Oscar Analysis: Best Visual Effects

Posted by Brian C. Gibson (brian@filmschoolrejects.com) on February 27, 2006

       BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• War of The Worlds - Dennis Muren, Pablo Helman, Randal M. Dutra and Daniel Sudick
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe - Dean Wright, Bill Westenhofer, Jim Berney and Scott Farrar
• King Kong - Joe Letteri, Brian Van’t Hul, Christian Rivers and Richard Taylor

This list yields a significant amount of contention between the nominees. I will start off with the fact that the judges are fed a fifteen minute clip of the best visual effects the respective film has to offer. So when analyzing these three films, the real question is:

Which film, if it were only fifteen minutes long, would kick the most ass?

I walked into War of The Worlds thinking to myself that this movie will be just like all the rest. I expected bad clich©s and even worse “visuals” of aliens and their spacecrafts. What I found however, was a visual masterpiece. The spacecrafts not only look believable, but their effects are truly impressive. The man with the hardware and the director of visual effects, Dennis Muren, is a fifteen time nominee and eight time winner in this category. The other men involved in the visual effects of this film have all been nominated in this category at least once. Muren and Spielberg have worked together on winning films such as E.T., Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park. Given Muren’s credentials and proven track record, I assure you that the visual effects in this film deliver the goods. The DVD of War of The Worlds is one of my favorites by far. It is a DVD that you would use to show off your new speakers or television to a jealous neighbor. Sadly, this film does not offer the fifteen minutes of awesome that it would need to prevail in this competition.

Now on to a film with one of the longest titles since LOTR: Insert Title Here. So for all intensive purposes, I will be referring to this film as Narnia throughout this review. Narnia boasts amazing visual scenes encompassing battle sequences, CG animals, and environmental wonders. The men behind the powerful visuals in Narnia have been nominated three other times and won once, all nods coming from Scott Farrar. This film is truly filled with eye candy but look no further than the trailer to find your answer. A movie trailer is supposed to pull the skirt up just enough to draw you in and give you some eye candy, and Narnia has a very short skirt. Most of the gems are already shown in a two and a half minute trailer that barely caught my interest. If Narnia were released in any other year that Peter Jackson was not releasing a movie, its visual effects would probably bring home the hardware.

King Kong delivered visual effects that brought a new dynamic to computer generated models. Jackson was able to create a relationship between his audience and a CG character in Gollum. He took it one step further in doing the same thing, but with the story’s protagonist. The film does not miss a beat from start to finish, flexing visual muscles though impossible sequences involving the eighth wonder of the world. Not since Jurassic Park have I felt that a CG character, or characters for that matter, interacted with their environment or each other so well. Peter Jackson presumably had a difficult task in front of him when deciding how to edit a film like King Kong to 15 minutes of eyeball molestation. By the way, Jackson’s team has won six out of eight of their previous nominations.

WHO SHOULD WIN: King Kong

WHO WILL PROBABLY WIN: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe

Tags: Oscar, Academy Award, Visual Effects, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg

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