Inception – 2010 (WINNER)
Inception is one of the most intellectual movies I know. It was a movie that really makes you think as you are watching it, and the visuals are a pretty huge part of that, and I do love movies that make me think. They made use of perfectly crafted optical illusions that distort what is physically possible, which, at times, can make you second guess what you are seeing on the screen.
The perfect example of this is a plot point that made use of the Penrose stairs, stairs that ascended in an impossible eternal loop. Even after taking a screenshot of this visual trick, giving me a chance to study the image, my brain still struggles to make sense of it. But in the film, it wasn’t just a still image. The illusion was live and in motion, making it all the more amazing.
And to make it even more impressive, I learned that according to the movie trivia on the film’s IMDB page, “In spite of this movie’s extensive surreal effects sequences, the majority of the visual effects throughout the movie, such as the Penrose stairs, rotating hallway, mountain avalanche, and zero-gravity sequences, were created through the use of practical methods, not through the use of computer graphics imagery. This movie only has around five hundred visual effects shots, as opposed to most other visual effects epics, which can have upwards of two thousand visual effects shots.”
One of the things about the effects in this film that really requires you to pay close attention is the timing. The visuals had to be timed to serve the complicated plot. This is the third time I have watched this incredible film, and I feel like I find something new and interesting every time I watch it. I call that bold, innovative, and wonderfully creative story-telling. The concept of the movie is based on having dreams within dreams, within dreams. When something happened in one level of a dream, it had an effect on the deeper levels of the dreams, and it was important to keep track of who was dreaming which dream levels.
One of the most visually fantastic effects in the movie occurred when, in one man’s dream, a second dreamer is in a van that rolls down a hill. In his new dream, the hallway in which he is standing begins to turn over and over. They filmed this using a technique that Stanly Kubrick pioneered to create the illusion of people walking up walls until they are standing on the ceiling in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. They built the hallway on a rotating gimble and fixed the camera to rotate with the hallway. Obviously it is an old trick, but it worked beautifully.
Even the sequence in which a mountain fortress is blown up was achieved with the construction of a miniature model, something that is rarely done any more in favor of completely digital environments. I think the scene that contained the most CGI was the one where Paris is folded over on top of itself. But even then, audiences had never seen anything so surrealistic, though all the practical effects gave the movie a wonderfully organic feel of reality. This was such a pleasure to watch!