mountain river, and shoots the bad guy through the ice. There was a sequence in which Stallone kills another baddie after sliding down a long slope. I liked how our hero was on the bottom, on his stomach, and while still sliding quickly down the mountain, he changes positions and starts punching the villain in the face as the speed toward a cliff. There was the great effect of Stallone killing one of the bad guys by lifting him up and impaling him on a hanging stalactite.
But there was one stunt in particular that was pretty cool. It was when a stunt man zip-lined from one flying aircraft to another. There was no CGI used for this scene, no compositing, no green-screening. The guy actually did the stunt, and because of the danger, he received a million dollars, earning Cliffhanger the award for the most expensive aerial stunt in movie history. British stuntman, Simon Crane, did the stunt at fifteen thousand feet without a safety harness. Wow! I wouldn’t do that, even for a million dollars!
Another impressive visual effect was the avalanche scene. In it, a ton of snow and ice slide off the top of the mountain, nearly killing Stallone, and carrying one unfortunate bad guy off a cliff. And there was the film’s climax, of course, where the main bad guy, played my Jonathan Lithgow falls to his death inside a wrecked helicopter. When it hits the ground, it naturally explodes in a fantastic fire-ball. So we have to use suspension of disbelief for a while and allow some impossible things to happen without questioning them, but it sure made for an exciting action film.