2023 – Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3
Here is another fantastic nominee for visual effects that really deserved the attention. I think it stood up to the standards of not only all the rest of the Guardians movies, but also the entire MCU. The visuals were a little heavy on the CGI, which some people use as a criticism, but if it looks this good, then I don’t see the problem. The images on the screen are colorful, other-worldly, fantastical, and flashy. They catch the eye, the imagination, and enhance the story in ways that are simply stunning, and could only be done with CGI.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the visual effects is Rocket, and by extension, all the sentient animals. It is not a new effect, by any means. Remember all the way back in 1995, nearly thirty years prior, when the film Babe won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects? It was for the same thing, talking animals. My goodness, look how far they’ve come! Here it looks real, it looks like the technique has been perfected.
Not only did the mouths move properly, combining the shapes needed for English speech, but they were able to adhere to the fact that they were not human, and did not have human lips or jaws. But what was even more impressive was the movements of the rest of the bodies, the fur, the visual emotional cues, the absolute realism. They did a fantastic job, with a quality that could only have been achieved using computer generated images.
I did a little reading, and found a number of interesting facts about the film’s visual effects. According to an article in Variety, written by Jazz Tangcay, there were 3066 visual effect shots in the film, which sounds like a lot. The post-production took a whopping fifteen months to complete. One of the most challenging scenes is one to which I honestly hadn’t given much thought. I quote, “… the ‘stampede’ sequence, which sees Mantis, the Guardians and over 500 animals being rescued from the High Evolutionary’s ship. Alexis Wajsbrot of Framestore London says it was one of the most technically challenging sequences. Not only is it hard to do crowd scenes in general, but Wasjbrot also explains there were animals “all bouncing and interacting with one another, in the middle of the Guardians, and you add fur to the creatures. It becomes a heavy scene to tweak and manage.”
The two-minute, one-shot hallway battle was just cinematic gold. Each member of the Guardians team got their moment to show just how hard-core each one of them was. They were awesome from first to last, and it made for an incredible, exciting action sequence. And lest I forget, all the visual effects surrounding the completely underutilized Adam Warlock were pretty amazing. He radiated power and strength, but his fatal flaw, his complete lack of experience, was what allowed the Guardians to defeat him. I think the effects for Volume 3 totally lived up to the legacy of the previous two films in the Guardians sub-franchise within the MCU.