I get the story has problems and the under effective director, etc, but putting that aside, from an FX point of view, is this movie a good time to watch? That is all I am trying to get out of it really. I think I could achieve it on just some good, if not somewhat campy, practical effects.
shareThe effects are actually pretty good, not in a campy way. However, they never really gave us a real good look at the effects itself, most of the creature scenes were either in dark environment, with flashy light or in shaky cam, which pretty much ruined the experience.
shareThe practical effects were crap tbh, one or two scenes looked alrite majority of the time they looked rubbish though. Take the first major effects scene were the guys infected and tentacles come out of his back. Could see it was rubber lol. Maybe a tad bit of cgi just to touch up would have served the movie better. The acting was garbage as well.
sharei kind of have to agree w/ mridsdale. the creature design/fx in THE THING is a trillion times better than it is in HARBINGER. i don't hate this movie, it's just not all that great.
shareYEAH!!! The way the effects are it looks like *beep* CGI, even though its all practical. That's even worse than using CGI.
shareuhh, if you think it looks anything like CGI then you really have no clue on visual effects AT ALL and you really should get some glasses or your eyes lasered..
These FX looked better than any of the CGI effects of the The Thing remake, and it really shows that you can make a movie on a very thight budget, it was actually only a 10th of the budget for the thing remake..
So I honestly think if the movie actually had a real experienced director and a 1 million dollar budget it would have blown The Thing remake right out of the water..
It was made with 100th the budget of the Thing 2011, not one 10th.
shareYou're right, it more like 100th certainly not 10th.. But the 380K was not the complete budget, it was quite a bit more as it got also funding from a production company, but nowhere is actually said what the real budget was (including what they paid themselves)..
shareThe awful camera work, set lighting and editing destroyed the few good FX shots in the movie. There's no ground for comparison with the Carpenter's The Thing in respect to cinematography and editing. It's all trash, to be honest.
shareNo it's not, there are a few GREAT scenes and a couple almost at the very end (beneath the wheelhouse, with the captain). Also great watching Lance Henriksen on screen again. It's actually very close to being a cool movie, imo. Plus, the crab boat - from Discovery's Deadliest Catch... Not a waste of time to see it!! :))
* The very last scene is neat, too!
http://i.media-imdb.com/images/warning_small.png
Posting Quotas Are In Place
Please wait: 00:01
The awful camera work, set lighting and editing destroyed the few good FX shots in the movie. There's no ground for comparison with the Carpenter's The Thing in respect to cinematography and editing. It's all trash, to be honest.
The effects are pretty bad imo. The film is actually a perfect example for all those fools who have been jumping on the CG is crap bandwagon lately.
It shows that practical effects on their own just don't cut it anymore. As I said in my review the creature effects looked like they were straight out of the 80s.
I think the film would of benefitted a lot by using a combination of both practical and CG. On top of that the acting, script, cinematography, lighting etc is all pretty bad too so maybe if all those elements were better the practical effects could of looked more believable.
If you like those 80s monster flicks then you'll proably enjoy it but even as a fan of those movies and practical effects myself it's not a film I'd watch more than once.
It shows that practical effects on their own just don't cut it anymore
And yet, the Thing prequel was vastly better than this steaming pile. This movie is like a case study in people who are blinded by ideology.
shareCG isn't cheaper than practical effects, more often than not they don't spend enough money on the CG or have too short deadlines and so we end up with poor CG.
CG is used because it offers more flexibility than practical effects not because it's easier or cheaper.
The last "The Thing" movie wasn't as bad as everyone makes out, most of the bad reviews were just butt hurt fans who feel like they were mislead. I'm not saying it wouldn't of been good with just practical effects but really the best option is always a mixture of the two. They are both just tools at the end of the day and both have strengths and weaknesses.
For me the original film was'nt great just because of the effects it's everything else too, the soundtrack, characters, acting, script, atmosphere etc the second movie lacked a lot of those things.
I'm a fan of both CG and practical but imo this film just turned out to be a poor example. I still find that strange considering it was Studio ADI who have done some amazing practical effects work in the past. Sometimes sub par effects can be overlooked if the rest of the film is top notch but it wasn't not by a long way.
No, its because its quicker, easier and cheaper. Its been said countless times by film makers.
shareYou have to have a genius, doing teh CGI. Someone who knows how to operate the software doesn't cut it, as shown in countless movies. Just like a good sound engineer... I've met some (a lot) in the past ~20 years and out of the bunch, there were two - a guy (music) and a girl (graphics). Rest, pretty much, just thought they were great. xD
http://i.media-imdb.com/images/warning_small.png
Posting Quotas Are In Place
Please wait: 00:01
funny, considering big movies spend 100mln$+ on the cgi, it cost as much as 2mln$/minute to produce
you would think if its so cheap this wouldnt be the case
there is good cgi and bad cgi, some stuff is cheaper in practical, some in cg, but the main advantage of cg is that it can be done and changed in post after a movie is filmed, with practical you are stuck with what you filmed
Sorry, but in my opinion The Thing prequel sucked. It's cool if you like it, but some of us don't like it for other reasons. Not just because we're 'butthurt fanboys'. The CG was crap...but so was everything else. It had zero suspense, no sense of dread or paranoia, mediocre directing at best, it was a prequel that was pretty much a 'remake' of John Carpenter's film (right down to a big FX scene where two people have flamethrowers, 1 flamethrower unit screws up/doesn't work while the other tries to blast it but gets attacked/hit by The Thing, the other 1 finally burns it and then has to burn the person who was hit...exactly what happened to the Windows character in Carpenter's film, it didn't even work as a prequel (in Carpenter's film the creature is stealthy, while this one is as subtle as a Looney Tunes character), a stupid script (it 'crashed' and yet the creature can start the spaceship up in 10 seconds...usually crashed means Actually Crashed)...in MY Opinion it was a useless flick.
To be honest, I love Practical FX. But I do agree that you also need good characters, or fun lines of dialogue, or atmosphere, or fun sequences of action, or a great soundtrack, and etc.
I wholeheartedly disagree with you saying: "The film is actually a perfect example for all those fools who have been jumping on the CG is crap bandwagon lately. It shows that practical effects on their own just don't cut it anymore."
So One Cheap, Low-Budget film funded by Kickstarter shows that Practical FX are Done and should be buried? By that logic, then can I say that piss poor CGI like the ones in After Earth or some of the shoddy scenes in the new Terminator shows that CGI don't cut it anymore?"
Your answer would be 'No, it doesn't.' The door swings both ways.
My point was that films with a mixture of both CG and practical will always work better, at least for a few more years anyway.
This movie just shows that it doesn't matter what kind of effects process you use if it's done poorly it's going to look bad whether it's CG or practical.
There's so many people that are anti CG these days and seem to think that practical is some kind of holy grail of visual effects. A lot of them just seem to have selective memories or just didn't watch many movies during the 80s and 90s because films were full of bad visual effects back then. Even iconic films like Aliens has some extremely poor effects by todays standards but I can watch that movie over and over.
The same goes for the original Thing movie it's probably one of my favourite films, I've lost count of how many times I've seen it. Although impressive for the time a lot of the effects look dated now but that doesn't matter because the film as a whole makes up for it which is why it still holds up today.
When a film is good people often overlook bad visual effects when it's bad they look for things to blame and CG is currently flavour of the month.
I bet if this film was full of CG people would be raging about how CG ruined it when in actual fact it's just a poor film regardless of the effects used.
I'm sorry...but I don't think Aliens has 'extremely poor FX by today's standards'. They look better than any scene in Jurassic World, or Terminator 5, or the Robocop remake (all 3 rampant with CGI). And that's not just 'nostalgia talking', either. But hey, it's all subjective. In your eyes, it is. To me, it isn't.
And I'm sorry, I don't think any of the FX look 'dated' in the 1982 The Thing. The Thing Prequel had FX which looked dated the day after it came out. Again, just my opinion.
Then you should go back and rewatch those films.
I can name many scenes, take Aliens for example, watch the exterior space scenes of the dropship, watch the scene as the drop ship flys over the complex as it's landing, watch the scene where they are waiting for the dropship to land and it crashes behind them, or the scene where Ripley is shooting up the nest. All of those scenes have obvious models, bad compositing, bad rear projection etc, even the original had a few scenes where you can tell the alien is blatently just a guy in a suit.
As I said the reason those films still hold up today isn't because of the effects it's because everything else was so well done.
Also the films you are comparing are all sequels which rarely live up to their predecessors anyway. I'm sure if they were all originals they would not be getting such harsh reviews.
Anyway my point still is that practical and CG always work better together than on their own, at least for the time being. CG will eventually take over as processing power advances and costs come down. Already it is possible to create CG that most people can't distinguish from real life the problem is currently it costs the earth and takes forever to render/produce.
Aliens was released almost 30 years ago. They did what they could, with the technology available at the time. I thought the only effects I had issues with in Aliens were:
1. The alien warrior costumes were very cheesy.
2. The alien queen miniature when Rip blows up the nest.
3. The giant queen prop in the airlock.
4. The effect of Bishop being ripped in half.
5. The rubbery puppets that grabbed Ferro & Dietrich.
5. The shot of the APC coming to a stop is obviously a miniature.
Most of the other effects seemed great.
Here's an honest opinion from someone who really really WANTED to like the movie:
The practical effects were okay...just okay.
The problem with this isn't that practical effects aren't capable of being awesome, especially coming from ADI, the problem is that ADI clearly didn't put in their best effort...and that's kind of unforgivable.
To a degree, I can understand that they were severely limited on budget, but they're practical effects professionals who have some some REALLY amazing and detailed stuff in the past. This movie was sold on the premise that it was going to be a practical effects showcase - to convince you that practical effects are still very relevant. To that degree, they failed miserably.
There are very few practical effects in the film. The monster is only partially seen a handful of times, and seen "in full" like twice, but even then he's obscured by lighting. I can understand lighting being an effective tool in making practical effects believable but for something essentially trying to homage The Thing, I can point at the dog kennel scene squarely and say they showed the monster pretty damn well and detailed there - so why can't practical effects professionals do the same here?
And there are some pretty ghetto bad practical effects on two occasions: One where it was very apparent that the monster tentacle thing was just a glove covered in some low-quality materials with someone's hand in there puppeteering it, and another scene where you could clearly see LED lights in the tentacles that looked like holiday decorations. And even the "good" effects in the film looked and felt middle-tier at best. They didn't put in a lot of effort into detail versus things shown in the ADI sizzle reels for other film projects (like Fire City, which is low budget but the creatures look outstanding and highly detailed). Even in their Thing 2011 sizzle reel showing off the cast-aside practical effects shots, you could see the amazing detail and quality put into those create effects by ADI.
They reused the rewind-tentacle thing over and over...basically sticking tentacles to something, retracting them, then reversing the film to have a reaching out effect. They did this like 8 times. There was one really well-done kill with the mechanic, and one pretty neat scene with the "umbrella" tentacle thing but that was about it. There really weren't a lot of monster effects in the film.
Budget shouldn't be an excuse at all, because THEY ARE the practical effects shop, not just being contracted on a budget. They should have been willing to take the hit on costs of using their own supplies to make stellar effects. They chose not to. They chose to be cheap and look cheap and get bad actors.
If I'm speaking outside of special effects and plot lacking, the acting was mostly unforgivable because of the poor casting choices. And the main lady was clearly only the main character because she's also a Producer on the film, so she probably bought her role. Lance Henricksen was way out of this film's league and clearly the ONLY person putting in a champion effort to act. When Lance was on screen, he elevated the whole film, but only in short bursts. He was the only thing that felt natural about the film.
It's not a bad film, but for a practical special effects showcase, it fails pretty badly.
That was a great post and you really hit the nail on the head perfectly!
shareWell said. Special effects (FX or CGI) have no bearing a movie's quality and enjoyability, so the filmmaker's obsession with that single component of their movie was probably their downfall. I've seen movies with gorgeous cinematography that sucked. Movies with amazing acting that sucked. Movies with great effects that sucked. You can take any handful of components of a film and still churn out something that's bad overall.
In other words, even if this truly did have the best practical effects ever seen (which it didn't--not even close), that would have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the movie. Sadly, the end result was cheesy, mediocre effects (how they use their puppets is just as important as the creature design itself), paired with horrible acting, directing, cinematography, and just about everything else you can name.
The Visual Effects were top of the line in this movie. The creatures were extremely well done. These people have no idea what they are talking about. It's worth a watch.
share