I’d fix the annoyingly bad special effects in some movies. The Hunt for Red October was a nicely-made thriller, but the early CGI looks incredibly bad. That’s not ,me speaking from the point of view of someone who has seen CGI become better through the years – the CGI looked pretty awful even at the time, judged by then-contemporary standards. The Mad magazine satire pointed this out, showing Tom and Jerry riding a torpedo at one point.
So fix up the damned depth charges that look like cartoons, and other effects. And, while you’re at it, stop the silhouettes of Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin from bleeding through when the sub is surface cruising up the river in Maine at the end.
I love Forbidden Planet, and wouldn’t touch most of the effects, which pretty much hold up, eve n after all these years. But the shots of the Krel underground machine (not the air shafts – those still look great) stioll look too damned cartoony. Fix it, and the film will be the better for it.
We have at least one still from it, and I don’t know if we have more, but if you could use that to restore the POV shot of King Kong’s body falling from the Empire State Building in the 1933 original, it’d be very dramatic. In the original film, the background kept bleeding through, so all they have is the rag doll silhouette shot of his fall. But the 2005 Peter Jackson film, probably as an homage, contained a shot of Kong falling, in slow motion, seen from above. And it works beautifully.
It’s too much to ask, since it’s such a large portion of the film, but the CGI in The Last Starfighter looks too cartoony – ALL of it. I’ve seen individual screen renders, which show what they really intended, and they look almost photorealistic, like modern-day CGI. I think they must have skimped in the interests of saving time an money, but the spaceships all cam out looking awful. I know some people like this, because it makes the scenes look like they’re from a computer game, but that clearly wasn’t intentional. Fix the scenes.
