Category: Best Visual Effects

The Time Machine – 1960 (WINNER)

I really liked this movie.  The visuals were creative, fanciful, fun, and a feast for the eyes.  They gave audiences multiple images and effects that the world had never before seen.  But that isn’t to say they were all perfect.  They were not.  The film’s extraordinary production design helped to enhance the visuals, but there were too many times when I was taken out of the story because of sub-par special effects.

For example, the scene in which the volcanoes erupt and flow down the street of a city.  While it was a cool effect to watch, it was painfully obvious that the filmmakers were using scale models.  The cars looked too much like toys and the lava looked too much like viscous mud under a red lighting gel.  It looked bright and interesting, but completely fake.

Next, there was the matte painting of the landscape of the extreme future.  It was a painting that looked like a cross between the styles of Thomas Kinkade and Bob Ross.  Once again, it was beautiful, but it also looked entirely unreal.  This example stands out even more than the other, because we first see the fantasy terrain in oils, then we cut to a shot of our hero walking amongst real the foliage.  It was so different, it got me thinking about the inconsistency of the images, instead of being immersed in the story.

But fortunately, the film had more good special effects than bad.  One of the earliest effects in the narrative was when the character of H.G. Wells starts his journey forward through time.  I think they used a blend of two different effective techniques.  First was a form of stop motion or single image animation.  They had a fast stream of separate rear-projected images shown in such quick succession as to appear to be a quickly morphing moving picture.  The second was actual time lapse photography, showing the world around the machine moving at incredible speeds.  

I liked the way Wells observed a mannequin and her quickly evolving display of ladies fashions, and the way he could see the sun speeding past his skylight.  I liked the way the mountains rose up around him as he sped forward in time, only to crumble away as the rocks are worn down by the ravages of centuries.  The matte painting of the giant head atop Morlock temple looked ominous and forbidding.

I also really liked the burning of the Morlocks’ cave.  They actually set a stunt man on fire and kept him on the screen for several seconds before allowing him to rush through a doorway where, I’m sure, men were waiting with fire extinguishers.  But I think that the film’s best effect might have been the accelerated decaying of the dead Morlock body.  It looked incredibly complex and fairly realistic, and I was properly impressed.  In other words, despite the bad scale models and the painted landscapes, I think that this movie was a deserving Oscar winner!

1960 – The Last Voyage

Here we have a true disaster film, worthy to stand in the company of other great disaster films like The Towering Inferno, the Poseidon Adventure, and Airport 57.  And in light of that, the quality of the special effects didn’t disappoint.  So why didn’t I award them a five star rating?  Because the special effects just weren’t that visually interesting, and there weren’t as many of them as I would have liked.

The movie was about an old cruise ship that was going to be decommissioned.  Even before the opening credits started to appear on the screen, we are shown that there is a major fire in the boiler room.  The fire fuses the pressure valves to the boilers, and it isn’t long before the they explode, ripping a hole through the middle of the ship and breaching the hull.  But then most of the movie follows two things.  The first is the efforts of a man trying to save his wife who is trapped under the wreckage.  The second is the crew of the ship trying to convince the Captain to follow safety precautions.

In other words, there was more drama than action, and while there is nothing wrong with that, it didn’t leave a lot of room for visual effects.  That being said, the fiery explosions were pretty spectacular!  Also, the flooding of the engine room was pretty well-done.  At first they tried to shore up the bulkheads with wooden beams, but eventually the water started seeping through the walls.  The trickle became a spray, which eventually became a flood.

The part where the smoke stack cracks in half and falls on the captain’s office was cool.  The black billows of smoke that rose from the breach were realistic.  But we never actually see the Captain getting crushed.  We see the crash, and then when the First Mate investigates, we see the Captain’s head sticking out of the rubble just enough to allow him to have a dramatic death scene.

But unfortunately, the climactic ending was a bit anticlimactic.  During the whole sinking of the cruise ship, we are periodically shown some wide angle shots as the life boats flee.  The sinking ship remained mostly level in the water.  In the close-ups, rooms and decks were being submerged, but in the wide shots, the ship was level?  And only once, as the man, his rescued wife, and the crew members who helped them are running for their lives, do we see them on a slanting floor.

Then as they tryto escape the foundering vessel, the water is flowing over the deck faster thanthey can run.  It isn’t long before theyjust hop over the railing and swim to the life boats.  And finally, we are shown a black, indistinctshape submerging under the roiling waves. But for that, I must say, it was kind-of weak for the climax of anotherwise OK disaster film.  I don’tknow.  I guess I just expected a littlemore from what could have been a visually stunning movie.

Journey to the Center of the Earth – 1959

I’m conflicted when it comes to assessing the special effects on this film.  On the one hand, they were wonderful.  They were unique, innovative, artistic, and at times, beautiful to see on the screen.  But on the other hand, they were obvious.  The gorgeous matte paintings looked too much like paintings.  Some of the forced perspective and compositing didn’t quite look natural.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the movie’s fault.  It was the technology of the times.  This was the best they could do.  Knowing that, it is easy to forgive the minor imperfections, the dark blue-screening lines around the giant reptiles, the suddenly grainy picture quality when the lizards are shown close up, the ridiculously fake tongue of the giant salamander when it tries to eat James Mason. 

But those few problems paled in comparison to the awesome visual effects that dominated the film.  Like many Jules Vern adventure tales, this film had a slight steampunk aesthetic which I have always liked.  In that, some of the visual effects were nothing more than great set design and props.  And I was captivated by all the stunning environments in the movie, like the dusty salt caverns, the giant mushroom forest, and the lost city of Atlantis.  Though these could all easily fall under the purview of the Art Director, I’m sure the visual effects artists had a hand in creating those sets.  The set designer might have designed and built the fantastical crystal cave, but the special effects guys made them glow and sparkle.

Another memorable effect was the giant monsters.  Despite the obvious way the in-camera focus of the creatures shifted when the live animals were filmed at extremely close range, in order to force our eyes to perceive them as giants, they were really cool!  I’m so glad they chose not to use stop motion animation or worse yet, massive, clunky animatronics to achieve the effect.  I also loved the whole scene where they make it to the exact center of the Earth.  They are on a raft in the middle of a subterranean ocean.  Powerful magnetic forces rip all the gold our heroes carry away from them.  There is a storm, and a giant whirlpool that seizes the raft.  It was a fun scene to watch!

And I can’t forget the movie’s exciting climax!  The adventurers find a shaft that leads from Atlantis to the open sky.  Their plan to return to the surface is to use gun powder to blow up a rocky obstruction, and ride a powerful updraft of wind to the open air.  Instead they cause an earthquake which destroys the lost city, and a volcanic eruption.  Lying in a giant asbestos altar stone, they ride the rush of lava up the volcanic shaft to freedom.  Never-mind the fact that the trip would have taken hours if not days, during which time, the people would have been cooked like eggs in a skillet.  Who cares?  It was still a lot of fun to watch!

Ben-Hur –1959 (WINNER)

Ben-Hur was a behemoth of great special effects.  There were phenomenal stunts, detailed scale models, absolutely first-rate rear-projection, masterful matte-paintings, incredible sound and sound mixing, fires, a naval battle, an exciting chariot race that lasted nearly ten whole minutes, and vivid, striking imagery that was a feast for the eyes!  How’s that for a single movie?

Of course when people think of this film, the first thing that usually comes to their minds is the afore-mentioned chariot race, so I’ll start there.  It was, even by today’s standards flawlessly done.  Once the flags were lowered, the intensity went from zero to a hundred in an instant.  The pace was fast and relentless, never slowing even for an instant.  The wide shots made use of matte paintings composited with live action so seamlessly, it looked completely real.  When the camera focused on the actors’ faces, the rear projected backgrounds were perfect.  The actors looked like they were actually part of the projected images. 

And the stunts!  When a chariot was destroyed, broken, or flipped, the drivers were tossed about like rag-dolls.  There was one great shot when the Charlton Heston’s stunt man was flipped over the front of his chariot, and then we saw Heston climbing back into the vehicle.  The shot where his nemesis Messala, played by Stephen Boyd, crashes and is trampled by a team of horses, dragged behind his speeding steeds, trampled some more, then crushed under chariot wheels.  They used a dummy, of course, but the transition from man to dummy was nearly undetectable.  The whole race was memorable for a good reason.

But there was so much more in the film.  The naval battle was just as exciting and visually stunning.  But there were three other images that stand out in my mind, and really caught my attention, all of which were religious in nature, which makes sense, as the film is, after all, a biblical epic.  In the beginning, the image of the star of Bethlehem moving through the sky and shining its light down on the stable was beautifully done.  The dark and sleeping town looked perfect.

The other are two separate images at Christ’s crucifixion.  Director William Wyler chose to never show us Jesus’s face.  But there is a powerful shot of Christ hanging on the cross, shown from behind, against a dark and raining sky.  The other is an up-side-down image of him reflected in a bloody puddle of water, shown only for an instant before the rain obscures the reflection.  The artful effects really turned the sequence from just emotional to devastating.  And the whole movie was full of similarly intense imagery.  Wyler and his special effects really knew what they were doing, and deserve all the Oscars they won.  And incidentally, I watched the chariot race from the 2016 remake.  It was nowhere near as good as the 1959 version.

Torpedo Run – 1958

As I was going into this movie, I was almost rolling my eyes.  Another war film.  Another submarine action/drama flick.  What could this movie possibly have to show me that I haven’t seen before?  Well, there was plenty!  Some of the underwater sequences may have been slow, but they were actually surprising in the tension that they created.  The effects were visually interesting and enhanced the story wonderfully.  I was pleasantly surprised by the movie’s realistic effects!

There were some awesome shots of the underwater vessel being barraged with depth charges, one after another.  There was even a really cool shot of one of them bouncing off the submarine’s hull before exploding!  There were several really cool shots of the torpedoes being launched from the sub, and of course, there were the obligatory surface explosions when the deadly projectiles reached their targets.  It was all done very well.  There was also a really cool shot, later in the film, of the submarine taking some significant damage when its tower crashes into a boom.

For me, one of the coolest parts of the movie was the minefield.  First of all, it was the first time I have ever seen a film use these particular kinds of mines, the ones attached to the ocean floor by strong cables.  I’m guessing the exterior shots must have made use of scale models, but they were extremely detailed.  As the submarine, the Grayfish, made its way through the cables holding the mines in place, they would sometimes scrape against them, or catch them while passing, forcing the vessel to reverse course to avoid destruction.  There were some great close-ups of the sub’s hull and propellers, and the details were amazing.  You could see the barnacles on the sub’s underbelly!  Very cool!

And then there was the climactic sequence in which the submarine is sunk.  They take on water and drop to the ocean floor.  The sailors are forced to put on Momsen lungs to make it to the surface.  You could tell, they actually put their actors, even their big name stars like Glen Ford and Ernest Borgnine, under water with the breathing devices.  And the sinking of their nemesis, the Japanese aircraft carrier, the Shinaru, seen through a periscope, was pretty cool.

I only have one minor complaint about this film’s effects.  Some of the shots of the Japanese ships on the surface of the water looked pretty fake.  The trouble is that I can’t put my finger on exactly why they did, but something was off.  Maybe they looked too much like detailed toys in the wide shots.  Maybe the telltale water filmed at close range broke the illusion.  Maybe it was the way they moved through the water.  I’m not sure, because none of these things really stood out as badly done.  But when a real boat was filmed, it was obvious, making the scale models obvious as well.  But overall, the special effects for this film were masterfully done!

Tom Thumb – 1958 (WINNER)

There is a lot to say about this Special Effects Oscar winner.  What they got right, they got very right.  But unfortunately, what they got wrong, they got very wrong.  It’s a good thing I’m only commenting on the special effects and not the film as a whole.  This was a ridiculous movie, and not always in a good way.  It seemed that its target audience was five years old and under.  There were a lot of bright colors and fanciful, forced merriment.  This movie was so wholesome that it made Walt Disney look like Andrew Dice Clay.

But that meant that the visual effects artists were able to take their imaginations in light-hearted and fanciful directions.  Probably the most impressive of the film’s effects was a ten minute dance sequence in which Tom Thumb, played by Russ Tamblyn, cavorts with a host of animated toys.  Most notably, he danced with a paper doll, who matched him move for move.  That was pretty impressive, except when parts of the paper doll turned sideways.  The thin paper actually disappeared in the stop-motion animation process.

There were plenty of enlarged sets and props that were often used to give Tom the illusion of smallness.  At one point Tom rides in the ear of a horse.  There were the moving toys that were sometimes stop-motion animation against a blue-screen, and were sometimes life-sized people in toy costumes.  There was a fun little sequence in which several pairs of magical shoes danced all by themselves, again, using that stop-motion animation.  These effects were all very well-executed and fun to watch.  There was even a shot near the end which borrowed a trick from the 1940 Best Special Effects winner, The Thief of Bagdad.  They had Tom sitting in the palm of a giant hand.  They could have blue screened this shot, but instead, they built a massive hand.  At least they had the sense to make sure it didn’t move.

But the movie’s bad effects were simply terrible.  For example, one of the worst things they did was, during many of the wide shots, Tom changed from a live actor to a tiny doll that looked like simple painted wood.  The doll never moved, even when picked up.  It just looked incredibly fake.  Another failing was the blue-screening.  There was often the tell-tale black outline around things that had to be tiny.  And lest I forget, there was a regular filmed background that changed to a painted backdrop that looked like it belonged in a children’s stage production.

But this was the 1958 winner.  I guess that, for the Academy voters, the good outweighed the bad.  Either that, or they were just drawn in by the refreshing burst of childish whimsy and magic that was a far cry from the common special effects nominees like war films or dramas.  The movie’s effects were fun, but I think they would have been even more fun if I was four years old.

The Spirit of St. Louis – 1957

Here is another example of a movie that, as far as I could tell, just didn’t have very much reason to be nominated for the Best Special Effects category.  The movie was a dramatization of the events leading up to the first trans-Atlantic flight made by Charles Lindbergh.  It was a drama, and really, nothing more.

So what did the film have going for it?  Well, there was some skillful stunt flying, a couple of physical stunts, a parachute landing, and some big, wide cinematic shots that were actually the responsibility of the cinematographer and the director. These shots were wonderful to see, but I wouldn’t call them special effects.  There were also a few rear-projection shots that were only interesting because they must have taken skilled stunt pilots to film.

There just wasn’t much opportunity in the plot for visual effects.  The stunt flying was really the only significant reason I can think of to warrant the nomination.  So I’ll comment on that for a moment.  There was one short sequence which showed a couple of biplanes performing at an air-show, each with red, white, and blue smoke trailing behind them.  They weaved through the air, crossing each other’s paths, making smoke patterns in the sky.  Part of the sequence was a stunt where men actually walked on the wings of flying planes.  That was interesting, but very brief.

Then there were several scenes which showed us take-offs and landings in difficult weather conditions.  The Spirit of St. Louis of course, was the featured airplane, and its initial take-off on a wet and muddy runway made for a tense scene.  Unfortunately, one of the problems I had was inherent in the plot of the film.  It was history.  We know that Lindbergh and his innovative airplane survived all their challenges.  So whenever his plane seemed to be in trouble, it was interesting to see the aviator’s dramatic human struggles, but there was always that little bit of viewer omniscience taking away from the illusion of danger.  The drama was fine, but a part of me always knew he wasn’t going to crash.

And that brings me to an interesting sequence in which the outside of the Spirit of St. Louis became frozen and iced over.  In order to prevent the plane’s engine from stalling, Lindbergh flies to a lower altitude.  The ice quickly melts and breaks away from the craft in small wet chunks.  The effect looked easy to accomplish.

And finally, there was the climax of the film, the scene in which Lindbergh approaches his destination in Paris.  The aerial shots of the beautiful city, with the Eifel Tower being prominently displayed, were very nice.  As he came in for his landing, a camera was fastened to the underbelly of the airplane, so it was an interesting way to see the end of his journey.  And that. Unfortunately, sums it all up for me.  It was all very nice, but not terribly inventive, innovative, or interesting.

The Enemy Below – 1957 (WINNER)

I’ll start this review off by saying that I only give the special effects three stars because it has all been done before.  Really?  Another WWII war movie?  Another volley of explosions and gunfire?  More scale models of battleships and submarines?  There was nothing new here.  There’s no denying that it was all done well, but where’s the creativity?  Where’s the innovation?

The answer is that visually, there was none.  The film was nominated based solely on the audio effects, and when it came to those, the film gives us some interesting sound effects.  Not so much in the sounds of watery explosions, but in the sounds of the submarine moving under the water.  It was in the sounds of the torpedoes speeding through the waves.  It was in the pinging sound of the sonar equipment as the American sailors desperately tried to locate the German sub.

I guess I have to admit that I know very little about the sound category.  What makes for good sound or bad?  What made this movie stand out?  Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer.  I can only comment on what I can hear with my uneducated ears, and to be honest, I couldn’t hear anything particularly special.  Fortunately, there are experts who know better what to listen for than I .

There was an interesting scene in which the German Captain had his men sing a loud patriotic song, which the American Captain picked up on his radio equipment.  The garbled sound effectively confuses the Allies.  The faint water dampened sounds of the depth charges exploding near the submarine were appropriately ominous.  And the soft whirring sound of the torpedo propellers was interesting.

Visually, there isn’t much on which I can comment.  The above water evidence of the underwater explosions were pretty realistic, but that wasn’t much of a surprise.  The US Navy supplied them with actual depth charges.  They were all real.  Unfortunately, the realistic scale models of the nautical vessels on both sides were given away, once again, by the unrealistic water filmed at close range.

Then there was one sequence of shots that were particularly awful.  So the sub has surfaced, and has been disabled, and the battleship turns to ram it.  Captain Stolberg is standing on the sub’s deck watching the approach of the American ship.  He is in perfect focus, while the rear-projected burning battleship, water, and sky are all badly out of focus and incredibly grainy.  It looked very fake.

And so I come back to my old question?  Why were there only two movies being nominated for the category each year?  Surely there must have been plenty of movies that were pushing the boundaries of what was possible in movie magic.  Why weren’t any of them considered for the Oscar?

Forbidden Planet – 1956

Wow!  Another great movie for the Special Effects category in 1956!  These effects were creative, inventive, and integral to the telling of the  story.  The were big, colorful, and visually dazzling.  In other words, they were everything that the category embodies, and it really deserved its Oscar nomination.  But the reason it didn’t take home its statue is that it was up against The Ten Commandments.  Kind of hard to beat that one.

This was a true science fiction fantasy film.  The story takes place in the far future, where mankind is seeding the galaxy with colonies.  Space travel is common, and there is also a interstellar military organization that maintains and polices the settlements.  The concept sounds vaguely familiar, right?  Well, it should.  Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has said that Forbidden Planet was one of his inspirations when developing his famous franchise.

The only other two space fiction films that had been previously nominated for Best Special Effects were Destination Moon in 1950 and When Worlds Collide in 1951.  The fantastic visuals included things like a great shot of the flying saucer cruising around the dark side of a planet, causing a spectacular eclipse, the matte-painted alien landscape, ray-guns with electric purple beams, a massively gigantic underground complex, and an invisible monster that is made visible in a fiery ghost-like outline.  And all this was wrapped up in a fantastic and well-developed script that went a long way to light up my imagination and enhance the realism of the plot’s fantasy.

The fiery ID monster was one of the coolest effects in the film.  I originally thought it was simply impressive hand-drawn animation, but my research turned up something a bit more complicated.  According to Wikipedia, the special effects artist, Joshua Meador, an animator on loan from Disney, “sketched each frame of the entire sequence in black pencil on white paper; each page was then photographed in high contrast, so that only the major details remained visible. These images were then photographically reversed into negative and the resulting white line images were then tinted red, creating the effect of the Id Monster’s body remaining largely invisible, with only its major outlines illuminated by the energy from the force-field and blaster beams.”

And I have to mention the infamous Robby the Robot.  This was the film that created the iconic machine that was used over and over again in movies and television, from The Twilight Zone to Lost in Space.  The robot effect cost about $125,000 to build, but has since become the most expensive movie prop ever to be auctioned, going for a price of $5.3 million.  Even in the mid-50s, he looked great!

The Ten Commandments – 1956 (WINNER)

The Ten Commandments was a tour de force of amazing special effects.  This movie gave audiences things they had never seen before and some of them hole up pretty well, even by today’s standards.  Granted, not all the visual effects were perfect.  After all, this movie came out in 1956.  There was no CGI, so everything was done with practical effects.  But despite some obvious imperfections, that was the very thing that made the effects so utterly amazing!

The visual effects’ biggest failings was really only two things.  First was some of the blue screening effects.  There were several scenes in which it was a problem, but the one that sticks out in my mind was when Moses is showing the Pharaoh the building of the city of Goshen.  There are actual black lines surrounding the actors when they are looking out over the balcony.  There is also a black line outlining the giant statue being moved below them. My second complaint is the scene where the staffs are turned into snakes.  That effect looked pretty bad, especially compared to the awesome effects in the rest of the film.

There was the burning bush, the turning of the river into blood, the burning hailstones falling from the sky, the angel of death, the pillar of fire, the parting of the Red Sea, the hand of God burning the words of the Ten Commandments onto the stone tablets, the destruction of the golden calf.  All that, and the scale of the visuals were phenomenal, enhanced by perfect matte paintings.

There were so many scenes in which the film’s director, Cecil B. DeMille, clearly spared no expense to create his grand vision of the Biblical epic, from the gigantic sets to the  fourteen thousand extras, from the grand score by Elmer Bernstein to the elaborate and opulent costumes by Edith Head.  Everything was done on a massive scale and it all combined to make some pretty unforgettable visuals.

But the movie’s biggest draw, its most memorable special effect, was the parting of the Red Sea.  To quote Wikipedia, “The parting of the Red Sea was considered the most difficult special effect ever performed up to that time.  This effect took about six months of VistaVision filming, and combined scenes shot on the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt, with scenes filmed at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.”  It really is very impressive, compositing so many screen elements to make the effect look as fantastic as possible.  Pure magic!

But for my money, the creation of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments was just as impressive and just as memorable.  Sure, the pillar of fire was clearly hand animated, as it had been earlier when it had defended the Israelites from Pharaoh’s armies, but for 1956, it was a spectacular visual effect.  DeMille really blew the competition away with this cinematic masterpiece!