Special effects that most impressed you

[Razgovory]

Since we have so many cinema experts here, I thought I would start a discussion on special effects.  This isn't about the best special effects in a film, just the ones that impressed you the most.  I imagine that for a good many of us, these will be from movies a few decades old that we saw as kids.  For instance, for me I was most impressed with the special effects in Jurassic Park (which I saw in a theater).  A second one might be the Skeleton scene from Jason and the Argonauts (which I did not).

[Viking]

The model spaceships from star wars, it still holds up while cgi doesn't.

[celedhring]

The T-1000, certainly. The CGI was used to great effect in the film, too.

[Syt]

Stuff like Sindbad, Clash of the Titans or Jason and the Argonauts on TV really impressed me as a kid, probably more so than anything that came after. Harryhausen FTW.

Theater wise, I think Jurassic Park blew me the most away when it was new. And Independence Day was pretty amazing for its day.

[Admiral Yi]

Another vote for Jurassic Park.  No film has matched it for CGI since.

Honorable mention for The Thing.

[Ideologue]

Well, there's Gravity.  Recent, but there you have it.  It's not magical or mysterious, but it is impressive.

The more respectable answer is The Invisible Man.  I had no idea that kind of work could be done so well not even two and a half decades after the birth of cognizable popular cinema.  It holds up today (with some cock-ups here and there) and it compares very favorably with movies made up until the mid-1990s--which is natural, since it's more or less the same process.

Star Wars couldn't impress me because I wasn't around in '77.  I'm sure it would have at the time.

Carpenter and Cronenberg's movies tend to be pretty shockingly-well put-together in special effects terms, though there's no secret to how you get a guy's head to explode when his face is only visible in the shot for a quarter a second.  I will say that I was kind of stunned and baffled by some of the regeneration sequences in Christine--far moreso than anything in The Thing, which is just makeup/animatronics and not mysterious (that great dog acting doesn't count as a special effect).  A lot of it is pretty prosaic now that I know how it was done (out-of-sight machines pulling the body of the car inward, run backwards) but it's extremely competent and ingenious work.

[mongers]

.....

Honorable mention for The Thing.

Oh. that's a good one.

And I think, as Syt mention, Harryhausen is timeless.

[Savonarola]

At the theater and at the time "Tron," "Jurassic Park" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

"The Invisible Man" as Ide said, is far ahead of its time.  The scenes where Claude Rains changes his shirt in the mirror, for instance, had to be filmed four times (all identically) in order to create the illusion.   From the same era, I think the lab scene in "Bride of Frankenstein" is among the best.

One of my favorites, when finding out how they did it, is in "The Unknown."  Lon Chaney loses his arms in the film; he made his torso appear smaller by simply getting a larger cloak. 

[PRC]

Jurassic Park was good and still holds up.

Star Wars with its model ships, light sabres and blaster fire still holds up to this day. 

That thing in Poltergeist. 

Alien still looks good.  For that matter the recent Prometheus, which had major plot issues, is visually stunning.

I think Avatar looks amazing. 

The Perfect Storm was kind of a goofy movie, but some of the scenes in it were impressive.

[Ideologue]

At the theater and at the time "Tron," "Jurassic Park" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

"The Invisible Man" as Ide said, is far ahead of its time.  The scenes where Claude Rains changes his shirt in the mirror, for instance, had to be filmed four times (all identically) in order to create the illusion.

Yeah, they go through that in one of the special features.  It's insanely complex.

[Iormlund]

B5 effects were generally dreadful, suffering from woefully low budgets. Nevertheless one of the CGI scenes that surprised me the most was when a squadron of Starfuries rotated on their Z axis while tracking a Mimbari fighter squadron, with matching thruster effects and all. I think that was the first time I saw Newtonian physics in action on a sci-fi show.

In a similar vein, I loved Kubrick's Blue Danube scene and 2010's EVA scene (though sound plays a leading role in both, not just visual effects).

[Viking]

B5 effects were generally dreadful, suffering from woefully low budgets. Nevertheless one of the CGI scenes that surprised me the most was when a squadron of Starfuries rotated on their Z axis while tracking a Mimbari fighter squadron, with matching thruster effects and all. I think that was the first time I saw Newtonian physics in action on a sci-fi show.

In a similar vein, I loved Kubrick's Blue Danube scene and 2010's EVA scene (though sound plays a leading role in both, not just visual effects).

The thing about B5 is that they were ossum given the budget they had. Having gone through the complete dvd box-set you see how much cgi rendered footage is re-used. It looks really dated now. The old home made Star Wreck stuff was better cgi. I think the problem with cgi is that it is  improving so quickly that you can see how much better the newest cgi is.

[jimmy olsen]

Jurassic Park blew me away when I was 11 and it still holds up.

The T-1000 for it's time was incredible.

I really loved Peter Jackson's Kong, thought he looked really alive.

[celedhring]

The thing about CGI too, is that the "wow" factor is sorta lost. You know they can do everything they imagine with it, so it doesn't surprise you anymore. This is sort of a good thing, since when special effects still manage to wow you it's because of a director putting them to good use (like Gravity), instead of filling the screen with stuff just because they can.

Another effect that impressed me as a kid (I loved the movie to pieces, too) was the glass soldier in Young Sherlock Holmes. If I'm not mistaken that's the first instance of a full-CGI creature in a feature film.

[CountDeMoney]

Another vote for Jurassic Park.  No film has matched it for CGI since.

This.  Nothing has beaten the T Rex paddock scenes in the rain yet.

Honorable mention for The Thing.

All those doggies.