Category: Best Visual Effects

The Hindenburg – 1974 (WINNER)

This was a good movie that continues in the disaster film genre which included other Best Special Effects nominees like The Poseidon Adventure, and Earthquake.  Once again, it was the only film nominated for the award, making the Oscar a give-away.  So what was it that earned the special effects team their gold statues?  It was a number of different effects.  There were some really great composited effects that helped to beautifully display the scale of the massive air ship.  There were some really nice scale models, and a few minor stunts.

But the really great effects, the reason why we all came to see the film, was the movie’s climax in which the Hindenburg was destroyed, because about a third of the entire sequence displayed no special effects at all.  It was real.  It was real footage taken of the tragic event.  On May 6, 1937, there was a crowd of spectators and a camera crew present to film the Zeppelin’s arrival.  When it burst into flames, it was actually caught on film.

It is important to note that cause of the tragedy was never fully explained.  There are many theories as to what actually happened, only one of which is sabotage.  So a completely fictional spy story was written around the historical event.  According to the plot, a bomb is smuggled on board.  Director Robert Wise was very clever in how he made his movie.  When the bomb goes off, the color image is turned to black and white to match the actual footage filmed in 1937.  The real footage was seamlessly cut and spliced into new footage created for the movie.  So, in that respect, a lot of what looked like special effects was absolutely the real thing.

The actual newsreel footage had some very specific details that needed to be recreated to make the sequence fit together believably and I thought they did a pretty good job.  The burning helium and the visible structural framework of the Hindenburg were recreated in wonderful detail.  As the actors made their ways through the burning wreckage, it was not always easy to tell where the manufactured footage ended and the real footage began.  Very well done!

And there was more than that.  There were shots at the beginning of the movie that showed the massive interior of the Hindenburg.  These were meticulously detailed matte-painted images that looked incredible.  And there was a great sequence in which a man has to go out onto one of the tail fins of the vessel while it is flying over a patch of icebergs in the Atlantic.  And there were even some wonderful wide shots of the Zeppelin simply floating through the air against a serene sunset backdrop, displaying its true beauty and majesty.

The effects, though they were few, they were mighty.  They were done quite well, and they gave us things we had never seen before, at least not so effectively.  I also have to give a shout out to the movie’s incredibly detailed production design which enhanced the illusion of reality.  The special effects would not have looked as good if Weise hadn’t recreated all the sets so precisely, exactly mirroring reality.

The Poseidon Adventure – 1972 (WINNER)

Alright, we have reached the era of the disaster film, and this was one of the more creative ones.  The story is that of an ill-fated ocean cruise ship that encounters a giant tidal wave that flips the massive boat on its head, and slowly sinks.  Several of the passengers must make their way through the overturned ship to the engine room.  In the propeller shaft, the hull is only an inch thick, and it is their only hope of survival.  Along the way, they encounter dead bodies, deadly fires, and rising waters as the cruise-liner goes down.

The effect of the ship rolling over onto its top was appropriately chaotic, but I noticed that a lot of it was accomplished through creative camera angles and quick cuts.  Some of the shots when the ship was clearly at a forty-five degree angle, showed people simply shuffling across the floor with the camera turned on its side.  They should have been falling, not walking.  But they also had a great revolving set that sent stunt men and women sliding across the floor, and yes, falling, crashing through the dangerous debris.  It must have been a logistical nightmare to choreograph the whole scene.  It was actually mostly impressive, especially considering that it was all done with practical effects.  There was no CGI to help create the illusion.

The ten people have to crawl over and under wreckage and through ventilation shafts, all the while trying to stay ahead of the rising water.  At one point, the desperate people have to swim through a thirty-five foot submerged passage, and we get to see a tense underwater sequence.  The actors were really put through their paces.  And no, Shelly Winters swimming was not a special effect.

Intermittently, throughout the film, we are treated to some really cool shots of the overturned boat under the water as explosions rock the ship.  This is significant to the plot, especially when the film reaches its climax.  The shaking of the vessel is enough to cause the deaths of several characters.  Once they reach the engine room, they have to walk on up-side-down catwalks with no railings to hold on to.  There is rising water in the chamber with an oil fire blazing on its surface.

But the film really did a pretty good job of creating the illusion of the overturned vessel.  The director, Ronald Neame, created a smart but subtle effect by having the camera constantly tilting back and forth just enough to create the illusion of instability, always keeping in our subliminal minds that fact the boat was still on the ocean, rocking with the waves.  The movie was fun to watch, and since it was the only movie nominated for the Best Special Effects category, it took home its Oscar.  But I think that it was good enough to have won, even if it’d had some competition.  Maybe it was all a little campy by today’s standards, but I still enjoyed it.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth – 1971

I’m having difficulty assessing a movie that was so terrible in so many respects, and yet give proper credit to its many competent special effects.  On the one hand, the film was little more than an exploitation film, an excuse to have mostly naked men and women running around and being primitive.  There were gorgeous women with big boobs in fur bikinis wrestling in the waves, and super fit hunks in loincloths wielding spears against stop-motion animated dinosaurs.  Never-mind that humans and dinosaurs never existed on the Earth at the same time.  But what do I know?  The film was popular at the box-office.

Maybe it was because, as far as those Claymation monsters went, they were filmed surprisingly well… mostly.  I am reminded of the 1949 Best Special Effects Winner, Mighty Joe Young, or even the 1964 nominee, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.  Both of those movies also used miniature figures and stop-motion animation, and did it pretty well.  But they were still noticeably clunky on the screen.  In this movie, the motion of the dinosaurs appeared much smoother and thus more realistic.  Somehow, the technique was improved, making the way the dinosaurs moved more real than anyone had ever seen before.

Not only that, but the way the dinosaurs interacted with the actors was also pretty impressive.  We know that they were miniature models that were filmed and composited into the scene, but when the actors threw a spear at a dinosaur, we got to see it stick.  There was even a flying pterodactyl that attacked an unfortunate caveman and carried him to the top of a mountain.  He was able to use his spear to tear the monster’s wing, causing it to fall to its death.

But the problem was that the effects were too inconsistent.  For example, there was a scene in which the cavemen fought a triceratops.  The dinosaur looked and moved wonderfully, but only until the battle was over.  As it retreated to its cave, its motion looked clunky and jarring.  And that pterodactyl, was amazingly detailed with really cool looking wings, in which you could see veins and arteries.  But then you look at the creature’s head and it was as if it had been sculpted by a child.

And I have to make mention of some of the sub-par green-screen effects.  In one scene, a dinosaur is set on fire.  As the smoke and flames rose, they curiously vanished when they reached a certain height on the screen.  Or sometimes the actors were obviously backlit, with no light sources behind them.  At least the movie’s climax was done right.  A giant tidal wave rose from the ocean and nearly sunk the raft onto which our prehistoric heroes were clinging.  The massive winds and waves were well done.  But there were just too many effects that were either executed poorly, or just looked bad because of the hit-or-miss production design.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks – 1971 (WINNER)

It’s a good thing I’m only reviewing the visual effects for this film, and not the movie as a whole.  I wouldn’t say it was a bad movie, but it was geared to children under ten years old.  As for the effects, though the movie won the Oscar for the category, many of them looked like unfortunate throwbacks to the psychedelic 60s.  They were bright and colorful, and occasionally fun to watch.  But most of the garish visuals appeared to have an underlying cheapness to them that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on.  Still, I applaud the academy for nominating something other than a war film, though even this fanciful children’s movie took place in the early 40s, and the buffoonish Nazis were still the main villains

The main concept of the plot seemed ripe for the creation of some wonderful, playful effects, and I think Disney did an okay job of bringing them to life.  Angela Lansbury played Eglantine Price, a woman with a talent for witchcraft.  In order to defend England against the Nazi invaders, she enrolls in a correspondence course of sorcery in order to learn the spell of Substitutiary Locomotion, or animating inanimate objects.  When the enemy invades, she gives life to a massive museum full of medieval armor and weapons.  All of them were shown moving about on their own, with no visible actors.  This was all done using that sodium vapor process that Disney was so fond of using.

But that was just the movie’s climax.  The name of the film comes from the flying bed which is used for traveling both to London for a ridiculous dance sequence, because, oh yes, this was also a musical.  But the film’s centerpiece was when the bed carried Miss Price, her charlatan love interest, and three precocious orphans to a make-believe cartoon world populated by talking animals wearing human clothing.  It was so very Disney.  This was all accomplished in the same style as the famous Jolly Holiday sequence from Mary Poppins, where the actors interacted with cartoons.  That being said, the effect was no longer an innovation, and I thought Poppins did it better seven years earlier.  There was a song in which Eglantine and Emelius Browne, played by David Tomlinson, danced together on the bottom of the cartoon sea, but it was painfully obvious because of how they moved, that they were suspended on wires and composited into the animated background.

The effects for when they were traveling by bed were, sadly, poorly done.  As they flew, bright rainbow-colored studio lights drifted past them, and the images of the land over which they were flying were shown as psychedelically colored film negatives.  It may have been pretty “groovy” for 1971, but the effect doesn’t stand the test of time very well.  Still, it was fun seeing people getting turned into fluffy white rabbits.  But on the other hand, there were a few matte paintings of the London city-scape that looked way too much like actual paintings with no realism in them.  I know the movie was a fantasy, but everything just looked a little too fake.

Patton – 1970

Well, here we are with yet another war film, and while it was a good one, the special effects are all completely old hat by now.  Were they done well?  Of course, yes.  But have we seen them all before?  Absolutely.  When are we going to get to something more interesting than gunfire and exploding shells?  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m aware that there is a place for them, but year after year, we’re seeing the same old explosions, the same old fires.  Come on, Academy.  There is so much more out there!

Ok.  I had to get that off my chest.  So now I have to guess at why this movie was nominated for Best Special Effects.  I say I have to guess because I can’t really figure it out.  I really saw nothing special or innovative about the effects.  The explosions were exciting and violent, just like they were supposed to be.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with their execution.  But nothing stood out as better than any other war film.

Was it matte paintings or green-screening?  I don’t think so.  Director Franklin J. Schaffner chose to do all the filming on location instead of in studios. There were stunts, of course, and I guess those could be considered special effects.  For example, during one battle sequence, a tank was situated at the top of a dirt plateau.  When a shell destroyed the wall of earth, the tank fell, rolling down to the lower level of ground, exploding, and catching fire at the same time.  But I can’t imagine that was very difficult to accomplish. 

There were a few scenes in which there were German fighter planes flying overhead and shooting at the soldiers on the ground.  In fact, Patton, played by George C. Scott, stood his ground, shooting at the airplanes with a revolver, as bullets riddled the dirt between his feet.  There were exploding buildings, exploding tanks, exploding jeeps, and exploding soldiers.  There were even a few seconds of a man with a flame-thrower, setting a truck full of men on fire.  There were also a few scenes which showed the aftermath of bloody battles with dead soldiers littering the smoking earth.  Bloody corpses, sometimes with body parts either mangled or missing, littered the ground.  But again, there was nothing special about any of it. 

I even went out of my way to do some research on the internet, trying to find anything written about the film’s special effects, some reason for its nomination.  But I found nothing.  I have to conclude that it was just a big year for the film.  In all, it received ten nominations, winning seven.  I think that big budget juggernauts that receive that kind of attention are often nominated for more than they really deserve.  Its too bad, because I’m sure that there were other films that deserved the Best Special Effects nomination more than this good movie with its average effects.  Funny enough, the movie that won the award for the category was also a war film.  But it was not long after this that the category seemed to peter out.  During the 70s, there were years which had either one nomination, or none at all.

Marooned – 1969 (WINNER)

This movie was a partially fictional story about the challenges and dangers of realistic space travel.  In that respect, the effects were very well done, and it might even have deserved its Oscar.  But do not mistake production design and direction for special effects.  For all that, those things were very good, but what made them good was their adherence to accuracy and realism, both of which were impressive for a 1969 film.  True, it wasn’t the first movie to strive for such realism in space travel effects.  We can look at previous Best Special Effects winners, Destination Moon in 1950, and 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, both of whom had their own takes on realistic space travel.

It is important to note that this movie that so realistically depicted actual space travel, came out in the same year in which man first landed on the moon.  The eyes of the world were focused on the real thing.  In that respect, the film’s adherence to reality and scientific accuracy was pretty much spot on, many things even being comparable to the wonderful 1995 film, Apollo 13.  The only significant thing about the plot that deviated from reality was the fact that the actual mission upon which the film is based was that of a single-man flight.  In the movie, there were three astronauts to give the audience a few extra points of drama.

So really, the effects focused on floating objects and men in space suits, space crafts that had to rendezvous with each other in zero gravity, and all of these things being blue-screened and composited together against the backdrop of outer space, just above the earth.  The images of the globe were cool, and at several points we are treated to wonderful sunrises over the edge of the planet.  The designs of both the NASA and the Soviet spacecraft were great.  And incidentally, the concept of an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut working together to save the life of two space explorers was not lost on me, nor did it probably escape the notice of the audiences of 1969.

There was also a very cool effect of a hurricane, complete with high winds, blowing debris, and heavy rain.  There was a very simple but effective moment when the eye of the hurricane became centered over the launch pad.  They simply turned off the wind machines, but it was a cool moment in the narrative.  And lest I forget, the two rocket launches were also very accurately depicted and looked good on the screen.  Once again, very realistic.

I really have very few complaints about the effects in this movie.  Everything was done well, but my biggest problem with the film was its glacial pace.  Everything was so slow, even bordering on being dull.  Now, I’m guessing that maybe this was inherent to the effects and their realism because true weightlessness is a pretty slow endeavor.  Nothing is done very fast.  The problem is that it doesn’t make for a very engaging cinematic experience.  A movie does not require quick action to be good, but realistic or not, it gets a bit dull when all the action is in slow motion.

Ice Station Zebra – 1968

I think the special effects for this movie were actually very good.  I was struck by how this movie had shots and effects that were perfectly comparable to anything you might see in a modern movie.  Even the quality of the film, the sharpness of the images, looked more like something we might see today, and less like something that screamed 60s.  The composite shots, aside from one which I will mention in a bit, were seamless and expertly executed.  So if these effects were so well done, why didn’t they win the Oscar?  One simple reason.  It was up against 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Sorry, Ice Station Zebra.  Bad luck for you.

There were really a lot of effects for this movie to be proud of.  This film had the distinction of taking place during the Cold War.  The mission was to retrieve a canister of photographic film taken by a Russian spy satellite from a research station at the North Pole.  The fastest way to get there was by submarine, giving us some great underwater scenes in which the massive military vessel had to sail below the gigantic icebergs of the Arctic Ocean.  The bottom side of the icebergs looked great on the screen behind the dark and detailed miniature of the ocean vessel.  Then the sub had to rise to the surface and break through the ice layer.

After several failed attempts and a double-agent’s attempt to sabotage the submarine by flooding it, they manage to get through to the surface of the ice.  Then the shifting ice flows nearly crushed the ship and they had to dive again.  That was all pretty cool!  And then then the men have to trek over the frozen landscape in the middle of a violent blizzard.  There was a short sequence in which several men fall through some thin ice and are almost killed the shifting sheets of ice.  That was filmed very well and was exciting to watch!  Even though it was a war film, the American sailors had to battle the elements as well as the Russian paratroopers that arrived later.

There was only one time the special effects didn’t work for me.  There were several shots of the Russian jets approaching the research station.  In one shot they are shown against an orange and yellow sky from behind.  Then they are shown from the front and above as they are flying over icy ocean water. Those shots were awesome and looked fantastic.  But then we are shown a single shot of the jets flying low and speeding toward land.  That one shot looked really fake, like the planes were not part of the same image as that of the green land mass.

But honestly, that was my only real complaint, so we are still doing pretty well.  The sequence in which the submarine’s torpedo bay is flooded was done well, as was the short scene in the beginning of the movie where the Russian satellite loses its orbit and plummets to the Earth.  The reentry effect was good.  And then, of course, there was the film’s climax, a quick gunfight followed by the canister of film, which had been attached to a weather balloon, was blown up in mid-air.  It was all very well and realistically done, a worthy nominee for the category.

Tobruk – 1967

I’m certainly glad this movie didn’t win the Oscar for Best Special Effects.  Granted they were better than the effects for Doctor Dolittle, the film that did win, but they were still pretty awful.  It must have been a really slow year for superior visual effects achievements.  There were better blue-screening effects from movies in the early 40s than there were in this 1967 war film!

One of the tell-tale signs of bad blue-screening is the black outline that surrounds the actors in the fore-ground.  This movie had a lot of them.  It is a clear visual separation that is hard to miss.  The actors didn’t look like they belonged to their surroundings.  Usually I’m able to get past this kind of flaw, but here, it was way too obvious, so much so that I was taken out of the story, distracted by the effect. 

Another sign of poor blue-screening is the difference in picture quality between the fore-ground and the background.  There were times when it appeared as though they were using inferior cameras to film the landscapes.  They were very grainy while the images of the actors were clear and sharp.  I understand that the background needs to be slightly out of focus, but this was ridiculous.

Another sign of poor compositing is inconsistent lighting.  There were a few shots in which actors were running around amidst fire and explosions.  Sometimes the actors were surrounded by glowing white halos, as if they were lit from behind by bright white stage lights.  And sometimes the flames in the various layers of compositing were different colors, while in other shots, they were all a pretty uniform color.  Those shots just looked terribly fake.

But that’s not to say all the effects were bad.  The wide shots of the gasoline fires in the film’s climax were really cool.  And the effects artist really knew how to blow things up.  Whether the explosions were caused by machinegun fire, detonating land-mines, or igniting fuel tanks, they were done pretty well.   There were several great shots of stunt men being set on fire and thrashing about.

And finally, I have to mention one other thing that distracted me from what was actually a great story.  I almost hesitate to mention this issue because I don’t know if it was the fault of the special effects artists or the set designers.  There were several sets used in the film that looked way too much like sets, something you might see in a stage production.  You know something has to be wrong when the sets themselves look fake.

I just don’t understand why the academy couldn’t come up with any more worthy visual effects nominations than Tobruk and Doctor Dolittle.  I can only guess that 1967 must have been a slow year for the category.

2001: A Space Odyssey (WINNER)

This movie was a true land mark in the field of special effects.  It was one of the big ones.  It was innovative, creative, visually stunning, and utterly enjoyable.  And the effects were integral to the telling of a great science-fiction story.  Some have called this film director Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece.  I did my research and found that many critics say that this is more than just a movie.  It is a work of art.  Kubrick was doing some really amazing things that had never been done before.

The first twenty minutes of the film are virtually silent.  There is no music or underscoring as we are introduced to the ape-like creatures that would eventually evolve into the human race.  And we are introduced to the enigmatic monolith that propelled them into a state of higher intelligence.  The ingenious use of front projection in these early scenes was perfectly executed.  From there we move directly into mankind’s ventures into outer space.  We get some very realistic and scientifically accurate depictions of space travel.  Kubrick built sets that rotated, and then fixed his cameras to rotate with them.  The effect made it appear that the actors could walk up walls or run around the inside of a ring.  It was ingenious, and looked fantastic!  At other times, he would shift the sets sideways and film the wire-suspended actors from below.  Their bodies would hide the wires from the camera, creating the illusion of floating.

In addition to those things, the scale models of spaceships and the gigantic spinning space station were incredibly detailed.  Even the smaller two-man pods were meticulously designed and crafted.  There was a scene in which a man in an EVA suit is killed and begins to drift off into space.  The way he moved in zero-gravity was incredibly realistic, as was the scene when his body was retrieved. 

And, of course, there was the film’s climax, the astronaut’s journey through the Stargate.  He is drawn into a giant floating monolith near Jupiter, and taken into another world, a tunnel or a landscape of glowing lights, colors, and shapes.  The surrealistic impressions we are given are of speed and distance.  And I liked the final image of the Star Child.  Audiences had certainly never seen anything like it.

The only effect I wasn’t certain of was the scene where the astronaut has to open the hatch of the main ship, then blow out the door of his pod, so that he is thrown into the open hatch.  He is exposed to the vacuum of space for five or six seconds.  He flies to the back of the airlock but then he pushes himself back to the exposed opening to manually close the hatch.  He is able to do this, and then has to wait several more seconds for the airlock to re-pressurize.  Then he walks away from the ordeal without any ill effects.  For a movie that was so obsessive about its realism and scientific accuracy, would the man even be able to survive this, and if he did, wouldn’t he endure some kind of intense bodily damage?  But no, he just shrugged it off like it was nothing.  My research revealed that Bowman could have survived the ordeal, but he would likely have suffered traumatic injuries.

Hawaii – 1966

Here is another one of those movies whose special effects nomination confuses me.  There really wasn’t much going on.  It was a drama.  There was very little action that required innovative effects.  I went into this film with the complete misconception that it was a disaster film involving an erupting Hawaiian volcano.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  I’m not saying it was a bad movie.  But there just weren’t many special effects to speak of.

So what effects did the movie have?  It was a period drama that took place in the early 1800s.  First, there were rough waters at sea as a sailing ship passes around Cape Horn.  Then there was a fire, as angry English sailors set Reverend Hale’s grass-hut church ablaze.  During that scene, Julie Andrews’ dress caught fire.  And then there was a sudden windstorm that toppled that same church when the Hawaiian Queen died.  Aside from that, there was just nothing.

Now, I know there was a fair amount of green-screening in the movie, and I’ll be the first to admit that it was done exceptionally well, especially in the ocean voyage sequences.  But was that enough to set its special effects above all the other movies that were released that year?  I don’t know.  What else came out that year?  Well, I did a little research and counted numerous films that, while I have seen none of them, I can only imagine had more interesting visual effects, films like Around the World Under the Sea, The Bible: In the Beginning…, Destination Inner Space, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Fahrenheit 451.  Even the war epic, The Sand Pebbles, which I have seen, had effects comparable to Hawaii.

So what was it about this film that earned it its Oscar nomination?  I did a bit of research, but unfortunately came up empty-handed.  The reviews I could find on the internet simply called the film’s special effects good, but never really explained why.  So all I have to go on is what I could see.  I’ll give the film kudos for good green-screening, but all the other effects seemed pretty average.  The shot where Julie Andrews’ dress catches on fire can be easily explained using a stunt double.  The sudden typhoon winds simply needed some powerful wind machines.  And the toppling church was only shown from a distance, where the bare frame of the large hut could be easily flipped without letting us see any wires.  I’ll be honest, I was not impressed, and for a Best Special Effects nominee, I wanted to be.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I must be missing something.  Why would a movie with so few notable effects be nominated for Best Special Effects?  One possible explanation is that the Academy didn’t begin formally recognizing makeup and hairstyling until 1981.  It might be possible that the aging makeup applied to the characters might have been considered for special effects.  And as far as that went, I thought makeup was done pretty well.  Add that to the superior green-screening effects and the few minor effects I’ve already mentioned, and you may have yourself a movie worthy of an Oscar nod.