Cinematical

In what surely will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen a big-budget film out of Hollywood lately, digital effects are transforming the way movies are made and giving filmmakers new opportunities to show things on screen they could only dream about a few years ago. Over at the New York Times, they have a pretty good article that explains how digital effects are used by filmmakers to enhance several recent films, including Director Tony Bill's WWI story Flyboys.

Digital effects have been around for quite awhile and really came into the spotlight when a computer generated stained-glass knight dropped from the window of a church and started trying to kill people in Young Sherlock Holmes. This film has the distinction of being one of the first, if not the first, to use CG effects in such a way.

Other films where CG effects were innovated include James Cameron's The Abyss, where a CG water tentacle terrorizes a group of oil drillers trapped deep under the ocean. Also, Alex Proyas' The Crow, where CG effects were used to put a recently deceased Brandon Lee into scenes of the film he was not able to shoot before his death, is another example of this. Plus, let's not forget a little film called The Matrix, where the use of CG effects pushed filmmaking to new levels and created a fantastic world never before seen on film. When Neo dodged those bullets during the spectacular "bullet time" sequences, you believed it. I know I did. And damn it was cool.

In the case of these movies, CG effects were put to good and necessary use. The effects didn't detract from the story, they enhanced it. And particularly in the case of The Crow, enabled the filmmakers to salvage their film and finish it with some semblance of a cohesive narrative. A feat quite remarkable when you look at a film like Brainstorm, which was made before the use of CG effects.

Like The Crow, Brainstorm's filmmakers were confronted with an untimely death during their production as well -- star Natalie Wood. After her death, they had to piece together the film with footage already shot. No adding, cutting and pasting her into scenes she wasn't in or anything like that. They had to work with what they had. Let's just say the results were less than stellar. Could CG have helped Brainstorm? Maybe. We'll never know.

Perhaps I'm just living in the past or maybe I'm too "old school" but I didn't think there was anything wrong with the visual effects in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars (the film that wrote the book on modern effects). Those movies didn't have any computer generated effects in them at all and I still loved them. Also, I might be in the minority here but I felt most of the added CG effects in the re-released versions of the Star Wars trilogy were unnecessary and hurt the films. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. That applies to current filmmakers as well as those going back to "enhance" their previous films. Yes George Lucas, I'm talking to you.

And don't get me started on Jar Jar Binks or the whole "Greedo fires first" crap. That stuff is just wrong. Really, really wrong.

But what about you? What are your favorite special effects in films -- digital or otherwise?