Category: Best Visual Effects

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.

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.