Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – 2006 (WINNER)
This movie’s visual effects definitely surpassed those of the franchise’s first installment. But here, it wasn’t about the living skeletons. Here, it was about two things: Captain Davey Jones with his squid face, and the Kraken. There were many more special effects in this visual spectacle of a movie, but those two really stole the show. This is what the 1954 Best Special Effects winner, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, another Disney film, would have done with today’s technology.
First, let’s look at Davey Jones’ squid face. It was amazingly rendered! It was in constant motion with dozens of tentacles squirming back and forth, curling about his head like a beard, playing a giant pipe organ. The actor, Bill Nighy, apparently wore makeup around his eyes and mouth, which they originally planned to splice with the CGI. However, as the design of the character progressed, neither his eyes nor his mouth were used, and the entire face was CGI, all except for the scene in which the key to the Dead Man’s Chest is stolen. And what was just as impressive was the fact that his strange crew, were completely computer generated! The only exception was Bootstrap Bill, who had no CGI applied to his image at all.
Then there was the Kraken. The visual effects artists didn’t have a live reference from which to fork from, however, the film’s animation director, Hal Hickel, told his crew to watch the 1962 Japanese kaiju monster film, King Kong vs. Godzilla, which had a live octopus crawling over miniature models. Until the film’s climax, all we really see of the Kraken is its giant tentacles as it smashes and destroys great ships, snapping them in half like so much old wood. There is one image of the creature’s full body in a quick underwater shot, which is nice.
Then, in the film’s climax, as it is destroying the Black Pearl, we see its maw, a giant round hole lined with row after row of massive pointed teeth. It was a pretty cool image, and Captain Jack Sparrow looked very courageous with his pirate sword, as the monster swallowed him whole. It was a pretty exciting ending.
However, the movie was also full of ridiculous silliness, which made its way into some of its other visual effects. These effects, while done well enough, I suppose, were just dumb and, for me, detracted from the movie’s effects, as a whole. There was the giant water wheel scene, in which three swashbuckling sword-fighters fence with each other, both on top of and inside the rolling wheel. It was so perfectly balanced that it rolled right through a rough jungle with uneven ground, and across a sandy beach without toppling until it reached the water. There was the hamster ball scene where a group of pirates in a spherical cage rolled through more jungle and into a gorge without injuring any of them. These kinds of things were only meant to be silly, but they had me rolling my eyes. With relative realism in the rest of the film, these effects just kind-of dumbed the movie down.