
However, there is also a slew of winners that demonstrate the ways visual effects can be used for greater means than just blowing up cities.

Ranking the visual effects in these movies from worst to best, one can see some truly puzzling winners whose VFX already looked outdated when they were first released. In this century, there have been 21 victors in this category. Many of these productions have been recognized in the Best Visual effects category at the Academy Awards throughout the 21st century. But there are plenty of modern motion pictures out there that use visual effects in an effective and more thought-provoking manner. But it's leagues and bounds ahead of just about any other attempts at large-scale special effects from 1920s cinema, and there are sequences in this (particularly the wide shots of the cityscape near the start and the flood sequences near the end) that still look genuinely impressive today.When we think of movies with lots of visual effects, it’s easy and understandable to just think of something like a Transformers movie that douses the screen in CG without much rhyme or reason. It's not hard to notice what's a model or a miniature, and there have been more realistic robots realized in films since its release. Sure, it's easy to see through the cracks with many of the effects. RELATED: The Best Silent Films Worth Watching If You've Never Seen a Silent Film Before It remains relevant almost a century later, as filmmakers in the 2020s still find inspiration from it. It paints a portrait of a futuristic city where oppressed workers rise up against the ruling class and has proved influential - in one way or another - to just about every science-fiction film that's followed it. While they're far from the only movies with great non-CGI special effects, they collectively demonstrate the power older techniques and technologies have to create movie magic that still holds up.įritz Lang's Metropolisis one of the most iconic and beloved silent films of all time, and for good reason.


Certain films are shining examples of CGI-free special effects being executed brilliantly.

This means that if you want to marvel at films that create fantastical words, high-tech futures, or terrifying monsters without the use of computers, you usually have to look to the past. RELATED: 'The Batman' Making-Of Featurette Reveals a Mix of CGI and Practical Effectsīut to get a film that doesn't use any CGI for its special effects is an almost unheard-of affair these days. That's even before considering how many great films made nowadays utilize a mix of CGI and practical effects, as when a film properly uses the best of both worlds, it can provide a visually spectacular experience (something like Mad Max: Fury Road might be the gold standard when it comes to this, capturing many real stunts that were enhanced with CGI or placed into partly computer-generated environments). There are some gorgeous-looking films with outstanding special effects that were pulled off with high-tech computers sights realized that couldn't have been fully captured in decades past. It should be stressed right from the get-go that computer-generated imagery is not an automatically bad thing.
