1942 – The Navy Comes Through
I have to say, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the visual effects for this movie. Sure there were a couple of explosions, but not much to write home about. At least the biggest and best one was in the climax of the movie, where the enemy submarine explodes from the inside. But honestly, that was about it. The rest of the effects weren’t that good.
You’d think the simplest effect would have been rear projection shots, but the ones that caught my attention looked pretty bad. Even a shot so ordinary as two men standing on the parade ground in front of marching soldiers looked to be poorly constructed. The men in the foreground were in perfect focus, and the background was so completely out of focus, that it was obvious that they were not part of the same image. They looked separate, like they didn’t belong in the shot.
Maybe it was the lighting, but they looked like they were standing in front of a badly-done green screen. As a matter of fact, a little bit of research told me that green-screen technology was actually developed in the 1930s, and used a little in the 40s. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and 80s that the technology was good enough to be used widely in films.
But for me, that was just an obviously bad visual effect that I noticed in more than one shot. Most of the other effects in the movie were just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary, but nothing else as strangely bad as the rear-projection shots. As I mentioned before, there were some perfectly competent explosions, and a scene or two that had some water being blown onto the deck of a ship, soaking the soldiers trying to do their jobs. There was even a great scene where an officer was unconscious in a room that was on fire, and another man has to rescue him. That was actually a pivotal scene in the narrative, and it was handled pretty well.
There were also some pretty ordinary shots of things like falling debris, or a submarine diving beneath the water, an illusion for that worked. I couldn’t tell if it was a real submarine crash diving or a model. Either way, it looked fine. There was also a fairly memorable scene where our heroes are hiding from the enemy vessels in the fog, but again, that seems like it would be a pretty simple effect, nothing to get too excited for. I don’t know, it just seems like I have seen the effects that were done well in other movies, and done better. I am not exactly sure why the critics of the time gave the visual effects such high praise.
Maybe I’m missing something, or maybe I’m just showing off my own ignorance. But I expect better from an Oscar nominated film. I don’t need my socks blown off, but I do need to not be taken out of the story because of a background that looks fake, especially when it didn’t have to be. But for all that, maybe I’m just expecting too much. But as uneducated as I am, I do know that other movies in the same era did the same things, but better. I’m glad it didn’t win the Oscar.