Category: Best Visual Effects

Twister – 1996

OK, putting aside the fact that the movie is about a grudge match between a woman and a mythical tornado, it is always a fun movie to watch for two main reasons.  First, the cast did a great job, and second, the special effects were spectacular.  Clearly, there was a lot of CGI work done, but as tornadoes tend to facilitate, everything was moving incredibly fast.  If there were any flaws, they were only on the screen for a spit second.  It was the utter chaos that was impressive.

So the tornadoes were what we all came to see, and they were fantastic.  The sheer power of the various twisters in the movie were awesome to watch.  I loved how they tore apart buildings and tossed around heavy farm equipment.  Well… except for the cow.  The poor flying cow was just thrown in there to add a little humor.  Just don’t look too closely at the cow, itself.  It looked pretty fake.  Then again, one does not often see a floating cow for comparison.  Still, little joke was pretty funny. The gag worked. 

They created big twisters and small ones.  There were skinny ones and fat ones. There was a really cool sequence where our heroes were in their truck on a land bridge in the middle of a lake, and two thin ropes of swirling air circled around them, spinning the vehicle several times before dissipating, leaving the passengers shaken, but unharmed.  Yes, the real name of the game is suspension of disbelief.

The film’s climactic F5 nightmare twister was, as described by a character in the movie, the finger of God.  It really is amazing how realistic CGI effects are becoming by this time in history.  It only makes sense that pretty much all the flying debris hurtling through the air as Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton try to run away from the tornado was computer generated.  Had it been real, they would have been shredded.  As it was, they escaped with nary a scratch.  They strap themselves to solid water pipes and let the twister overtake them.  It lifts their feet off the ground, and in a really great shot, we got to see the inside of the F5.  Very cool!

But there were also some great practical effects and some chaotic sets that put the actors in the middle of the action.  The scene at the drive-in movie theatre, where a bunch of people are huddled in the pit of a giant garage.  The tornado throws parts of the concessions building through the roof of the garage, not to mention a car that nearly crashes onto the helpless people.  I particularly liked when several hubcaps are thrown at them like metal Frisbees.  One of them hit one of the tornado chasers in the head, splitting his skin like the slash of a knife.  There were also a few great explosions, like when an oil tanker was picked up like a toy and thrown at Hunt and Paxton, exploding in a ball of fire when it hit the pavement.

All in all, it was an exciting film to watch with some wonderful visuals.  Maybe they stretched believability a little, but they were also intense and highly entertaining.  But what do you expect with a story by Michael Crichton, and also Stephen Spielberg acting as one of the executive producers?

Independence Day – 1996 (WINNER)

I went into this movie having seen it before, several times.  I have always enjoyed watching it, but I had forgotten many of the movie’s flaws.  Some of the acting was poor, the highly implausible script wasn’t very smart or even clever, and a lot of the dialogue was just dumb.  But its ok.  We went to see this movie for its fantastic action and special effects, and when it came to those things, this movie was great!

Hostile, technologically superior aliens arrive on earth.  They position gigantic, city-sized ships over every major city on the planet.  The arrival of the ships into earth’s atmosphere was really cool!  They created massive, dense clouds that were ominous and apocalyptic.  They cast dark shadows over iconic buildings like the Washington Monument, the White House, and The Empire State Building.  A repeating signal is detected between them and the mother ship, in which is found an electronic countdown.  The countdown reaches zero, and the real fun begins. 

They shoot glowing blue-green beams down onto the cities that erupt into expanding walls of fire and destruction.  This was really the film’s centerpiece.  To see the White House explode in a gigantic ball of flame and flying shards of debris was just phenomenal!  They showed several of these beams of devastation and the havoc they caused, and there were even a few great shots of the leveled cities.  I’m guessing they used miniature models and composited them with digital matte paintings.  The walls of fire were pretty impressive as they leveled the cities, throwing cars and people around like they were nothing.  I actually would have liked to see a few more locations around the world being destroyed in this manner, but this movie was heavily America-centric.

After that, the good ol’ U.S. of A fights back, because goodness knows no other country in the world knows how to kick butt like America.  There are a few cool aerial battles between our fighter jets and their alien combat ships.  I particularly liked the effect of our missiles hitting their shields.  These fast-paced action sequences were very exciting to watch, and looked fantastic on the screen.  Even the sequence where the two good guys in the stolen Alien ship escaped from the mother ship was great!

And then there were the aliens, themselves.  We only actually saw two live aliens in motion, if you don’t count the weird-looking CGI invasion forces all lined up inside the alien mother ship.  They were big and menacing with bio-mechanical armor and flailing tentacles on their backs.  Honestly, their faces looked like the faces of the underwater creatures in James Cameron’s The Abyss.

And finally, in the film’s climax, the Americans show the world how to beat the aliens.  Blowing up their big devastating lasers apparently makes their entire ship erupt in a spectacular series of explosions, killing all the bad guys and completely destroying their ships.  As implausible as that sounds for a technologically superior alien race, the visual effect was pretty cool, and well-worth the price of admission.

Apollo 13 – 1995

This was a wonderful movie that was robbed of a well-deserved Oscar by a talking pig.  This dramatization of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission was so perfectly executed that Buzz Aldrin thought they had found actual archival footage of events that had taken place in 1970.  Per Douglas Baily of the Baltimore Sun, “The second man on the moon unwittingly bestowed the highest praise on special-effects supervisor Rob Legato last month after viewing a preview of “Apollo 13.” Wandering over to director Ron Howard after the screening, Mr. Aldrin had some questions about the footage used in the film, particularly the stunning shots of the Brobdingnagian Saturn V rocket lifting majestically off the pad.  Mr. Aldrin had never seen those shots before and wanted to know from what NASA archive the film had been retrieved.  ‘He never guessed it was fake,’ says Mr. Legato.”

And it really was spectacular.  The launch sequence he was referencing was made using two different models, since building a five hundred-foot life-sized model was out of the question.  For the wide-angle shots, a five-foot plastic rocket was constructed.  But for the close-up shots, a detailed eighteen-foot model was used and it looked fantastic.  I particularly liked the detail of the condensed ice shaking loose and falling around the rocket during the blastoff.

The effect of the astronauts floating in a weightless environment was all completely real.  The scenes were filmed in a set that was constructed in a KC-135 airplane, the same craft which is used by NASA to train astronauts for space flight.  The plane flies in a parabola which creates twenty-three seconds of weightlessness at its apogee, the top of its arc.  To film the fifty-four minutes of necessary footage, the airplane needed to make the flight six hundred twelve times.  The plane is nicknamed the vomit comet, and I imagine the actors must have gotten pretty tired of making the trip over and over again to get so little footage for each round.

But the effects were so much more than those amazing things.  There were completely computer-generated environments and backdrops that replaced what only recently would have been matte-paintings.  There were also some pretty exciting exterior shots of the space crafts during the separation sequences and the explosion that caused all the problems. And the re-entry scene was incredibly realistic.  It was all in the details, and Ron Howard wanted everything done right.

Also, the compositing was all done in a computer, greatly improving the quality of the blue-screening technology.  For example, Mr. Baily’s article mentions three scenes that might not be recognized as blue-screened composite shots.  There was the one in which Jim Lovell is conducting a tour for politicians, another in which the astronauts are riding an elevator up to their place in the space-craft, and another in which a wide shot of the rocket on the launch pad is shown against an amazing sunrise.  It just goes to show you how the best effects in a film are the ones that we never even realize are special effects, the ones we see, but don’t notice.

1995 – Babe (WINNER)

The fact that this stupid children’s movie was nominated for best picture is baffling to me.  The fact that it took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects is a tragedy, especially since it beat out the incredible effects of Apollo 13.  I know that it may seem like my distain for the ridiculous nature of the plot is coloring my judgement of the movie’s effects, and I am certainly guilty of that in a small way, but I also have very definite reasons why the effects for Babe didn’t really deserve the award.

First, this movie’s effects were a one trick pony.  The big and magical effect that wowed the Academy voters was just the same effect used over and over again.  We got to see animals talk.  There was the pig, of course, but also dogs, sheep, a cow, a duck, a rooster, a horse, a cat, and three little mice.  Aside from the effect of making the animals talk in English, the movie had almost no effects at all.

And maybe that would have been ok, except that it wasn’t always done well.  The way the animation was done was to digitally map out the faces of the animals, then add CGI bottom jaws and lips.  Sometimes this was done to live animals, and sometimes it was done to animatronic puppets that couldn’t mimic human speech patterns by shaping vowels and consonants.  In some cases, the bottom jaws of the animals had to be flexible enough to bend in order to form the words.  In an effect where they were trying to make the movement look real and natural, it just didn’t work.  I’m not saying it never worked, but it was very inconsistent.

Sometimes, when an animal was speaking, the CGI mouths opened wide enough so that the background could be seen between its teeth.  But because the real animal, whose mouth was still closed, was between the camera and the background, there was a hole in the background where the closed mouth was removed.  When that happened, the animators had to fill in the empty space with CGI to match the hole in the image. 

And then there was the animatronic animals themselves.  As long as the puppets were completely motionless, they looked just fine.  But when they moved, they gave themselves away.  It was often far too obvious when a shot changed from using a live animal to a fake one.  It was terrible!  The three little mice that announced each scene in the movie by reading the title cards for the movie’s target audience, who were too young to read, were awful.  They were animatronic animals that didn’t move at all like real mice.  The desired illusion never worked.  Not once.

And that was it.  Aside from a shot where Babe sheds a few tears, and the climax of the movie where six sheep walk in perfect formation, there just weren’t many effects to speak of.  The problem is that the movie was geared toward audiences between two and ten years old.  They would be the only ones who would either not notice the really fake looking animals, or would not care.  And I’m sorry, but I have to say it for the hundredth time, because in this case, it really does tie into the film’s special effects.  Cute for the sake of cute is never cute.  Never! 

True Lies – 1994

Well, here we go back to the Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie.  Beat ‘em up, shoot ’em up, blow ‘em up.  Lots of guns, lots of explosions, and a bit of comedy for good measure.  The effects were certainly ones we have seen before, but there was more than your general pyrotechnics.  Some of the fire was certainly computer generated, but it looked real enough.  And there was some pretty fancy flying with helicopters and Harrier Jets.

First, let’s look at some of the explosions.  The most memorable one was when Arnold and his wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, are trying to stop the trucks carrying the nuclear bombs from leaving the Florida Keys.  Arnold turns a fuel tanker into a makeshift flamethrower, setting a lot of bad guys on fire.  But the movie’s main villain, Aziz, one-ups him and fires a rocket launcher at him.  Arnold jumps into the water as the entire dock explodes behind him.  Very cool shot!

Then there was when the Harrier Jets blew up the bridge to the mainland.  This was one of the coolest shots in the movie because the missiles looked so realistic!  The effects were a combination of practical effects and CGI.  A life-sized replica of the jet was made out of fiberglass and suspended from a crane.  When the missiles hit the bridge, it was amazing!  As the truck was speeding along the pavement, three missiles explode behind him, each one getting closer than the last.  The fourth one hit the target, the bridge collapsed and the burning truck was launched into the air!

The fantastic stunt that followed was also really exciting.  With the bridge out, Arnold is in a helicopter, chasing his wife in the following vehicle, a limousine.  The driver of the truck is dead with his foot on the gas.  Curtis is reaching up out of the limo’s sun-roof while Arnold, hanging down from the copter’s landing strut, reaches down and pulls her out of the speeding car, just as it careens over the edge of the destroyed bridge, and into the water. 

And the film’s climax, while not in the least realistic from a logistical standpoint, looked great on the screen.  The final fight between Arnold and Aziz takes place high in the air on the outer surface of a hovering Harrier Jet.  In fact, the two enemies have a fist fight, Arnold flying the plane, the terrorist clinging to its side, while all the while, Arnold’s teenage daughter is straddling the jet’s nose.  The mock-up of the aircraft was on a computer controlled hydraulic rig, allowing for precise movements that could be exactly replicated as many times as needed, and in different filming locations.  But still, just to give the illusion of height more realism, the whole thing was mounted on the top of an actual high-rise building.

While the effects looked real enough, their farcical nature in an otherwise realistic movie sometimes had me rolling my eyes.  But that’s ok.  Just check your brain at the door and you’ll enjoy the film and its special effects, which were all done with James Cameron’s usual high quality.

The Mask – 1994

This was a fun movie, but what do you expect for a movie starring Jim Carrey.  He is the man with the elastic face.  And the special effects did a fantastic job of utilizing his natural talent for extreme facial expressions, and exaggerated them for the zany plot of the film.  My initial reaction was lukewarm, at best, but I spoke to a friend of mine who directed where my research was to go, explaining why the movie’s visual effects earned their nomination.

My first, and I’ll admit, uneducated opinion was that I’d seen these exact kinds of effects before in the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was also nominated for Best Visual Effects.  The faces that became Tex Avery-like cartoons, the animated features, the extreme expressions.  But here was the difference. Whereas Roger Rabbit was hand drawn animation that was composited into the live action, The Mask was all computer-generated animation. 

It is a subtle difference, maybe, but The Mask did things that the former film could not.  Often, when we saw the character’s face stretch, bulge, shrink, disassemble, or distort in any way, it was not animation laid over live action, but live action that was computer-manipulated into animation.  That’s a pretty significant difference.  When he began to spin like the Warner Brother cartoon character, The Tasmanian Devil, the computer once again stepped in.  When his landlady tried to shoot him with a shotgun, and he bounced between the ceiling and the floor like Daffy Duck, it was the computer that did it, not hand-drawn animation.

As is becoming more common, the visual effects overlapped with the make-up effects, so we got to see Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey with an over-sized green head.  The enlarged teeth enhanced his smile to comic proportions.  And his fun and fanciful costume changes were like Superman spinning in a phone-booth.  When the gangsters were shooting at him in the nightclub, he found several funny costumes in which to dodge the bullets, each quick-change done with a whirlwind effect.  Then, when he spun Cameron Diaz on the dance floor, he really spun her.  When he tossed her into the air, she somersaulted so fast and for so long, she was a blurry, spinning ball.  I also really enjoyed it when the dog put the mask on and zany hijinks ensued!  It was screwball comedy at its best. 

One of my favorite scenes in the movie was when he encounters a street full of police officers.  His solution is to instantly change into the crazy costume of a Latin dancer reminiscent of Carmen Miranda, complete with maracas, and sing a funny song.  There were only few special effects in this dance scene, but the few that were there were done well, like when he leapt from a springboard, grabbed a light pole, and spiraled it down to the ground.  It was simple but effective, amusing, and seamlessly executed, much like all the movie’s visual effects.  So why didn’t I give the effects a full five stars?  Because unfortunately, they just appeared to use the same effects over and over again, impressive though they were.

1994 – Forrest Gump (WINNER)

This movie had a lot of special effects that were, for the most part, excellently executed.  They were innovative, bold, and inventive.  There were many visual effects in the film that contributed to its Oscar win, but there were two big ones that were earned them the gold statue.  First was the effect of inserting a modern actor into preexisting archival footage from the 1960s and 1970s.  The second was turning an actor into a double amputee, just above his knees.

They were able to digitally put Tom Hanks into the black and white news footage of Governor Wallace protesting the desegregation of the University of Alabama.  As far as I know, it had never been done before.  We got to see Hanks shaking hands with LBJ, JFK, and Richard Nixon, and sharing a couch with John Lennon on the Dick Cavett show.  For the audiences of 1994, it was incredible, and went a long way to bolster the believability of the fictional story.  They didn’t have to find a JFK look-alike.  They just used actual footage of the President, himself.  And it wasn’t just sharing the screen.  They touched, they interacted.  It was an ingenious effect!

However, when I watch those scenes with a critical eye, I don’t think the effect has held up well over time, and here’s why.  They used CGI technology to manipulate the mouths of the historical figures so they could control the dialogue, and that is where the illusion sadly failed.  I think it might have been fine if I wasn’t specifically watching for it, but most of it looked slightly off.  It looked too manipulated.

But it was more than that.  Look at the Governor Wallace sequence.  It was cool how they put Tom Hanks into the crowd, but whereas the entire crowd was standing still, listening to the politician, Gump was bobbing up and down, looking back and forth, and drawing too much attention to himself.  The director, Robert Zemeckis, wanted to make sure that Hanks was noticed, as if we wouldn’t have seen him if he had simply been behaving as the rest of the people in the old news footage.  He stuck out like a sore thumb, undermining the effect.  There was nothing wrong with the effect, itself, but it was ruined by the directorial choice.

The second great effect was Gary Sinise’s missing legs.  They were amazing.  It was done with the actor wearing blue leggings to make his legs vanish against a blue screen, and some clever CGI work to make the stumps the right shape.  There was a shot of him swinging his legs over the railing of a boat and diving into the water.  So that his real legs could move through where the railing was supposed to be, the boat railing was also digitally added.

And then there was the amazing Vietnam battle scene.  There is an incredible shot where Gump is running as the jungle behind him is be napalmed.  The explosions get closer and closer to Gump until the last one looked like it was erupting only inches from his heels.  Other than that, the CGI ping-pong balls looked simple, though they were probably a bit of a challenge.  But that’s what made all the movie’s visual effects so great.  They made all of the hard illusions look so easy.

The Nightmare Before Christmas – 1993

This review is going to be a tricky one to write.  In this series, I am focusing on the special effects of the films I am watching.  But this movie, on the surface, appeared to have only one special effect.  The entire hour and sixteen minute film was filmed in stop-motion animation that was so incredibly detailed, and so smoothly crafted, that it is often easy to forget that it is stop-motion at all, but is the stop-motion innovation the entirety of the movie’s special effects?

My research told me that the movie took over three years to film.  Why so long, you might ask.  Well, consider the meticulous detail that is apparent in the puppets and the environments.  It is beyond incredible and yet completely consistent.  That takes an incredible amount of time to plan, build, and then finally put onto film.  Consider also, that there were 109,440 frames in the film, and each one took a lot of time to set up and shoot.  On average, one minute of film took about a week to shoot.  The painstaking hours that it took to manipulate the figures for each individual frame of the movie must have been a daunting, if not maddening, task for the animation artists.

Per Wikipedia, “The filmmakers constructed 227 puppets to represent the characters in the movie, with Jack Skellington having ‘around four hundred heads’, allowing the expression of every possible emotion.  Sally’s mouth movements were animated through the replacement method. During the animation process, only Sally’s face ‘mask’ was removed in order to preserve the order of her long, red hair. Sally had ten types of faces, each made with a series of eleven expressions (e.g. eyes open and closed, and various facial poses) and synchronized mouth movements.”  The replacement method is where only a puppet’s face is removed and replaced with a new one to create each of its facial expressions.

But there were more effects than just the effect of the stop-motion animation, itself.  There were fire effects, smoke and fog effects, water effects, and hand drawn animations that were composited into the finished movie.  For example, there is a shot where several hand drawn ghosts carried physical Christmas packages in a complex weaving pattern across the screen.  The packages were filmed in stop-motion, floating on invisible wires.  Then the ghosts were drawn to match the movements of the packages, and composited into the scene.  Incidentally, at first glance, you might think that Jack’s dog Zero might have been hand drawn animation, but it becomes clear in the close-up shots that he was also a carefully animated puppet.  Brilliant work everyone!

But all that being said, and fully acknowledging the phenomenal scale and complexity of the stop-motion animation, I have to ask… was the movie nominated for Best Special effects based simply on the grand scale of that animation?  Or to pare the question down even more, is stop-motion animation really a special effect?  I suppose the Academy voters thought it was, so why not?

Jurassic Park – 1993 (WINNER)

This movie was one of the big ones when it came to visual effects.  Of course, the movie’s main draw were the incredibly realistic dinosaurs, and they were absolutely spectacular!  They used a combination of animatronics and groundbreaking CGI animation to create the most realistic dinos ever seen on the big screen.  The visual effects team really deserved the Oscar they took home.  The effects were so good, they still hold up to today’s standards.  Nobody had ever seen anything like it!

Consulting with real paleontologists, they tried to be as factual as possible in how the extinct creatures were displayed, how they looked, how they moved, how they behaved.  Every detail was considered.  Their skin had texture and depth, the lighting, the shadows, the compositing, everything was just about flawless.

The first dino we got to see was a brachiosaur.  It moved slowly and smoothly, and almost gracefully.  It was so far ahead of any stop-motion or even go-motion animation.  It was a breathtaking scene, and the audiences of 1993 were just as captivated as the characters in the story.  But it was the faster and more dangerous variety of dinosaurs like the velociraptors, that gave the film its best suspense and action sequences.  And there weren’t any problems with the way they were composited onto the screen.  They were complete three-dimensional images that really looked like they were just filmed with the actors.  Then there were the animatronic versions that were used when all we saw were the heads and claws, or like when we saw the entire giant body of the triceratops, which was awesome! 

Probably, the most iconic scene in the film was the one where the Tyrannosaurus Rex attacks the heroes in the trucks.  I only have one problem with the scene.  So, we see the Rex’s claw testing the electric fence.  We see the fence’s cables break.  Then we see her crawl through the fence.  But then, when she knocks the car off the wall through the hole in the fence, we see that there is a two or three story drop on the other side of the fence.  How did it get up high enough to break through the fence?  Did it climb the tree?  Anyway, the CGI effects were perfect!

But for me, one of the coolest shots in the entire film was near the climax.  In it, the scientists and the children are in a secured room when a velociraptor breaks through the window.  Its intended victims are climbing into the ceiling.  The raptor tries to break into the crawl-space, itself, but Doctor Grant kicks it in the face, and it falls.  There is a shot, seen from above, where the raptor tumbles to the floor and the girl nearly falls with it.  As she is pulled back up, the raptor jumps and almost bites her.  It was an awesome shot.  The little girl’s face was even composited onto the stunt-woman’s body in that shot.  Again, it was exciting, and perfectly put together, but then, I think the same can be said for the entire movie!

Cliffhanger – 1993

This wasn’t a bad movie, and I enjoyed it, for the most part.  But I can see why it was nominated for the Best Special Effects Award.  In fact, I think the effects were better than the movie itself.  As I watched, I was specifically looking for the seams in the visuals, and I was pretty impressed that they were practically impossible to find.  The whole schtick of the movie was extreme mountain climbing and Sylvester Stallone’s biceps, and there were plenty of each in the film, though it was the former that took up the bulk of the visual effects.

Mountain climbing is a really nerve-wracking activity to watch because there is always the possibility of a fall, and there were a number of spectacular falls in the script.  The first scene of the movie had a woman fall to her death from a zip-line because her straps magically undid themselves.  The camera gave us a really wide shot as we see her plummeting an impossible distance.  Great effect!  Or there was one really amazing close-up shot of Stallone stranded on the side of a cliff.  The camera begins to pan out until we see just how massive the cliff is, and how tiny he looks, desperately clinging to the bare rock.  Now that was an incredible shot, and from what I learned in my research, many of the shots of mountain climbing were real, and Stallone did most of his own stunts!

Once again, I have to lump the stunts into the visual effects, and there were lots of exciting examples.  There was the scene in which Stallone was under the ice in a frozen Rocky Mountain river, and shoots the bad guy through the ice.  There was a sequence in which Stallone kills another baddie after sliding down a long slope.  I liked how our hero was on the bottom, on his stomach, and while still sliding quickly down the mountain, he changes positions and starts punching the villain in the face as the speed toward a cliff.  There was the great effect of Stallone killing one of the bad guys by lifting him up and impaling him on a hanging stalactite.

But there was one stunt in particular that was pretty cool.  It was when a stunt man zip-lined from one flying aircraft to another.  There was no CGI used for this scene, no compositing, no green-screening.  The guy actually did the stunt, and because of the danger, he received a million dollars, earning Cliffhanger the award for the most expensive aerial stunt in movie history.  British stuntman, Simon Crane, did the stunt at fifteen thousand feet without a safety harness. Wow!  I wouldn’t do that, even for a million dollars!

Another impressive visual effect was the avalanche scene.  In it, a ton of snow and ice slide off the top of the mountain, nearly killing Stallone, and carrying one unfortunate bad guy off a cliff.  And there was the film’s climax, of course, where the main bad guy, played my Jonathan Lithgow falls to his death inside a wrecked helicopter.  When it hits the ground, it naturally explodes in a fantastic fire-ball.  So we have to use suspension of disbelief for a while and allow some impossible things to happen without questioning them, but it sure made for an exciting action film.