The Lone Ranger – 2013
Ok, here we have yet another example of a movie with a poor script, but a lot of great visual effects. It was a pure and unadulterated action/adventure movie that took place in the old west. Unfortunately, it is yet another example of filmmaking that ignores reality for the sake of exciting visuals. The characters survived crashes and explosions that would, in reality, kill any normal human being, and physics were often tossed out the window. But the VFX artists did what they were told, and made it all look good.
Of the many visual effects in this movie, there were two main categories. There were the stunts and the invisible digital environments. Of course, there was a lot more than that, but those are the effects that stand out the most to me. There were several fast-moving old west locomotives, so of course, we have to have a good train crash. This movie has several. There is a lot of impressive horse riding, and people transferring from horseback to speeding trains.
There were two stunts in particular that were really cool and both took place during the climactic battle. There were two runaway trains, one moving forward, the other moving backward, so that their noses met in the middle. As the trains are moving at nearly the same speed, there is a shot where a man attempts to step from the grill of one train to the other. That was cool. The other is where one train is on a track, and the other is on a separate track that goes above the other on a bridge. Tonto jumps from the upper train to the lower!
So yeah, the stunts were cool and exciting to watch, but it was that other kind of visual effect that was really the more impressive one. The invisible digital environments. What I mean is that if I hadn’t done my research, I wouldn’t have known that most of the time, the actors were in front of blue-screens. Going back to that climactic train battle, the actors were on mock-ups of train roofs. Everything in the background was completely digital. The sky, the desert, the mountains, the rocks, the trees, the smoke from the trains, and the bulk of the trains, themselves. Each of these elements were created as separate layers in a computer simulation. But I never knew. And even as I go back and watch the scene a second time, I’d still swear they had just filmed these things in a desert. You’d never know the environment was all fake! It looks that real!
There were also some pretty fantastic explosions and fires. But there was one effect that was pretty bad. Just one. When the Lone Ranger and Tonto are on the roof of a burning barn with Silver, the horse, they impossibly escape. Silver, with the two riders on his back, jumps through the flames and down about three stories to the ground. The CGI landing looked a little wonky, and I was momentarily taken out of the story. Thankfully, the shot was over quickly. But the explosive destruction of the wooden bridge, and the shot where the train with the villain on it plunges off that bridge, was pretty darn spectacular, easily making up for it.