Snow White and the Huntsman – 2012
While the movie may have been a little average, the visual effects were pretty darn good. It was a fantasy film whose failings were in the script and the acting, though it looked fantastic. There were effects that, to use a gold-standard comparison, were just as good, if not better, than the visually stunning Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies by Peter Jackson. However, there were also things that were a little less effective, though there were few of these, and I’ll get to them in a bit.
I’ll start off by going through the good things, of which there were many. The movie’s first really interesting visual effect was the Evil Queen’s magic mirror. When she evoked its power with her iconic rhyme, Mirror, Mirror on the wall, the large golden plate came alive and a liquid metallic cloth poured out of the mirror and onto the floor. It flowed across the room and morphed into the shape of a specter draped in golden material. You could even see the Queen’s distorted image reflected in the metallic cloth-like surface. It looked fantastic!
There was a brief fight with a massive troll that looked very photo-realistic, just as good as the trolls in LOTR, if not better. But the one effect that really stood out to me as impressive was the seven Dwarves, which were also just as impressively executed as those in Jackson’s Hobbit films. The size differences were handled with just as much skill and attention to detail. Even the bizarre milk-bath scene where the Evil Queen rises out of a pool of the white liquid, looking like a perfect porcelain statue. It added very little to the plot, but it looked cool. There were also several interesting shots in the movie where a young face is morphed into an old and withered face, and these, while probably not terribly difficult, were very effective.
And then there was an effect that was used several different times in the film, in which a creature or a person would quickly transform into a burst of other animals like birds or butterflies. There is a beautiful shot where a white CGI stag explodes into a flock of birds that fly away in every direction. It looked great on the big screen, and is an interesting fantasy effect that I’ve only seen a few times before.
But I think a few of the more of the questionable effects had more to do with poor design than poor execution. For example, when we first see the majestic white stag, it is a wide shot. He is standing in front of a gigantic tree. Except that his impossibly massive horns are tree branches instead of actual horns. As such, they were difficult to see clearly against the actual backdrop of the tree. Also, the depiction of fairies in these scenes looked to cartoonish. They looked too much like CGI animated creatures, and I don’t think they were supposed to.
And one last effect that I didn’t care for was the magical evil soldiers made of black stone shards. They also looked too animated. And they moved so fast and so chaotically, that they just turned into confusing visual noise on the screen. If your effects are so chaotic that I can’t tell what’s going on, then the effect has probably failed. But if that is the worst of the film’s effects, then I think we’re still ok.