Avengers: Infinity War – 2018
The visual effects in this movie were incredibly good! So good! They really knew what they were doing when they put this movie together, and there is no doubt that the effects were a huge part of that. This is one of those films that completely embodies the modern action blockbuster. In a behind the scenes featurette, Executive Producer, Victoria Alonso said that there were 3,000 shots in the film, and that 2,900 of them were CGI. “The entire movie is one big CG scene. The environment is CG, the weapons are CG, every shot is dense in layers.”
And many of those things are fantasy elements, so of course they are computer generated, but they make them look perfectly real! Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than in the film’s main villain, Thanos, played by Josh Brolin. So he acted the part in a motion capture suit, with face capture dots all over his face and a camera mounted on his head, but the animators actually made the character look vaguely like Brolin, and all the emotiveness of his performance came through clearly. Brolin created such a great bad guy! Yeah, he was giant and purple, but if such beings were real, that is what they’d look like!
Then there were a plethora of awesome effects that we have seen in earlier Marvel films. There was the magic portals and shields from Doctor Strange, the genetically enhanced raccoon and talking tree from Guardians of the Galaxy, the nano-technology powered super suit from Iron Man, the bad-assed lightning god effects from Thor, and the crazy-tough fighting of Captain America and Black Widow. We didn’t get much of the big green guy, but we did get plenty of other great heroes like Black Panther, the Winter Soldier, and Spider Man. There was also a great bunch of new villains called the Black Order that looked fantastic.
But it was the cool effect in the film’s powerful emotional climax that sticks in my memory. You see, spoiler alert, the good guys lose, and Thanos wipes half the life in the universe out of existence. When the heroes start to dissolve into flakes of dust that are blown away in the wind, it was heartbreaking, but so cool to watch. It was so well done, and even though it was a CGI laden action movie, I am nearly brought to tears every time I watch it.
I also have to make special mention of the phenomenal CGI environments created for the movie, from the streets of New York, to various space ship interiors, to alien worlds, and finally to the fantastic battleground of Wakanda. Every scene looked like it was shot on fully fledged, real sets. That being said, a lot of the environments were made as live set extensions, but there is no way to tell where the reality ends and the CG images begin. Perfect.
And finally, I’d like to say how much I enjoyed the varied array of spells used by Doctor Strange. For example, though the name of the spell was not mentioned in the film, I easily recognized the crimson bands of cyttorak from the comic books. They were true to the source material, so extra bonus points there. Great visuals!