What older movies made a good use of either side stepping special effects or have effects that somehow still hold up today? Why are they good movies?
The original Jurassic Park. Crazy to think that movie came out in 1993, over 32 years ago.
Lord of the Rings effects still hold up, in my opinion at least. The Balrog uses a lot of “hidden” information with the use of blackness to cover up bad cgi. Horse charges are zoomed out far enough to disguise how few horses are actually there. Most of the movies use practical effects though.
old movies
Lord of the Rings
💀
Reading this made my back hurt.
Especially when you compare the effects in Lord of the Rings to the Hobbit. You can really see when the studio is overworked and underpaid, even when it’s a studio as good as weta.
I can usually turn a blind eye to bad CGI, but The Hobbit was next-level awful. It wasn’t so much bad as unfinished. I felt I was watching a pirated movie before post production was complete.
Check out the M4 fan edit. I recommend this at every opportunity haha. They cut down the entire extended trilogy into a 4 hour film, covering only the events in The Hobbit novel. One of the many adjustments they make is colour correction, which really helps with the “unfinished” feel you’re talking about. It’s incredibly well done, and aside from a few janky cuts is the definitive version of The Hobbit movies imo.
Yeah, I was racking my brain to find a major movie filmed in the last decade without digital effects so that I could induce a recognition of the passage of time, and I couldn’t manage it. Covid started more than half a decade ago, and modern movies rarely use solely practical effects
Fury Road was almost all practical effects
So was sicario edit: and the raid, but most isn’t all. Visual effects are simply too tantalizing and/or useful. Particularly for landscapes, I simply don’t notice
The Princess Bride
The flames are real flames! The R.O.U.S. is a tiny guy in a suit! The giant is… Andre the Giant!
Yeah, the behind the scenes stuff for that movie is wild.
They had to keep reshooting the fire swamp scene, because Cary Elwes (Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts) kept panicking every time Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) got lit on fire.
The R.O.U.S. scene had to be delayed, because they had to go bail the dude in the rat suit out of jail. He had apparently gotten too drunk the night before, and was in the drunk tank on the morning that they were supposed to shoot the R.O.U.S. scene.
Alien,
the original 1979 one.Imo it really aged well,
recently rewatched it and was amazed by how good the special effects looked, especially for that time.It’s also a really good movie,
scores 8.5/10 on IMDB,
kept me on the tip of my chair for the full 2 houra.There is one scene where the two characters are gathering coolant bottles for the life support (Lambert and one of the Mechanics I’m blanking on) where you can see the xenomorph is a dude in a suit. The rest are cleverly done to hide that fact, and it’s done very well. The scene in the air vents when the xeno catches Dallas is terrifying even knowing it’s coming.
Alien is a 10/10 for me. Showed my wife last year and she was indeed on the edge of her seat for the duration. And she hates science fiction!
So much of the movie has leaked into pop culture and memes that it’s easy to forget just how horrifying it is, how well crafted. I hadn’t sat down and really watched it for decades until I watched it with my wife.
Star wars, with models and miniatures.
Most great old movies, where cheesy effects were irrelevant next to the story.
Gravity Falls Little Gift Shop of Horrors, where the characters watch an ‘incredibly expensive’ stop motion scene that we (the audience) only see as reflected shadows.
Just gave the special editions a rewatch. The cgi inserted scenes have aged incredibly poorly, especially compared to the rest of the 1977 effects
The “Despecialized” editions are the best right now. I appreciate what Lucas wanted to do in the 90s but I wish he’d just left the originals alone.
I’ve really enjoyed 4K77.
And matte paintings. Never forget the legendary artists who turned paintings into scenery, or the camera workers who managed to blend in the actors to them.
- That first legendary pan-down to Tattooine, which the Tantive IV and Star Destroyer then fly past? Matte painting.
- The sterile hangars and seemingly-bottomless pits of the Death Star? Matte painting.
- The busy Rebel hangar on Yavin IV? Also a matte painting. I seem to remember reading that some of the hangar floor markings - besides making it look like an actual hangar - served to help align the matte with the set shots and coordinate extras so they wouldn’t accidentally walk out of the filmed segment and behind a matte portion.
How about most of the storm troopers standing at attention for the arrival of Vader? Matte painting.
The bottomless chasm in Bespin, matte painting.
Leia’s hair in the first one? Matte painting.
Don’t make me bust out the LART.
Blade Runner (1982) still looks incredible. The miniatures and attention to detail in design effectively set the tone for subsequent cyberpunk.
The Thing, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Alien(s), ET - just from top of my head. The Thing would be my favorite out of the bunch. No CGI, just pure and hardcore man-made effects.
Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park make heavy use of CGI. The liquid metal effects in T2, and any time you see an entire dinosaur that is standing up and moving around in Jurassic Park, are computer generated. They were just done very well.
Jurassic park is a classic one to list in this category. The reason is that they mixed a lot of practical with the CGI and (imo more importantly) because they used the CGI sparingly and in a way that was basically “what if there was a bigger animatronic there” without going over board with it.
Of course T2 and Jurassic Park has CGI and it holds fucking strong today still. When I was talking about no CGI, I was talking about The Thing being my fav out of the bunch because of no CGI and just looking awesome so many years later.
Still my favorite movie of all time
Jurassic Park
Yup, it was lauded for its amazing CGI when it came out, but the vast majority of the movie was shot with puppets and practical effects. It’s also a great example of “less is more” in the sense that the movie is over two hours long, but only has like 15 minutes of actual dinosaur footage. That meant they were able to focus their time and resources effectively, to make the few bits of CGI as good as they could be.
Jaws.
The shark prop didn’t work well and looked terrible, which resulted in much of it being left out of the movie. The movie is more terrifying because of this.
The shark has a name, it’s Bruce
The severed head rolling into view in the hole of the sunken boat still freaks me out. I think it was filmed in the back yard pool of one of the producers.
Nobody sidestepped special effects like film noir did. They made a whole genre out of, “If we dim the lights enough, nobody will notice we stole this set from a different movie.”
The history of film noir is something really special that came together due to a unique set of circumstances (saddle up for an infodump). The Great Depression had given popularity to pulp fiction novels, generally focusing on working class protagonists struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and often viewing power and social structures through cynical terms. Meanwhile, in Germany, Hitler destroyed the German film industry, which had previously been the best in the world. A bunch of people who were generally some combination of gay/Jewish/communist/film makers came to America and brought their expertise, expressionist style, and antifascist perspectives to Hollywood, where it blended with existing American culture to create something entirely new.
Every iconic aspect of film noir was that way for a reason - even if the reason was often, “saving money,” like I mentioned before. The older, grizzled detective and the young femme fatale were cast out of necessity, especially during wartime when young men who would have otherwise dominated those roles were out fighting (or expected to be). While of course they are product of their time and can contain sexist themes, they provided roles for women that were more complex and had more agency than before. And they were also subject to censorship, but some movies, such as Crossfire (1947), snuck hidden meanings under the radar. The book Crossfire was based on was centered around a homophobic murder, but the Hays Code prohibited any mention of homosexuality, so the plot was changed to a racist/antisemitic murder (which also capitalized on the anti-Nazi sentiment of the time) - but with subtext alluding to the original plot. The effect is that the two forms of bigotry are linked together (tagline: “Hate Is Like A Loaded Gun!”), and the director later said that the Code, “had a very good effect because it made us think. If we wanted to get something across that was censorable… we had to do it deviously. We had to be clever. And it usually turned out to be much better than if we had done it straight.”
Film noir’s fans cut across demographics, popular with women and men alike. Back in those days, going to the movie theater was an all-day affair with multiple films shown, and film noir movies generally occupied the role of “B movies” (necessitating their cheap production values), but the point is that they were just targeted towards… moviegoers. And I don’t want to paint it as just, “foreign socialists promoting their agenda through hidden messages” or that sort of thing, it genuinely was a blending of perspectives and cultures that (much as I hate to say it as a certified America hater) really represents America at it’s best, the dream that we ought to aspire to. There really was something magical happening in the cultural dialogue that these movies are the product of.
But of course, we’re not allowed to have nice things. Due to McCarthyism, the alliances and blending of cultures and ideas that had allowed the genre to exist were ripped apart. People were pressured to name names and sell out their colleagues, which spawned distrust and animosity, betrayal and grudges that would disrupt the industry even after the direct threat had passed. And eventually replacing film noir and it’s proletarian focus and cynical view of society, came the spy movies, glorifying government agents infiltrating other countries as part of this global ideological conflict against communism. Propagandizing trash. Dead art taking no risks and presenting nothing to challenge the audience.
Anyway, film noir is cool and fun and artsy and had a progressive (for its time, at least) current insofar as it was allowed to.
Thank you for the information!
Tron. Vector graphics and filters gave a better effect than any of the weak sequels.
Forever underappreciated. They were hiring research professors at universities to do that stuff. It was so cutting edge that it was actually experimental.
And they got disqualified from the Oscars “because they cheated” – the following year there was a brand new nomination category for computer generated effects…
Just like the monkeys in 2001. They were so good, the Oscar jury thought they were animals instead of actors.
Yeah that part made me very sad.
The fifth element.
Gremlins. My brother and I were just discussing this because we heard that the new Gremlins movie will be using analog effects.
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We live in the timeline that all the other timelines use as a ridiculous example.
You’re telling me there’s a dimension for EVERY possibility?
Yup.
So there’s a timeline where Donald Trump becomes president?
Twice!
One of my favorite songs lol. And I wanna be at the rnc by the same gury, Nick lutsgo
That was a beautiful song, but what the fuck is a grimlin?
It’s grEmlin!
I can’t believe no one has said The Thing yet.
The creature effects are so good, it holds up today.
That head that turns into the spider walker, perhaps best special effect ever in my book.
First thing I thought seeing the title. Such an old movie and still is impressive!
You want old movies? How about Royal Wedding (1951). It has a scene where Fred Astaire dances on the walls and ceiling. There’s no cgi or special effects, it was just done with a simple camera trick.
Royal Wedding (1951)
Here’s the scene. When he sets the picture on the desk, they cut to a wide shot before the room starts spinning. Everything he touched had to be “nailed down”, including the cigarette, the hat and coats, the chair and the picture.
Modern movies need more random tap dance breaks.
