People love to bemoan the over reliance on CGI in today’s movie landscape. And we don’t exactly blame them. Movies like The Hobbit permanently soured our opinions on CGI (at least its overuse), and even “good” movies like those found in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are filled to the brim with, let’s face it, some pretty unconvincing CGI work.
But that’s not to say that the art of the practical effect is dead. If anything, the 2010s proved that the practical effect is still very much alive. It’s just vastly underused! These are the ten best practical effects seen in the last decade.
The Amputation - 127 Hours
Most people went into 127 Hours knowing full well what the story was about and where it was destined to end. And because audiences were expecting lots of blood and gore, director Danny Boyle needed to make the amputation sequence as harrowing and as realistic as possible.
As such, he went down the practical effect path, and the result was one of the most bone-chilling and disturbing sequences of the entire decade. Yes, the music, sound design, and erratic editing certainly helped, but those would all amount to nothing if the effect itself was unconvincing.
The Hallway Fight - Inception
Christopher Nolan loves a good practical effect, and it makes his movies all the more entertaining and convincing. Yes, movies like Inception are bizarro science fiction nonsense, but its practical effects help sell its world and the events that transpire within it.
Perhaps the greatest practical effect in the movie is the rotating hallway. To accomplish the effect, a 100 foot hallway was constructed on eight concentric rings and powered by two enormous motors. It was a ton of work, but the results were simply breathtaking.
The Tesseract - Interstellar
Interstellar is a visually wondrous piece of work, and yes, it relied on its fair share of CGI. Granted, it was convincing CGI, so we’ll give it a pass! But when it came time for the climactic tesseract sequence, Nolan and his team decided that a practical effect was best.
The crew constructed an enormous and elaborate tesseract set, and the sequence where Cooper looks through the bookcase at Murphy was done entirely through practical effects with Matthew McConaughey suspended from the ceiling. And this is why we love Christopher Nolan.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Just… the entirety of Mad Max: Fury Road. Well, most of the movie, anyway. Fury Road was praised upon release for its adherance to old school action and practical effects, and it resulted in six technical Academy Awards (including Best Production Design and Best Film Editing). Yes, some CGI was used to touch up various scenes, but for the most part, what you saw in Fury Road was all real.
This type of movie lives or dies on its special effects, and an over-reliance on CGI would have doomed this movie from the start. Luckily, Miller was smart enough to realize this and gave us one of the greatest action films of recent memory.
Dunkirk
Dunkirk is another brilliant example of a movie utilizing practical effects to its advantage. There is no one sequence to highlight in this movie, as most of the movie itself was shot using practical effects. Real warships and model fighter aircraft provided extensive realism when it came to the props, the mole set required constant rebuilds, and specific aircraft were modeled with second cockpits to allow for in-flight shooting.
Large scale bomber models really crashed into the English Channel, and model ships were sunk in a prop pool at Falls Lake Universal Studios. It’s amazing stuff.
Miniatures - Blade Runner 2049
You may ask yourself how Blade Runner 2049 managed to look so real, despite being so clearly…not real. The answer, as is often the case with the most convincing fictional landscapes, are miniatures. Weta Workshop worked extensively on the miniatures for Blade Runner 2049.
They built the dark and dreary Los Angeles and the massive LAPD headquarters, the Building Trash Mesa, and the massive Wallace Tower. Of course, these miniatures were touched up with CGI, but the work that Weta did is simply indescribable.
The Landscape (& Potatoes) - The Martian
Ridley Scott’s The Martian did not take the easy way out. For one thing, they didn’t resort to CGI to film the Martian landscape. The exterior shots of Mars were actually filmed in a valley called Wadi Rum, which is a barren site located in southern Jordan. FYI, Lawrence of Arabia also made extensive use of this site!
But perhaps most surprising is the fact that the crew didn’t resort to CGI to film the growing potatoes. These potatoes were actually planted at different times in Budapest’s Korda Studios to represent the different stages of growth seen in the movie.
The Revenant
Okay, maybe Leo didn’t actually get mauled by a bear, but that’s about all there was when it came to fakery in this film. Most of the effects work done in The Revenant was practical and entirely on location. It was largely filmed in remote and harsh locations, and this actually led to a lot of crew members quitting in frustration.
Leo has also made his difficulties known, saying that he was actually wading into freezing rivers, laying in real animal carcasses, and eating real raw animal meat. He may not have been mauled by a bear, but he certainly put his body on the line.
The Exo Suits - Edge Of Tomorrow
Edge of Tomorrow is filled with CGI, and while you were viewing the movie, you may have been asking yourself how they managed to make the exosuits look so real and convincing.
Well, it’s because the suits were real! They built and designed by production designer Oliver Scholl and Pierre Bohanna, both of whom based their ideas off real powered exoskeleton initiatives. Over five months, the team hand crafted roughly 70 hard material and 50 soft material suits for the movie.
Bane’s Escape - The Dark Knight Rises
It only seems suitable to end the list off with another Christopher Nolan practical effect! Fans were a little torn on the quality of The Dark Knight Rises, but everyone seemed to agree that the opening plane sequence was top notch filmmaking.
The entire ordeal required real skydivers, a fuselage being flown over Scotland, and real stunt men desperately hanging on to the dangling fuselage. In the end, the effect looked terrific and it gave Bane one of the greatest openings a villain could possibly ask for.
