what are some pre-CGI movies with great special effects?

Cafe Society
41

One thing I’ll vouch for:

There is very good CGI these days. The best CGI looks far better than the worst models any day of the week.

But IMHO, the best models look far better than the best CGI. Stan Winston, Rob Bottin, classic John Dykstra-- they did amazing stuff with nothing more than wires, plastic and blue screen.

That said, I will add that the one downfall to all the pre-CGI movies was the “blue screen effect”: before CGI, models could never be perfectly integrated into real-life scenes.

Even today, that’s why in, say, Return of the Jedi, the final battle sequence in space is still an outstanding showcase of special effects. . . but the Rancor looks like hell. Why? The latter has to be integrated with live action, and it shows (not to mention you’re simulating a living creature-- never easy for stop-motion models or CGI).

Personally, with few exceptions, these rules hold true today:
– CGI can do space effects very well for very cheap (I think the new Battlestar Galactica has excellent space effects, and on TV no less), but models still look better.
– CGI does animal effects MUCH better than it used to, but still not perfect
– CGI doesn’t do people very well at all, unless they move slowly, are seen at night, or employ motion capture
– CGI ruins horror movies. Give me the ol’ time blood and gore spatter.

If I had my druthers, I’d force most of Hollywood to use practical, physical effects BUT integrate them with CGI. This way, you get the best of both worlds: physical objects (with their intuitive feeling of weight and mass, something CGI struggles to capture), but they integrated into the scenery with computer effects (i.e., no more “blue/green screen lines” like in the old days).

42

Aliens was really good except for a couple of things:

The computers looked very horrible… old green and black interfaces that typed out a message one character at a time. In the Special Edition, Burke prints out a picture of Ripley’s daughter and it looks absolutely terrible. It’s so pixellated it looks like she was rendered in Lego.

The big bladed part of the queen’s tail fell off when she fell into the airlock on the Sulaco. As she’s thrashing around you can see her tail has all of a sudden become a blunt object.

Aliens was great because you never really get big glory shots of the creatures, just snippets of them. Combined with the darkness and the atmosphere of the environment it works really well. I was surprised this approach really sucked when they tried it again (with fully CGI aliens) for AVP2.

43

Close Encounters of the Third Kind still looks great

44

I have to disagree. While I like George Pal, even in the day his films didn’t look as good as the competition, and I was pretty disappointed in War of the Worlds the first time I saw it (On the Big Screen, I might add – I saw it in a circa 1960 re-release, before it hit TV). These weren’t Tripods, and they weren’t very convincing as Flying Machines. Pal actually tried to make them sorta-kinda tripods by having electric arcs sending little lightning bolts down to the ground in sets of three – and if you look really close you can sometimes see them. But it ain’t the same. I would’ve liked to have seen Harryhausen do this as a period opiece (as he wanted to – he even produced csome test footage, which is extant, and shows up on YouTube sometimes) The “strobing” effects of stop-motion gives a very convincing “mechanical” effect that would’ve worked well with the Tripods (as it did with the AT-AT “Walkers” in The Empire Strikes Back and the two-legged Walkers in Return of the Jedi).
Pal’s other films just don’t quite seem to do it:

Destination Moon (excellent effort – read Heinlein’s account of making the film – but the stoop-motion is REALLY unconvincing)
Conquest of Space – Looks cartoony

The Time Machine – some good stuff (especially the Machine itself and the Sphinx), but everything just looks too clean.

Seven Faces of Dr. Lao and Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm – Jim Danforth’s stop-motion just isn’t up to Harryhausen’s.

—and the less said about Doc Savage, the better.

45

How about the classic special effect: Cinderella’s dress? :wink:

46

I’m about as big a Star Wars fan as you’ll find but I have to say that, as ground-breaking as the SF was (particularly in the first film), there are some big clunkers that sort of detract from how good the rest are.

In the original, it’s the lightsabers. They were so cool when we were ten and had never seen people dueling with laser swords, that we overlooked the obvious cut-scene on the Falcon when Luke ignites his saber, or the way Ben’s all but disappears when it’s seen end on during his duel with Vader. With all of the stuff that Lucas “corrected” in the re-released versions, I am astounded that he didn’t add better effects to the lightsabers.

In Empire it’s the T.I.E. fighters flying through the asteroid field. You can see a “box” around each one of them where the fighter was superimposed on the asteroid field. Again, you couldn’t clean that up in the re-release? Luke falling through the depths of the Cloud City doesn’t look too good, either.

And then in Jedi, by which time you’d think ILM would be at the height of their skills you have the aforementioned Rancor or, even worse, the backgrounds while Jabba’s sail barge and other vehicles are moving through the Tatooine desert. In the other movies, I was young and excited enough to not even notice the missteps, but the very first time I saw ROTJ (let’s see, I was 15) I thought, “What the hell was that?” It was just sooooo obviously an effect that it actually pulled me out of the movie for a minute. The Rancor didn’t even do that. There’s a little of the same thing during the speeder bike chase, but it’s not quite so glaring.

Yeah, the battle over Death Star II still looks astonishingly good, but other parts of the films haven’t held up so well.

47

Pix?

48

Dee Wallace as the were-pomeranian.

49

Pretty much every movie Terry Gilliam’s made. Although he’s probably used CGI in his more recent films.

50

The Lost World

It’s a silent, but whenever I play it in the store, it rents.

51

Mike Jittlov’s stuff falls in this category. Unfortunately, most of his stuff has, to my knowledge, not been released. You can find one or two of his pieces on YouTube (like the short Wizard of Speed and Time : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiLsbx4D8eI ). Try to see Animato, if you get a chance. It’s his demo reel, andhe really shows off.

He lambasted CGI in his feature-length version of TWoSaT, saying all his work was done here (tapping his head). The feature released as TWoSaT was not the film he’d hoped to make. I heard him describe it in 1982, and it would’ve been a straight adventure flick, not a film about how hard it is to make an animated film. I also saw a lot of his other shorts. great, great stuff.

lissener, have you seen the restored version of the silent The Lost World? It’s definitely worth seeing. Most prints (and DVDs) are only about 70% complete, but the restored version is something like 95% complete, andit makes a huge difference. There’s also a commentary track by the annotator of The Annotated Lost World.

The work in The Lost World is a mixed bag. Some of it is truly awesome, with unbelievably lifelike motions of well-animated figures, with little touches like matted-in flowing water. Some scenes, on the other hand, are worse than the stop-motion I did as a pre-teen. I figure O’Brien used some filler generated by his staff to bring the film up to length.

52

That was the film I thought of when I saw the thread title. The first few scenes with the flying saucer are the weakest, but the rest is very impressive including the Krel underground world and monster sequences.

53

:smack: I have no excuses.

Although! While I’m at it, there is this neat little scene in Escape from New York which also really makes one appreciate the creativity that goes behind a lot of these hand-made special effects. It’s a computer seen from, I believe, the cockpit of an airplane. The computer is showing vector graphics of the city where the plane is about to land. However, such graphics weren’t available at the time, so they had to do it by themselves! Here’s how it was done:

The thing is, it really does look like the real deal and it’s shown for a couple of seconds or so. But it’s there and they did put in the work to make it happen.

54

They did basically the same thing in Megaforce, a profoundly bad movie that’s great for Bad Film Fests.

55

When think of great special effects movies, Q the Winged Serpent doesn’t spring to many people’s minds. It was, however, the first movie to have rotoscoped stop motion animation. Plus boobies.

56

Hey, I liked Doc Savage!
(Though I will admit that, at 8 years old, I was much easier to please.)

57

Yes, that’s the one I have. Awesome.

58

I have an original promotional flyer from that film, the studio gave them out to advertise the film in local theaters.
My grandfather worked the movie theater in Wilcox Pa in the 20s and he gave it to me some years ago. It’s stamped admission $0.15.

59

I’m no expert, but I’d guess that’s worth a LOT of money.