Speaking of models used for SFX shots in movies, once you know that they only ever blew up on model F/A-18 for Independence Day, you begin to notice that every single F/A-18 in the movie blows up in the exact same way.
Also, the old John Wayne naval war movie (you don’t see a lot of those) has a shot near the end where a cruiser explodes in a fashion that makes it horribly evident that it was a model, in that the entire front portion of the deck separates intact, gun turrets and all, from the rest of the ship. I just don’t think it would ever happen that way.
But yeah, sometimes too it gets weird when you switch from predominantly one style of SFX (say, stop-action animation ala the old Star Wars trilogy) to another (say, the straight-up CGI like in the new prequel movies). For one thing, many of the ships just seemed less detailed once they were no longer built from cobbled together bits and pieces from model battleship kits.
Yeah, Rorshach leaping about on fire escapes was exceptionally well-done: it probably was wire work, but it wasn’t “hero leaps 20 feet with a blanked out harness” wire-fu: it looked like something a fast, agile well-trained guy could actually do. Ditto for the fight scenes, which didn’t have the egregious “punched guy sails 30 feet across room on invisible strings and goes through a wall”.
Heck, the Veidt/Comedian fight which opened the movie, apart from going down pretty much as I pictured it from the comic, even managed to delineate the characterisation: the Comedian was a tough, street-smart dirty brawler who might have been a meat-and-potatoes kicker and puncher but was great at improvising; he’d have creamed a normal opponent, but he was totally outclassed by Veidt’s clinically ruthless speed and perfection.
I just saw a preview/making of the Mutant Chronicles, and they went into a little minor detail about how CGI would be wrong for the overall steampunk mood and style, so they did everything in glass mattes and miniatures.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that many of those huge special effects CGI extravaganzas are also huge miniatures movies.
We watched the first two Terminator movies last night for the first time in more than a decade, and it was fascinating what holds up and what doesn’t. The effects in the first one have aged remarkably well, except for some very dodgy stop motion when the exoskeleton starts walking. The stuff that was obviously puppets and such are still extremely convincing. On the other hand, pretty much everything in T2 still looks fantastic, especially when you consider how “early” and extensive the CGI is. (That said, of course a lot of it is just plain physical effects. Including the easiest effect - hiring a twin.)
Huh, I thought that a lot of the CG in T2 was dated already by the time it hit theaters, especially that whole metal-morph that they built the whole movie around.