2023 – Napoleon
I had to give this review a bit of thought. I watched the effects breakdown videos, did a little reading, and even then, I couldn’t figure out if I was impressed with the visual effects of Napoleon. Did they deserve their Oscar nomination or not? And in the end, I believe they actually did. The visual effects were pretty remarkable. The problem is that they were nothing new. They were done perfectly, but they are effects we’ve seen many, many times. It was all about the compositing, and very little else. It’s an old trick, and we’ve seen it all before.
A huge number of the visual effects in this movie were of the invisible variety. The illusion of reality that made up so many shots in the film were seamless, flawless, composites that I didn’t even notice enough to recognize they were there. I mean, yes, there were several battle sequences, as one might expect in a movie about the French Emperor, and as you might expect, these were amazingly real. The sheer scale of the armies was impressive, hundreds of thousands of men strong, the cavalry charges, the cannon fire, not to mention the sword-play and the dying men. It was all fantastic to see on the screen, and you know that very little of it was filmed in camera at the same time.
And then there were the more complex war effects. I was particularly impressed with the scene where Napoleon’s forces are firing cannons at their enemies who are on a frozen lake. As the projectiles hit the ice and exploded in white shards of ice, the surface ice broke apart, and the unfortunate men fell into the water and sank to their deaths. There were incredible shots from below, allowing us to see the cannonballs crash into the water, the dying men soon followed, accompanied by red clouds of blood that colored the lake. It was a very cool seen to watch.
But those battle scenes were the obvious effects. I believe it was the rest of the movie that earned Napoleon its Best Visual Effects nomination. It was Napoleon sitting on a horse, looking at the harbor. Those weren’t real ships, or dock workers, or smoke, or even a real harbor. Or at the very least, they weren’t filmed at the same time. It was all composited together, and though the illusion is staring you in the face, you don’t even consider its reality. The compositing was so seamless that you just think it was filmed in camera.
There were other scenes that just showed people standing in the snow. If you think about it at all, you just think that they filmed on a snowy day. But in reality, there was no snow. They might have filmed it in summer. The snow on the ground, the flakes coming down, the mist in the air, were all digital. And if it was all CGI, it was perfect. As always, the best visual effects are the ones you don’t even notice. Problem is… they did nothing new. They just did it incredibly well.