Superman Returns – 2006
Honestly, I couldn’t really find very much wrong with this movie’s visual effects. They were all pretty seamless and well-constructed. So, what I’m going to do is point out some of my favorite effects and expound a little on how a few were done. I think it is important to point out that there were nine different visual effects companies that worked on this film, and they all seemed to blend their individual elements together so that you’d really never know. It was all pretty impressive.
There was one effect in particular that really stood out for me. They went out of their way to tie this movie to the 1978 Superman and the 1980 Superman II films. To do this, they digitally resurrected Marlon Brando who played Superman’s father in those films. Brando died in 2004, but they were able to use unused audio tracks from 1978 which either had no film, or had been filmed from the wrong angle. They digitally modeled Brando’s mouth and then tracked it onto his face from separate takes, painstakingly lip-synching the movement of the mouth to the audio.
Another effect that I really liked was how Superman’s x-ray vision was portrayed. Not only did they show what he was seeing, but they also gave us transparent images of what he was looking through. In one memorable shot, Superman is watching Lois Lane going up in an elevator. The art-deco style of the building made for a beautiful and artistically designed image that looked great on the screen.
There was a cool shot of a bad guy shooting our hero in the eye from a distance of a few inches. The gunshot was shown in slow-motion. We see the blast of fire flash from the barrel of the weapon, the bullet as it hurtles toward Superman’s open eye. Then we get to see the projectile make contact with the eyeball and flatten against its super surface. The sequence ends by showing us the flat piece of metal falling to the ground. It was pretty awesome! And without going into any detail, the sequence where Superman stops a jumbo jet from crashing into a baseball field was exciting to watch, other than the fact that Lois should have come out of the crisis with massive bruising or broken bones, not just mussed hair.
Yes, there were great CGI effects in the film that you might have no idea were digitally created, like the entire cornfield through which young Clark Kent is shown running. But one effect that stood out to me as a little questionable was the surface of the ocean water. I think they got it mostly right, the coloring, the texture, the lighting, the spray, the foam, the mist. But the motion in a few of the close-up shots just looked a little too artificially wavy. This tiny thing caught my attention as I was watching the movie. Still, I’d call this a very minor complaint. Pretty much everything else was perfect, even the completely CGI Superman, whose digital cape flowed in outer space, as if there was an atmosphere.