Author: Snugglecub

2022 – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

The visual effects for the second movie in the Black Panther series of films were very good, but I think that maybe they could have been better.  I’m sorry to say, they were up against Avatar: The Way of Water.  When compared to that movie, the effects here, kind-of paled in comparison.  I know, I shouldn’t be comparing the two films in a review; I should be reviewing this film’s effects on its own merits; but it is hard not to say, yeah, but look at what they could have been.

Both movies had, as part of the stories, scenes or shots that took place underwater.  But Avatar wasn’t afraid to have those shots in sun-lit conditions, making the images easier to see, more detailed, more realistic, and all the more brilliant for it.  Here, as happens in most underwater scenes in movies, everything was dark, indistinct, and harder to make out.  I mean, I understand, light doesn’t go very deep in the ocean, but that’s what made these effects just good, rather than great.

OK, enough comparing.  The other effects in Wakanda Forever that were actually awesome were those that involved Namor.  We’ve seen characters fly in so many movies, but it was Namor’s method of flight that looked so cool, so unique.  He had wings on his ankles.  You could see them furiously flapping when he wasn’t on the ground.  It was like he was standing on the clouds, running on the air, skidding to a stop to change directions, leaping from one invisible surface to another.  And what’s more, it was a mode of flight that was true to the comic book source material!

So, as you might imagine, the underwater effects were good, as were the above-ground water effects.  The flooding of Wakanda was thrilling to watch.  The water bombs were pentahedron in shape, and looked both fantastical and futuristic at the same time.  Great little design detail.  We were also treated to the character of Riri Williams, wearing an Iron Man-like tech-powered suit of armor, which was pretty cool.  And I also really liked the cool-looking Midnight Angel armor created for Okoye and Aneka.  Great designs for all of it.

But now I have to mention something else that I didn’t particularly like.  So, due to the tragic death of Chadwick Bosman, the character of Shuri, beautifully played by Letitia Wright, took on the mantle of the Black Panther.  I understand that because of all the stunts, acrobatics, and action required of the superhero, it was mostly created using computer-driven CGI.  But I don’t think they got the look exactly right.  In more than one shot, when the CGI Black Panther appeared on the screen, it looked too thin.  Yes, Shuri has a skinnier, lither shape than T’Challa, but she looked way too thin, thinner than Letitia Wright actually is.  It didn’t look right, and it caught my attention in a bad way.  Oh well, that’s a minor complaint.  It was still fantastic, and I think the Oscar nomination was well-deserved.

2022 – The Batman

It took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t terribly impressed with the visual effects in The Batman.  But I believe I now have the answer.  When we go to see a superhero movie, we expect it to be a big, CGI-fueled, visual effects extravaganza.  But this movie was neither an action film, nor was it filmed as a fantasy.  It was a detective movie that was so grounded in reality that the superhero element, at times, seemed like nothing more than window dressing.  There were no supernatural elements, no futuristic technologies, nothing that could not exist in the world in which we currently live.

But this makes sense when put under the light of director Matt Reeves’s vision.  He wanted to tell a story about the early days of the Caped Crusader.  He doesn’t yet have all the fancy gadgets we are used to seeing him use from his utility belt.  The Batmobile can’t sprout wings or turn into a submarine.  Though there was an interesting escape in which Batman’s suit turns into a wingsuit with a parachute attachment.  Thus, many of the visual effects could be practical effects.

But that’s not to say the CGI effects were not used.  Of course they were.  But they were effects that were, in this day and age of filmmaking, pretty commonplace.  There were practical explosions that were enhanced by CGI.  There were sets that were extended by CGI.  There was rain added to scenes using CGI.  And there were digital face replacements, where the stuntmen and women’s faces were replaced with those of the lead actors.  There were also a few short sequences where digital water and flood effects were created, as well as a few electricity arc effects, which were created in computers.  But really that was about it.  There just wasn’t much of it, and in any case, it has all been done before.

Another technology that isn’t exactly new, though I’m guessing isn’t yet the industry standard, was the use of on-set LED screens.  They were used during filming as backgrounds, instead of using blue-screens, where environments and backgrounds are added in post-production.  This was very effective, and has the added bonus of allowing the actors to see and be a part of the environments they are supposed to be in.  I imagine this allows the actors to more readily inhabit the roles they are playing, enhancing the storytelling.

When it comes down to it, I’m not saying the visual effects were badly done.  I just think they were too common, to widely used already.  There seemed to be nothing new, nothing original.  I did a fair bit of reading about the visual effects employed in The Batman, and I couldn’t find anything that made it stand out above any other film, let alone any modern superhero film.  I’m sorry to say that while the visual effects in this film were good, it has all been done before, and done just as well.

2022 – Top Gun: Maverick

This Top Gun sequel had some pretty incredible visual effects.  The Stunt flying, the incredible compositing, the design, everything, was put together to create a film that was far superior, both in the script and the visuals, than its predecessor.  Of course, as you might expect most of the visual effects were all about the fast flying fighter jets, the dog-fights, and the exploding planes.  Not only did they look awesome in motion, but they looked pretty cool on the ground, too.

For example, one of the effects of note in the movie was right in the opening sequence.  The Darkstar, the allegedly fictional jet, which reached a speed of mach-ten.  Even seeing it in the hangar, just the design of the aircraft was pretty cool.  Apparently, that was a real mock-up when we see it before it takes off.  But once it was in the air, it was entirely CGI.  It was partly designed by real engineers that work at Leckheed Martin along with their Skunk Works Division.

And I would never have known that most of the airplanes in the film were composited.  Wikipedia explains it pretty, saying, “In an interview with aviation YouTuber C. W. Lemoine, one of the VFX artists on the special effects team, Fred Lyn, stated that the use of CGI was extensive in the film with the F-14 and Su-57 visualized entirely by computer.  Lyn also said that the F/A-18 scenes predominantly involved a single jet, which was then put through CGI to create the dogfight training scenes that depicted multiple jets.  The four-jet strike force at the end of the film was also created through CGI from a single F/A-18.”  And I would have sworn that they used four jets with four pilots.

But the effects were so much more involved than that.  Of course, even though the actors were put through a boot camp so they would be able to act under extreme g-force conditions while a trained professional pilot flew their jets, the actors also had to learn to operate the camera equipment, which makes sense, since there would have been no room for a camera operator in the cockpits of actual aircraft.  And all that effort was for the purpose of enhancing the realism of the visuals.

But there were also plenty of practical effects in the movie.  It wasn’t all CGI.  There was some pretty impressive actual stunt flying.  In the third act of the film, four jets are flying through a canyon, low enough to avoid enemy radars and missiles, a tactic which put them dangerously close to the ground with mountains less than a hundred feet beyond either wingtip.  If anything went wrong, the actors could so easily have died, and again, I call that impressive.  And of course, Tom Cruise, the main character took on most of the screen-time, doing most of his own stunts, and even doing some of his own flying, as he is actually a pilot capable of flying fighter jets on his own.  Well done, Tom!

2022 – All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those movies that had some excellent visual effects, many of which I cannot see or identify.  They were in the movie to add to the realism, nothing more.  They were there to enhance the storytelling on a subliminal level.  We aren’t supposed to know that we seeing a visual effect.  And they did their job perfectly competently.  Other than that, though,  they were fairly unremarkable.  The problem is that these kind of visual effects have become commonplace these days, and while I cannot deny that they were done well, I didn’t find anything about them that made them stand out to me, or raise them up above the visual effects from any other film.

You see, in my admittedly small bit of research, I couldn’t find anything that showed innovation, invention, or creativity.  I was more impressed with the visual effects for the Best Picture winner, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and the visual effects for that movie weren’t even nominated for an Oscar.  The war scenes were done perfectly well, but how often have we seen battle sequences that were just as realistic with period specific WWI explosions and gunfire.  We see expert compositing, digital blood, and interesting lighting effects in nearly every other movie that’s been made for many decades.  I just don’t understand how these effects, while good, were better than any other. 

I read an article about the visual effects in this movie and one of the most impressive things of which the article boasted was the scene near the end of the movie where there was falling snow.  Apparently, they filmed in the morning when it was actually snowing, but the weather didn’t last until the shoot was done, so the continuity was maintained by adding digital snow.  See what I mean?  Good, but not terribly impressive.

Another effect that the article mentioned was the scene where the insane General is ordering his soldiers to go back and fight until the armistice is in effect.  The crowd of soldiers standing in front of his was made larger with computer generated visual effects.  I would never have guessed it, but that is just standard fair for any movie worth its salt.   Why was I supposed to be impressed by that?  What am I missing?

Of course, there were more noticeable effects like the flame throwers on the battlefield, or the character of Tjaden stabbing himself in the throat with a fork, a very bloody and violent effect.  But really I don’t understand, nor could I find any article or review that explains why All Quiet on the Western Front was nominated for Best Visual Effects.  Now, I’m not saying that it wasn’t a powerful movie.  I quite agree that it deserved its Best Picture nomination.  But I don’t think I agree with its nomination in this category.

2022 – Avatar: The Way of Water

I have to say, I was thoroughly impressed with the visual effects for this movie.  There were images on display, the likes of which, I have never seen in my life.  In fact, nobody in the world had ever seen anything like it.  True, I’d guess around two thirds of the film was CGI, which many people have a problem with, but when it is done this well, I don’t mind one bit.  The motion capture and facial recognition technologies that were developed and employed were beyond amazing, and made even more so, considering that much of the film took place under water.

Speaking about underwater motion capture, Director James Cameron was quoted as saying, “”It’s never been done before and it’s very tricky because our motion capture system, like most motion capture systems, is what they call optical base, meaning that it uses markers that are photographed with hundreds of cameras. The problem with water is not the underwater part, but the interface between the air and the water, which forms a moving mirror. That moving mirror reflects all the dots and markers, and … it creates thousands of false targets, so we’ve had to figure out how to get around that problem, which we did. … It’s taken us about a year and a half now to work out how we’re going to do it.”

But something else that impressed me was the live action elements, and how they were seamlessly blended with the CGI.  For example, Spider was a fully live-action character.  And yet you’d never know he was acting with computer generated images, even though there were the size differences between the Na’Vi and the human child.  But actor Jack Champion, who played Spider, handled it all perfectly. 

And then there were the new alien environments and all the extremely detailed design elements.  The aesthetics of the film were just incredible.  This includes the physical differences between the forest Na’Vi and the water Na’vi; the forest plants and creatures as compared to those of the sea.  The giant whale-like Tulkun looked just as incredible out of the water as in, even when they were interacting with the large, futuristic water-vessels of the humans.  There was one awesome shot that comes to mind, in which a Tulkun leaps out of the water and lands on the deck of a ship.  It looked every bit as real as the live-action boat it was attacking. 

And speaking of the futuristic designs of the human ships, weapons, and technologies, they were perfection.  Cameron actually made them look just as cool as the CGI alien elements of the film.  I especially liked the U-boats with their harpoon guns.  They were a terrible part of the film’s narrative, but they looked pretty awesome.  The hyper-detailed design of every single part of the visuals was just stunning, and I can’t wait to see what Cameron comes up with in the next installments of the franchise, slated to come out in 2025, 2029, and 2031.