32 movies that revolutionized VFX
Aug. 19, 2024These landmark movies took VFX to the bleeding edge
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In its original form, the movies have always been about illusions. Unlike many other art form, movies strive hard to fool the audience into believing what they’re seeing, and nothing has exemplified that mission more than the ongoing evolution of visual effects. Throughout movie history, some movies have pushed the envelope - and some of them deserve singular recognition.
Alfred Clark’s 1895 picture The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots is believed to be the movie that began cinematic visual effects history, with its innovation of… stopping the camera to replace a human actor with a dummy, and then resume filming to create the illusion of Mary’s beheading by an executioner. It’s crude and primitive by modern standards, but hey, that’s how history works. Someone’s gotta be the first.
The subsequent history of movies was marked by amazing leaps in visual effects development, from Georges Méliès to George Lucas. The rise and fall of stop-motion animation, the introduction of rotoscoping, and the big bang that were computers, you can practically trace humankind’s technical sophistication entirely through how popular movies changed thanks to technology.
With visual effects more commonplace in movies than ever, here are 32 movies that revolutionized visual effects, or VFX.
32. Metropolis (1927)
Almost all visual effects-heavy movies owe a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The 1927 silent film sci-fi classic was based on Lang’s sights of New York City skyscrapers, a cutting-edge architectural marvel when Lang visited Manhattan in 1924. An inspired Lang combined the progressive Art Deco movement with the ancient Biblical story of Babel to envision a distant dystopian future plagued by class warfare. The movie fittingly pioneered many techniques picked up from generations of filmmakers after Lang, including miniatures, camera rigs, and the Schüfftan process, an illusionary technique, mirrors make actors appear to occupy miniature spaces. Though Lang’s film predates the existence of computers themselves, Metropolis undoubtedly foresaw the things to come.
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James Cameron is a passionate diver in addition to being a master filmmaker. His admiration for the ocean is felt throughout his movies, like Titanic (1998) and the Avatar series, but his 1989 epic The Abyss broke new ground. While The Abyss has loads of practical effects (like the use of small black beads floating on the surface of a giant pool to control light), it’s still a VFX marvel in how the movie’s artists replicated the feeling and sensation of an unpredictable moving element for one of the movie’s most haunting moments: When aquatic aliens appear before the characters and imitate their likeness. Dennis Muren, with the rest of Industrial Light & Magic, were the artists who made the water look as real as can be in 1989. In a 2007 interview with Animation World Network, Muren recalled working on The Abyss: “Well, is it even possible to do that? That was the big thing I remember. And we ended up doing 13 shots in six months and it was pretty close to on budget. And it was amazing for that time that we could do it for that quality where it had to be perfect.”
2009 was a busy time for visual effects cinema, with James Cameron’s Avatar capping off the year in epic fashion. But the Oscar-nominated sci-fi feature District 9, from Neil Blomkamp, caught many people’s attention, not just because of its independent production nor its reimagining of the alien invasion story as a politically charged parable. Image Engine, a scrappy visual effects studio based in Vancouver, was tasked with bringing the movie’s many aliens to life, a task made extra difficult because of the movie’s documentary feel. (In other words: shaky cameras.) In a 2009 interview with Studio Daily, VFX producer Shawn Walsh commented: “They’re so banal, with a reality TV-era appeal, and you completely forget that there’s an alien staring at you in that shot …District 9was a real surprise to people going into the theater cold, who didn’t know what to expect.”
At the height of the War on Terror, with on-the-ground news footage captured by handheld digital cameras, producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves imagined a colossal Godzilla-like monster seen through that proverbial (and quite literal) lens. The result was Cloverfield, a 2008 monster flick with a unique verite style a la The Blair Witch Project a decade earlier. Of course, the two movies had huge differences, namely a giant monster and the destruction of New York City. Even in an era when CG filmmaking was commonplace, Cloverfield was innovative in its artistic blend of incongruous styles and its technical execution that similarly married real-world environments and sets with digital elements, like the severed head of the Statue of Liberty flying through a city block.
Christopher Nolan’s science fiction masterpiece Interstellar is centered around mankind pushing into the great unknown, throwing caution and hope and even sanity through the black holes that scatter outer space. The problem: No one in human history has physically been inside a black hole. (Like, haveyoubeen through a black hole?) Creating and depicting black holes - and sure, the faraway alien planets too - with adherence to scientific accuracy was the daunting job of DNEG, whose work won them the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at the 87th Academy Awards.
Observed VFX producer Peter Franklin in an interview with Art of VFX: “One of the big problems is that a black hole is, well, black! It has no surface features, no highlights, no low lights, just black. But then I read about the accretion discs that often form around black holes – huge whirling discs of gas and dust that are sucked in by the black hole’s immense gravity. As the material gets closer to the hole it heats up with friction, releasing vast amounts of energy and shining brilliantly. We realized that we might be able to use this to define the shape of the sphere of the black hole.”
Is there a CGI character that looks better than Davy Jones? Years after the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest in 2006, Davy Jones still holds his own against so many other VFX creatures, from Gollum to Thanos. On ILM’s website, the studio describes how it achieved the effect of Davy Jones. First, it details Imocap, a “lightweight, low-footprint” system that makes it possible “for actors to perform motion-capture on location.” This surely helped director Gore Verbinski work directly with his actors on the actual sets, rather than working with them separately much later at a mo-cap studio. ILM also describes Davy Jones' octopus beard. The movie’s creature artists, ILM says, “put in wonderful animation controls that allowed animators to move the tentacles in very specific ways.” A custom program was developed “that would drive the individual joins between the segments of the beard with a whole variety of perimeters for high-level control that would dictate emotional changes.”
Farrar’s instincts proved right when he later saw the scene where Optimus Prime looks into Shia LaBeouf’s upstairs bedroom. “[Y]ou get super, super close to the head, and I myself was amazed and thrilled by how good it looked. It looks perfect up close and we were a foot away from this shiny chrome face. I thought, alright, this is very cool.”
Alfonso Cuarón’s heart-pounding thriller Gravity, where Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut free-floating in space who tries to make her way back down to Earth, is distinct for its long continuous shots. The movie’s mesmerizing visual effects were executed by Tim Webber and his team at Framestore, who used CGI to simulate the vastness of space (about 30 million stars are in the movie, according to Framestore’s website), the weightless properties of space, as well as realistic depictions of NASA space stations. This was all in concert with the movie’s cinematography, with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose camera moved in and around Bullock to achieve the illusion that Bullock is floating for real in space.
The visual effects accomplishments in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings are as vast as J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. While the trilogy is a famous example of cinematic forced perspective (to help sell the size differences of Hobbits to humans), it’s also a visual effects marvel, such as with the character Gollum. Weta pushed the technical envelope to transform actor Andy Serkis, undoubtedly the leading motion-capture actor in all of Hollywood, into the tragic creature Gollum. Beyond Gollum, the trilogy’s large-scale battle scenes and numerous impossible creatures all make a case that Lord of the Rings, while a fantasy, is also a marvel of science.
Star Wars and visual effects go hand-in-hand. Industrial Light & Magic, one of the preeminent visual effects houses in the world, came to existence entirely because of Star Wars. While the ‘77 original movie is a pure exhibition of practical effects and rotoscoping magic, it still reflects a forward-thinking vision by George Lucas who so clearly yearned to be on the bleeding edge. (Look no further than in 1997, when Lucas jumped at the chance to tweak the movies using modern technology.) And so it was when Star Wars stood at the dawn of the 21st century with the first of Lucas’ prequel trilogy, beginning with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999. From the movie’s many aliens (including andespeciallyJar Jar Binks, played by Ahmed Best), and alien environments, not to mention a refined vision of lightsabers and a standout “podracing” set piece, The Phantom Menace was like looking into the next decade of movies.
You can’t talk about the visual effects industry without mentioning Ray Harryhausen. Inspired by repeat viewings of the 1933 hit King Kong, Harryhausen grew up to refine the wheel of visual effects starting with the 1953 movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. 10 years later, Harryhausen was in charge of the effects for Don Chaffey’s fantasy epic Jason and the Argonauts, a film widely considered as Harryhausen’s finest work. The movie’s standout set pieces, namely Jason’s battle with sword-wielding skeletons (all animated by Harryhausen) - a startling blend of human actors “interacting” with impossible characters - have been studied and referenced by generations of visual effects artists. Anytime you see a 21st-century superhero stare down an alien, it’s a feat that traces itself back to what Harryhausen pulled off in ‘63.
With The Matrix, the Wachowskis hacked the future of Hollywood with an unmatched vision that mixed the surreality of Japanese anime with Hong Kong action flicks. Thanks to The Matrix’s story all about reality being little more than a pre-programmed simulation, the movie dropkicked unsuspecting moviegoers with mind-melting effects that reboot the laws of physics. Inspired by John Woo’s taste for slow-motion, the Wachowskis - with VFX supervisor John Gaeta - turned up the volume with standout “Bullet Time” sequences, which were accomplished with a refined take on stop motion filmmaking (including literallyhundredsof cameras) with experimental computer work.
It almost doesn’t get any bigger than Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg’s thrilling blockbuster and warning against the hubris of science notably revolutionized computer-generated imagery in Hollywood movies, with Jurassic Park magnificently realizing dinosaurs in a way they’d never been seen before. (Move over, King Kong.) While ILM, who worked on the movie, had already made amazing strides through movies like The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park marked another leap forward; originally, the dinosaurs were going to move via traditional stop-motion animation, but thanks to ILM’s breakthrough CG, the experienced animators applied their craft to CG which helped sell the illusion of the dinosaurs as real, living things. The VFX accomplishments from Jurassic Park could fill an entire college course, so let’s just say: Thanks to Jurassic Park, we’ve never looked at dinosaurs the same way again.
Eric Francisco is a freelance entertainment journalist and graduate of Rutgers University. If a movie or TV show has superheroes, spaceships, kung fu, or John Cena, he’s your guy to make sense of it. A former senior writer at Inverse, his byline has also appeared at Vulture, The Daily Beast, Observer, and The Mary Sue. You can find him screaming at Devils hockey games or dodging enemy fire in Call of Duty: Warzone.
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