There’s a strong trend among generations younger than mine (I’m a tail-end Boomer) when it comes to movies.
As a Boomer, the development of sophisticated CGI in filmmaking was an exciting thing for me. So many stories could now be told on the screen that otherwise would have been daunting, if not impossible, until CGI came along.
One obvious example was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It would have been virtually impossible to film that novel with any level of authenticity without CGI. And yet, even in that CGI-infested film, Spielberg still resorted to practical effects when it was feasible, like the giant T-rex model they built and the sickly Triceratops wheezing away on the ground.
Ridley Scott could never have evoked ancient Rome to the sophisticated degree he managed in Gladiator without the judicious use of CGI. Although I could have done without the identical flock of birds flying away in every shot of the Colosseum.
Science fiction’s groundbreaking novel Dune was adapted to the silver screen twice. David Lynch’s version was just…ugh! Although the sandworms and Toto’s music score were excellent. Denis Villeneuve’s later adaptation by comparison was like a Rembrandt compared to a kid’s drawing on the refrigerator. The CGI world building was superlative.
But the king of them all was the most ambitious film project ever produced, so big it took three movies to contain it: the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings to the screen. It was quite literally impossible to bring Middle-earth to life in any convincing way without massive CGI. In fact, they had to write a whole new piece of software they named Massive to pull it off.
Even then, Peter Jackson used practical effects whenever it was practical to do so. Which brings us to the topic of this article. In an entertainment world inundated with CGI, from science fiction to fantasy to the utterly worn out genre of superheroes, even to the point where the term CGI porn was coined, younger generations overloaded with CGI are often more impressed with quality practical effects.
I don’t know how many YouTube reaction videos I’ve witnessed where the young reactors gush over practical effects when watching pre-CGI movies, even to the point of saying they love practical effects. And it’s not hard to understand why.
With CGI, you can do literally anything you can dream up. Meticulous work to be sure, but nothing amazing because all you gotta do is align the pixels in the right way to create the illusion of anything.
But with practical effects, it takes creativity, ingenuity, genius, and construction skills to actually build physical machinations that present the illusion of something existing that does not. It takes great effort to make a practical effect look authentic. There are many examples of times when those efforts didn’t quite succeed. For example, it seems like a real challenge to get fake Arnold heads to look realistic.
Then there are times when the effects dazzle, and those are the times that impress us the most. As a prime example, the movie The Thing is lauded as one of the greatest showcases for practical effects of all.
Another movie that’s become a genuine classic that came from a genuine classic filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The effects were 100% practical, even the psychedelic drawn out light show in the last sequence.
And of course there’s Star Wars, a cornucopia of practical effects. Kind of a transitional step between practical and computer generated, where the computers aided in the precision of the practical effects, but did not actually Computer Generate the Images.
We all love George Lucas for originating Star Wars, but let’s face it, most of us are pissed off he thought he had to throw CGI crap into the special editions. The CGI effects stand out like a sore Wampa arm chopped off by a light saber and sully the charm of the practical effects. Then he went and sold Star Wars to Disney and…well, that’s a gripe for another day.
One iconic type of scene that over the years has represented several types of effects are the various werewolf films. The scene of transforming from human to wolf requires effects of one kind or another. In the first transformation in the first Universal The Wolf Man film in 1941, the effect was pretty basic and quite boring by our standards. We only saw a transition of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s legs through dissolves, quite lame by today’s standards.
Fast forward to the Twilight era, and we see Jacob’s transformation as a purely CGI effect, quick and dramatic for about two seconds, but still ho-hum once the initial jolt is over.
Then there’s An American Werewolf in London, whose transformation scene is considered by many to be the best lycanthropic full-moon change in the history of cinema, all done by practical effects. This one stands out comparable to the effects in The Thing, and is so graphic, you’ll have to go to YouTube itself to see it, because YouTube thinks we’re all babies.
Perhaps the epiphany of practical effects is Mad Max Fury Road, where the effects are based on the practical, but with CGI enhancing the physical stunts. The effects here are so amazing, a lot of people thought the film was mostly CGI (including me, until some obnoxious schmuck on the Internet corrected me).
And of course I can’t end this article without giving a nod to one of the most significant effects series of films, where the use of CGI is strained to its limits in evoking a sense of reality and succeed quite admirably: The Planet of the Apes series.
Starting out as purely practical make-up effects, it transitioned into the most challenging CGI project of hundreds of realistic intelligent apes acting at Hollywood level.
And yet the practical make-up from 1968 still impresses us today.
While CGI is a godsend to the cinematic storytellers of the world. allowing us to tell stories that would be extremely difficult to downright impossible without it, and while excellent CGI can impress us, it’s still the genius behind dazzling practical effects that evokes true admiration in us.
Just ask any young YouTube reactor encountering quality practical effects from the Golden Age of movies.