17 films that changed everything with their special effects
From A Trip To The Moon 's dissolves to Avatar's facial action system, these groundbreaking movies created new experiences for filmmakers and fans
Film Features Willis
Though they may seem a recent phenomenon, special-effects driven movies have been with us since the dawn of cinema. From the moment filmmakers realized that the camera and the editing room offered the potential for manipulation of images, directors have tried to push that manipulation as far as they could. Images once relegated to the imagination have been recreated on the big screen, sometimes with more success than others, but almost always with the goal of creating a more convincing illusion.
Considering what we can accomplish today on our cell phones, it’s hard to imagine there was a time when a simple split screen or a matte painting was considered a gasp-producing effect. Over the decades, filmmakers discovered rudimentary effects like dissolves and wipes before eventually moving on to more modernized visual trickery that involved blue screens and rotoscoping. Indeed, the story of film is the story of innovations, from the magic tricks of Georges Méliès to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So check out our list of 17 movies that changed the special effects game, and remember that in 1923 the parting of the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments—as cheesy as it may seem now—was pretty freakin’ spectacular.
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Where is The Abyss?
In the Ocean?
Gazing back into you. Dunno how you missed it.
Being screamed at, as usual. Probably gets old.
Sky Captain was so much fun.I’d add The Hobbit films. Peter Jackson did those in 3-d, but he also increased the frame rate to 48 per second so people wouldn’t get headaches. Seeing them that way was really breathtaking. I think higher frame rate filming is the future. 24 frames is so 100 years ago.
His use of forced perspective to put the hobbits and other characters in the same rooms was pretty nifty as well. I’m sure it had been done before somewhere but not with that frequency.
Forced perspective has been around since the days of still photos though. Even as incredibly well done as it was in LotR, it really isn’t “new” per se.
Oh for sure – anyone who’s taken a picture with their elbow resting on top of the Washington Monument has done this. But Jackson had to use it every time a hobbit interacted with another race.
No disagreement on it being a feat of technical filmmaking. I’m just pointing out that (for once) AVC did have a bit of a coherent thesis in putting together this list- it’s all about the firsts and/or trend-setters.
No argument there. FWIW, there does seem to be some better content poking its head up on AVC now and then. Unfortunately it’s swamped by the clickbaity stuff.
The one major innovation he used was building sets that could move with the camera. Previous forced perspective shots were usually locked down. So in the scene with Gandalf and Bilbo at Bag End in the beginning of Fellowship, there’s a tracking shot that moves across a table and the forced perspective isn’t broken. He even cheekily has Gandalf take the lid off a teapot which Bilbo fills with water.
YMMV, I suppose. I thought the high frame rate made the hobbit films look like soap opera crap.I think that’s also why it wasn’t included— HFR really hasn’t caught on, so you can’t really say its groundbreaking, since not too many films seem to be going back to it.
I’m beginning to view it like video games ( as it’s all going digital anyway). The higher the frame rate, the better. 48 is good, 60 is better, 120 better still.
You watch your TV shows with motion smoothing on, don’t you.
Why did Melies’ moon look so pissed off?
If someone shot a rocket in your face, wouldn’t you be pissed off?
For that matter, if someone painted your face with plaster then made you sit under hot studio lights, wouldn’t you also be pissed off?
Guess I didn’t realize the moon was such a little candy-ass.
Of course it is. Why do you think showing your ass is called “mooning”?
I figured it came from Ancient Greece. But then, that’s what I think about any and all things involving buttocks.
It really is pretty cheesy.
They make a cream for that!
I haven’t seen King Kong in decades, but did I miss something that the gorilla was trying to sexually assault Fay Wray’s character? I remember him treating her more like a dog would act with his favorite toy… maybe not completely gentle at all times, but something he savors and doesn’t want to lose.
Damn dude, what kind of dog did you have?
I had a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel at one point (RIP, little buddy), and his favorite toy was a stuffed lobster. He would sometimes throw it around a little, but he never ripped it open and always wanted to keep it by him when he rested on his little dog pillow.Unless I’m remembering the original King Kong wrong, that was kind of my impression of how he interacts with the Fay Wray’s character.
I like how that section concludes by describing the Kong who literally exposes Jessica Lange’s tits as “less rapey.”
He peels off some of Fay Wray’s clothing, but it seems less like assault and more like playing with a doll.
He peels off some of Fay Wray’s clothing, but it seems less like assault and more like playing with a doll. Yeah, but there was a scene cut (later restored, not sure when) where, during the New York rampage, Kong is looking for Ann, picks up a different girl, pulls of some of her clothes, realizes it’s not her, and…Drops her in the street.I’m not kidding. This cut scene was restored along with some others that show Kong as a bit more bloodthirsty than we want him to be. He stomps a pedestrian – I think a couple times – squishing him into the sidewalk.
If we’re thinking of the same thing, that scene was in every cut of King Kong that I’ve seen since I was a kid in the 70s. Is this where he drops her into the crowd below and her screams sort of blend in with the noise of the police sirens?Not denying that Kong is essentially a monster, albeit a somewhat sympathetic monster. I’m just questioning the idea that he’s a rapey monster in the original.
If we’re thinking of the same thing, that scene was in every cut of King Kong that I’ve seen since I was a kid in the 70s Yep. But the scenes, as far as I remember, weren’t shown in theaters in 1933. (I wasn’t there, but I remember the “uncut” version being publicized, on tv and revival theaters in the 70s.)I never think of Kong as rapey or even problematical. He’s a monster and a wild animal, mistreated and set loose on the New York theater crowd.
That scene was in the original release- however, for many subsequent rereleases, the Production Code (established in late summer 1934) required cuts to be made.
(I wasn’t there, but I remember the “uncut” version being publicized, on tv and revival theaters in the 70s.)That must’ve been where I saw it. I had a very clear memory of the 1st KK movie and I found it absolutely terrifying. And for years I’ve been wondering how the heck could a small child have seen that movie? (Of course I was also taken to see The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno—Gen X’s parents treated us like how Kong treated Anne.)
You’re misremembering it a bit. While Kong does grab that woman, he doesn’t try to undress her. As soon as he realizes it’s not Ann, he drops her.I don’t recall him stepping on pedestrians in NYC, but he does stomp some Skull Island natives.I wasn’t trying to argue that Kong isn’t violent, just that I think the suggestions of sexual assault are overblown.
Yeah, I probably am misremembering about Kong and the not-Ann woman. The dropping her… that happened, though, and was both scary and (sort of) funny.I was sure he stomped a New Yorker, not a Skull Islander, but I could be wrong. I don’t see neighborhoods.
Youtube has informed me that the not-Ann woman was played by the soon-to-be wife of Gary Cooper. Their marriage apparently lasted until his death.
He stomps a few and even eats a couple of both the Skull Island natives and some New Yorkers, the full account is here: https://listofdeaths.fandom.com/wiki/King_Kong
FWIW, I watched the scene in question again yesterday, and while he does chew on a New Yorker in a relatively graphic fashion (for 1933), he pulls the poor guy out of his mouth and tosses him. Again, I’m just replying to the tediously persistent observation that Kong wanted to rape Ann. That’s not supported by the film itself.
You’re taking this way too literally
Yeah I feel all the Kong movies treat Ann as a pet or toy.
Beautiful list all around. Wonderful to see Sky Captain get even a tip of the hat. Not that they ‘changed things’, but if the list were any longer, I’d easily put Forrest Gump (with a minor in In The Line Of Fire) in there as well. I seem to recall ITLOF getting quite the write-up in the press for the archival footage composite work, or maybe it was a slow news day/week.
I was so excited about Sky Captain. But for all its technical innovation, the film itself sent me to sleep.
Honestly the most impressive work in Forrest Gump, to me, was with Lt. Dan’s legs being digitally removed.
I remember being impressed with the work in the ‘early’ days of cgi, but then I looked into it and only then was I truly ‘jaw-droppingly’ stunned at what the work actually entailed. It’s one thing to say ‘oh, we had him have blue-screen socks and we erased them away’… BUT, what blew me away was that with two specific scenes, they had to CREATE or put back WHAT the legs would have bumped into had they been there(!). In his motel room floor he’s moving around, but if that center table was there it would have been in the way of his leg turning… oh forget it, you just have to go see it, AND the pier that wasn’t there(!):In case the vid cuts off the bottom, just click the title at the top of the vid and go see it.
What did Tron do to the AV Club to be dismissed so easily? It seems crazy to be so unimpressed by a classic and groundbreaking SFX movie.There’s only a parenthetical mention here: “Though other sci-fi movies had utilized CG for visual effects (Tron)…”And when talking about TRON:Legacy as a blockbuster no one remembers a couple weeks ago, there’s the absolute insult: “Legions of fans revered Tron, a wildly ambitious sci-fi epic hampered by dodgy (even for 1982) FX.”
Yeah, “Tron” deserves an entry of its own. Another overlooked gem is “The Last Starfighter,” the first film to use CGI for all of what would have been traditional miniature shots. Granted, the effects don’t hold up 39 years on, but they were dazzling at the time. Harryhausen should get at least a mention for the ways in which he integrated stop motion characters with live action actors. The skeleton fights in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” and “Jason and the Argonauts” are all-time masterpieces of effects work.
I guess the argument could be that Harryhausen greatly refined and improved upon an existing effect. He clearly revolutionized it.
The Last Starfighter is great. I picked it up on Blu-ray a while back and at least for me, the effects still hold up. I was a worried that the higher resolution would reveal the cheesiness of it all but in a way the cleaner image made the wire-frame CGI better. Not more realistic, but personally I will always be able to suspend disbelief for The Last Starfighter.Now all I need is a decent Blu-Ray release of Remo Williams (not holding my breath on that one).
Tron has it’s fans but the films were commercial failures. More of a cult thing so they get overlooked.
The AV Club be like
The Light and Magic documentary on Disney+ is really excellent. It does a great job of showing how much work modelling and composite shots and matte paintings took and how quickly they moved to being a CG company once they realized how much of the effects work in Jurassic Park could be done with computers.
“It would take many more decades before serious A-list directors would embrace the illusion.”Alfred Hitchcock would like to have a word here.https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0046912/
T2 impressed me more than Jurassic. Maybe because it came a year earlier. Sin City was pretty cool too, sort of a live comic book. Maybe has been done before but I have not seen it.
I’ve never been so gobsmacked by a movie’s effects as I was by T2. It felt like a massive leap forward.
I know I’m far from the first to observe that both of those movies have CGI better than most of what we see today, despite the essentially unlimited processing power we have available today.The phone in your pocket is more powerful than the Apollo NASA computers.
I watched T2 recently and while the CG is very impressed what seemed really crazy to me was the Arnold motor bike jumps off the bridge scene wasn’t really and was done with traditional effects.
Just rewatched it not so long ago. The effects work still holds up. Maybe not quite as well as Jurassic Park, but way better than dozens or hundreds of movies that came after (cough, cough, Scorpion King).
The reason both of them work as well as they do is largely because they don’t try to do EVERYTHING all at once. Spielberg and Cameron used them sparingly (there’s only 150 FX shots in T2 and 63 in JP, if you can believe it), and wisely combined them with practical effects whenever possible, which gives them real weight and never lets the audience get used to one look.
I suppose it’s fair enough to leave T2 off the list, but I agree, there is something about the CGI in T2 that is way more impressive than any CGI that came before. It’s something about the way Cameron uses it with consummate taste and restraint. For example, the moment in the hospital where the T1000 walks through the bars and his hand is briefly stuck because the gun is wedged. That is absolute perfection with an effects shot. In many ways it is far more modest than anything in Tron or Jurassic Park, but to this day I think it is one of my all time favorite cinematic moments.
Harryhausen not mentioned once . . .
I’m glad this list went back as far as it did, and there are one or two I hadn’t heard of, so something to explore =) But I will say I’m disappointed Metropolis isn’t mentioned — seems like that is a pretty iconic film due in no small part to its (ground breaking?) effects …
Came here to say the same. Metropolis 100% belongs on the list.
There were also some brilliant and very creepy effects in Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse films but I’m not cinema savvy enough to know if they were progenitors.
Yes!
No Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The movie both Siskel and Ebert opened their review of with “It’ll have you constantly saying ‘How did they do that’”.
No Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That’s certainly an oversight. Although live action/animation movies had obviously been made before, Roger Rabbit was (is) miles beyond any of them. Part of the fun for me was the inclusion of Disney AND Warner Brothers characters, but the interplay between them and the humans was so smooth that it’s actually hard to remember the toons aren’t really there. The real-life movements combined with toon actions (that lady’s dress blowing up when Baby Herman runs between her legs for instance); the shadows, Betty Boop being all sad and black-and-white… and above all Bob Hoskins’ totally committed performance. In every scene between him and a toon, he’s looking at them, and talking to them. Haven’t seen it in a couple years. Time for a rewatch!
Richard Williams was the ideal animator to higher for that film. I have no idea why his animation looks different, but the motion on his characters have a certain distinctive fluidity in their motion that translates very well to inserting them into live action.
I have no idea why his animation looks different Me neither, but holy hell, the animation in Roger Rabbit is perfect. That scene where Dumbo is flapping against the Venetian blinds? The elephant looks more realistic, despite the character being 2D, than in the Disney Dumbo remake. (Which, no, I haven’t seen but I saw a trailer.)
I remember when it originally came out, seeing it at a matinee. Afterward, walking to the car, I really did expect to see Toons in the parking lot. It wasn’t some dizzy, hallucinatory thing, exactly, but more that for the last two hours or so I had seen that world and expected it instinctively until I sort of caught myself and the spell vanished.
SAME! I came out of the screening and after a while I just felt a bit lost, kinda dizzy without being dizzy. I stopped, looked around the street and couldn’t figure out what it was, like as if I couldn’t remember where I left my car keys except I didn’t have any car keys. And then it just came to me, the world just looked… a little bit empty.
They mention it in the slide about the Alice shorts. While Roger Rabbit pushed the idea farther (and probably to its technical conclusion), it really didn’t invent that much, which seems to be the deciding factor here. Same reason Willow got the nod over Terminator 2 in terms of morphing.
I would have included:The Exorcist (1973) because it basically created the template for all possession movies that came after. Any time you see a movie about demonic possession movie you automatically start thinking about The Exorcist.Alien (1979) & The Thing (1982) because like The Exorcist every movie about unfriendly aliens that came after, took their cue from either Alien or The Thing. From the design of the xenomorph to the chest burster scene. All done with practical effects.Friday the 13th (1980) & Dawn of the Dead (1978). Two words: Tom Savini. He took gore to a whole new level.An American Werewolf In London (1981) & The Howling (1981). Before these two films, transformations from man to beast were mostly done with slow dissolves. Rick Baker (American Werewolf) and Bob Bottin (The Howling) did it so you could actually see it happening.
You have some valid points—The Exorcist back in the day had a number of special effects which changed the landscape and had people passing out in the aisles. Alien and The Thing—practical effects are another category (though plenty of FX in each) but I love Ridley making a working ship for space travel look like a working ship, not a sterile series of blinking buttons; he had such style and vision for that film, as did Carpenter for his. The power of a great director. The original Night Of The Living Dead set the tone for what you could do with gore and practical effects if you wanted to really shake up the audience, years before Friday.. or his own sequel Dawn.. everyone else needs to tip their cap to Romero, understanding his vision opened the door. An American Werewolf In London should have been here as a ground breaker. Of course subsequent films like The Howling improve on the tech, but this list is for the original big *WOW*.
The original Night Of The Living Dead set the tone for what you could do with gore and practical effects if you wanted to really shake up the audience, years before Friday.. or his own sequel Dawn..
What’s Friday? The Ice Cube movie didn’t come out in the ’70s.
Seriously? Just trolling? Reference deficit? You do know about:Ellipses (…)But JIC— Friday (Ice Cube) obvs didn’t have the sequel Dawn.. in the title, so clearly referencing horror Friday The 13th mentioned by the other post, though I kinda wish Cube would have written for the horror franchise.
Yeah, AWiL and Howling were the first ones to come to mind when I read the article headline.
I think you also have to include George Pal’s “War of the Worlds” on any such list. It really blew the lid off of visual effects and is still impressive as hell. “Forbidden Planet” also deserves at least a nod.
If there’s a list for great foley work, War of the Worlds should be on that too. The sounds the Martian warships make as the death ray is warming up… can’t unhear it.
I’d put Nosferatu on this list. For 1922 the effects were great… and for now? That movie scares the heck out of me.
Murnau was visionary, heads and shoulders above anyone else in that era. I would argue that Sunrise belongs on this list even more. But yeah, at least one of them.
Thanks for the useless Young Sherlock Holmes trailer, here’s the glass knight scene
I do feel like the trailer conjures up a particular time a place – a guy with kind of a rich tenor voice saying “Stephen Spielberg presents… Young Sherlock Holmes” is like the 80s in a nutshell. “What’s the pitch?” “Sherlock Holmes, only young!”“I’m listening.”
Flight of the Navigator belongs here. Per Wikipedia, “It was the first film to use reflection mapping to create realistic reflections on a simulated chrome surface.” (Not that I know what that means.)
You completely omitted George Pal’s “Destination: Moon,” “Forbidden Planet,” not to mention anything that Ray Harryhausen produced, and as far as modern films go, also omitted Dragonslayer, which used a newly created process to make model work look more realistic by creating a motion blur.Do your research, fer crissakes.
I would have also included Blade Runner. It’s influence on science fiction cannot be understated. I know it’s Douglas Trumbull again, but he once against takes not only special effects to the next level, but introduces cyberpunk to Hollywood and Video Games.I showed this movie to my nieces and their friends a few years back and they said, that CG looks awesome! I said it’s not CG. They couldn’t believe it.
“Stanley Kubrick pioneered front projection with retroflective matting in 2001: A Space Odyssey. For most of the Dawn of Man sequence, the background is a projection on a massive 40 by 110 foot screen, necessitating a custom projector larger than any before to avoid any grain showing.”
Don’t watch this sequence on a a real good 4K TV. You can see the divided stitching and scratches on the project screen and it takes you out of the movie.
Of all the effects in 2001. When the stewardess picks up the pen floating in zero G it looks perfect. Turns out there were no wires or screen cuts. The just taped a pen to a sheet of glass and moved it in front of the camera. Such a simple trick but it just sell the realness of the movie so well.
Did Avatar also develop the first “ruin the majority of a movie with an overly-long trailer showing most of the plot” trend? Good lord it basically showed 3/4 of the movie in less than four minutes.
Oh that’s gone on forever. It’s what works- unless your story is built around shocking twists, it’s better to just let people know what the movie is about.
The trailer for Casablanca shows Rick shooting Major Strasser.
What’s kind of funny is that now when I watch something like Jurassic Park, I’m blown away by the practical effects. There’s something to be said for using a mix of both.
no T2?
I guess it’s hard to fit two films from 1927, but Murnau’s Sunrise belongs on this list.
No 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The special effects in that were absolutely enchanting.
Prediction: The final Avatar film is going to tell you to weep when Spider finally gets an avatar.