Author: Snugglecub

2023 – Godzilla Minus One

I’ll just say, right off the bat, that I’ve never been a big Godzilla fan.  I’ve always seen the old original Godzilla movies from the 1950s and 60s as cheesy, poorly made films that appealed to juvenile audiences and nerds, a term which I actually use lovingly, as I consider myself one.  In fact, kaiju films just never held any interest for me.  Even the modern, American-made Godzilla movie from 1998 with Matthew Broderick got terrible reviews and was practically disavowed by Godzilla fans.  But I actually enjoyed this movie, and I loved its visual effects.  Here’s why.

Despite the fact that this is a modern movie, it was done as a period piece.  I think it was one of the most amazing things about the visuals of the movie.  Everything had the look and feel of a movie from the 1960s.  From the way it was acted, to the way it was filmed, this movie had an antiquated aesthetic that helped to tell the story.  The visual effects were so good that though it was obvious modern effects technology was being employed, you might still mistake it for a sixty year old film.  And because that was intentional, it was amazing.

The design of the monster was great.  It looked like the original Godzilla of old, and at times, you could almost see the man in the rubber suit.  But because it was all done with modern CGI and digital effects, the VFX artists achieved a realism of form and motion that could never have been done in the mid-20^th century.  In the water, Godzilla was like an agile aquatic creature.  It destroyed ships and was made maybe just a little more terrifying because you couldn’t see its full size.  But on land you could see it all, from the prehistoric spikes on its back to the massive tail, capable of destroying tall buildings with a casual swish.

And the destruction of Tokyo was so cool!  Again, it was filmed to have the look of a movie from the 1960s, but it was done with modern movie-making techniques.  The running people, the crumbling buildings, the flying debris, and the dust and smoke, all combined to make for a thrilling scene of power and devastation.  You’d almost think you were watching the guy in the rubber suit laying waste to the miniature city with its fake buildings, but the hyper-realism was too spot on.  Every detail was intentional.  He tore apart a train, stepped on fleeing humans, and used his nuclear blast breath ray.  It was visually stunning and looked incredible on the screen.

After all, that was where the original Godzilla came from, right?  Godzilla and kaiju was the direct result of the nuclear bombs that were detonated in Japan at the end of WWII.  Godzilla is a metaphor for nuclear weapons, and is one, itself.  The electric blue nuclear effects had the look and feel of something from the 60s, but were clearly modern.  It was amazing and I think the Oscar win was deserved. And will there be a sequel?  Only time will tell, but I’ll bet the effects will be amazing!

2023 – Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One

I was actually really surprised by the visual effects in this movie, and in a good way.  I didn’t want to watch this movie until I had seen all the Mission: Impossible movies.  So I went back to the beginning and watched them all.  Of course, this is the seventh movie in the franchise so by the time I got here, I was a little Mission Impossible’d out.  And after binging all seven films, I can say that it was pretty cool to watch the overall stories, the characters who came and went, the progression of the plot-lines, and the improvements and complexities of the visuals in the action sequences and the stunts.  And since stunts do not have their own category at the Academy Awards, they get to be part of the visual effects category.

It is fair to say that practical effects and stunts, combined with CGI enhancements has sort-of become what the Mission Impossible films are known for.  The star of the franchise, Tom Cruise, prefers to do most of his own stunts, and the fans love him for it.  In this film, the big one was where he rides a motorcycle off a cliff, and then skydives away from the mountain.  A VFX video I watched showed how he actually drove the cycle up a wide ramp in a studio, which was later replaced with a mountain cliff, but that made the physical stunt no less real.  It was pretty darn impressive, and thrilling to watch!  Same with the requisite car chase scene.

But there were two sequences in the movie that I liked just as much.  First was near the beginning of the movie that took place in the Arabian Desert.  An incredible gun fight in the middle of a massive sandstorm looked visually stunning.  Of course most of the flying dust and sand was digital, but you wouldn’t know it.  It looked fantastic, and would have been impossible to film in a real storm.

The second was the train crash.  The bridge has been blown upThe automatic breaks have been slowing the train down, but it isn’t enough.  Cruise and his co-star, Hayley Atwell, have to make their way back through several cars before they go over the edge of the destroyed bridge, and fall into the chasm.  There is the coal car, the kitchen car, and finally a lounge, complete with a falling piano that had to be dodged, and they did that thing which I have seen in other films, even beyond the Mission Impossible franchise.  They keep the camera inside the crashing vehicle, whether it is a rolling car or train, and we get to watch gravity take a back seat.  We see the actors floating amid the dirt and debris, bumping into the walls and ceiling of the cabin.  It is pretty cool!

This train sequence was worth the Oscar nomination alone, but the seamless CGI compositing, and the digital scene extensions, enhanced the film, even in the few scenes that were not intense action sequences.  The fight on top of the speeding train was pretty awesome, too, especially in the tunnel.  Pure cinematic magic!

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.

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.

2023 – The Creator

The visual effects for The Creator were incredible.  OK, so I know we didn’t see anything new here, but the realism of the fantastic sci-fi images just keep getting better and better, improving on old visuals and making them more stunning to see on the screen.  For me, the most memorable effects were the AI robots with large mechanical holes in their heads, the incredible design and locator technology of the military base called Nomad, and the great explosions.  Who doesn’t love a good explosion?  There were many other things, of course, but these were really great.

First was the mechanical people or Simulants.  Remember back in 2001, the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence?  Stephen Spielberg was doing things in that film that the world had never seen before.  Well, here, The Creator does the same thing.  It used live actors to play the parts so you could see their real faces, but the backs of their heads were all mechanical.  A simple hat allowed them to pass for human. Here, you could clearly see through the holes in the heads.  You could see the rotating mechanical parts inside those holes.

And they impressively showed the Simulants in various forms of lighting.  I’m guessing that this robot effect was applied to about half the characters in the film.  And they showed a wide range of ages and ethnicities.  It was so creatively and realistically done!  And it wasn’t just that one kind of robot.  There were military robots that were fully mechanical, only resembling humanoid shape, with a filly mechanical head.  The designs were really cool, and even though they were artificial devices, they moved with the ease and fluidity of humans. 

Nomad was a fantastic sky ship that searched out specific targets and obliterated them with missile attacks from above.  It was like a giant bird of prey, searching for its next kill.  The blue search lights that hit the earth’s surface were like a combination of digital mapping technology seen in films like 2012’s Prometheus, and the fantastic laser light show I remember seeing at Epcot in the mid 80s.  It looked very futuristic and powerful, just like it needed to.

But one thing I did learn is that one of the impressive things about The Creators visual effects, was that they were able to accomplish all these stunning visuals on a very minimal budget.  To quote an article that appeared in 3D World Magazine, “The Creator made headlines at the end of 2023 when it was revealed the movie’s VFX cost just $80 million but looks like $300 million film. The VFX team on the movie made good use of its budget to bring the sci-fi fable to the screen with a sense of realism. This new detail is just another insight into how the team created an emotional connection to its digital VFX.”  And that’s the truth.  I was just as emotionally invested in the Simulant characters as the human ones.