History VisualEffectsOfAwesome / LiveActionFilms

* ''Film/MightyMorphinPowerRangers'': Most of the practical effects hold up well. The CGI...doesn't.

** In ''Film/ForYourEyesOnly'', dry-for-wet effects (special lighting, slow motion, wind and CGI bubbles) were used to simulate underwater close up shots of Creator/RogerMoore and Creator/CaroleBouquet, as Bouquet had a medical condition that meant she could not film underwater scenes. The effect is so convincing that, even today, most viewers would never guess unless they were told that they weren't really underwater.

* It really says something that all the fancy-schmancy CGI effects in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' don't even ''equal'', let alone surpass, the effects from ''Film/SupermanTheMovie'' of 30 years earlier. Perhaps not the literal truth, but the sentiment is sound. The 777 rescue in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' is impressive, though.

** The [[UsefulNotes/ThreeDMovie 3D]] was simply revolutionary. This was the first 3D movie with a truly progressive DepthOfField to fully exploit the effect as opposed to a succession of fairly flat layers with a few gimmicky objects being waved in the audience's face. Easily the biggest leap forward in Visual Effects (and, arguably, film-making in general) since [[Film/ANewHope 1977]], if not [[Film/TheWizardOfOz 1939]].

** There had been lots of [[SerkisFolk motion-capture]] characters in film, but the Na'vi are probably the first ones anyone would want to have sex with.

** If you're still in any doubt, consider that at the time the Earth had not yet been ''photographed'' from anything higher than a low orbit - that is, we had no photos of it that took in the whole Earth in one go. The famous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble Blue Marble]] photo was still four years away when the film was released! Remember that next time you see the shot of the Earth rotating in the window of the space station as it spins to simulate gravity. Similarly, nobody had ever seen Jupiter except as a blurry image through ground-based telescopes. The high-resolution images of the solar system we now have and take for granted simply didn't exist back then.

** Made all the more awesome when you actually sit and consider that computer graphics were not an option when the film was made and everything is hand-drawn. The computer only corrected the lighting of the cartoons so they mixed up well.

* ''Film/JacobsLadder''. None of the visual effects are optical. None. It's entirely "real" and done in-camera.

* The 1937 film ''Sh! The Ocotpus'' is an otherwise quite forgettable OldDarkHouse flick, but it features [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m3Rea0H_p8 a scene]] where the villain transforms to her true face on-camera using makeup and colored filters. It still looks flawless today.

*** And to to add the astonishing MindScrew cherry on top of the sundae, the climax of the film where Cooper finds himself [[spoiler: in the Tesseract where he sees multiple versions of his past unfolding simultaneously]]. Most of his surroundings throughout that part was a ''set'' that they really dangled Matthew McConaughey in.

* The titular robots in ''Film/{{Transformers}}'' (2007) are TechnologyPorn incarnate. The sheer jaw-dropping complexity of the robots and their millions of moving parts makes it hard to believe that a human being actually designed that thing. And then you realize the visual effects designers had to ''invent entirely new technology'' to get it done, a leap that hadn't been made since ''Franchise/JurassicPark''.

** ''Revenge of the Fallen'' is apparently to take this up to eleven. [[CombiningMecha Devastator's]] CG model is apparently so bloody complicated that it '''melted''' an animator's computer.

*** ''Dark of The Moon'' takes it one step further with an all out alien invasion and the appearance of Driller, a machine that is not only bigger than Devastator (in both size and piece count), but the scene in which it destroys a building towards the end took ILM's top performance computers close to an hour to load. (Also, it took up the entire ILM render farm to be finished!)

** ''Film/StarTrekFirstContact'' is considered the best of ''[[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration The Next Generation]]'' films, if only because of the insanity of the Borg battle above Earth near the beginning. The Borg ship alone is about the size of the entire Starfleet armada sent to destroy it. And then there's [[EvilIsSexy Borg Queen]]. Both her entrance-in-two-parts and [[NightmareFuel her death]].

* The 1993 ''Film/AttackOfThe50FootWoman'' remake has the scene of a giant Nancy bathing in a swimming pool, surpisingy seamless for a low-budget TV movie.

* It really says something that all the fancy-schmancy CGI effects in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' don't even ''equal'', let alone surpass, the effects from the 1978 ''Film/{{Superman}}'' of 30 years earlier. Perhaps not the literal truth, but the sentiment is sound. The 777 rescue in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' is impressive, though.

** The [[UsefulNotes/ThreeDMovie 3D]] was simply revolutionary. This was the first 3D movie with a truly progressive depth of field to fully exploit the effect as opposed to a succession of fairly flat layers with a few gimmicky objects being waved in the audience's face. Easily the biggest leap forward in Visual Effects (and, arguably, film-making in general) since [[Film/ANewHope 1977]], if not [[Film/TheWizardOfOz 1939]].

* ''Film/DetectivePikachu'':

* The makeup effects in ''Music/{{Beetlejuice}}''. Especially near the end of the movie.

* The CreepyAwesome [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcp9Ysi75f0 titles]] for ''Film/TheGirlWithTheDragonTattoo''.

* ''Film/DungeonsAndDragonsHonorAmongThieves'' proves that practical fantasy effects are still very much alive and well in TheNewTwenties. While CGI used for things that simply cannot be pulled off physically, a ''vast'' majority of the more fantastical elements shown on-screen are made to be as real as possible. ''All'' of the non-human races (including the [[BirdPeople aarakocra]], [[DraconicHumanoid dragonborn]], [[CatFolk tabaxi]], and of course, the dragons) are pulled off through impressive animatronics, puppetry, and makeup, and even the magic effects are done as practically as possible, making it almost impossible to tell if there were any embellishments in post.

*** Particularly impressive is the scene where Magneto confronts the cops, takes control of their firearms and floats them in midair, aiming at each of them. Also, the various closeup shots of Wolverine's claws emerging, Senator Kelly's NightmareFuel mutation, Mystique's transformations (that got progressively better as the films went on) and so on. Also in the first film is an extreme TalkingToHimself scene where Wolverine fights Mystique (the latter disguised as Wolverine) and one seriously cannot tell which is the real Logan.

* While the latter two ''Franchise/BackToTheFuture'' films aren't as beloved as the original, they do exhibit TalkingToHimself scenes of incredible complexity for their time, such as Michael J. Fox playing most of the members of the [=McFly=] family circa 2015, and the elderly Biff Tannen giving his teenaged self [[TimelineAlteringMacGuffin Gray's Sports Almanac]].

* VisualEffectsOfAwesome/MarvelCinematicUniverse

* Anything that Stan Winston has ever worked on. The dinosaurs in ''Film/JurassicPark1993'', ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'', the Film/{{Alien}}, the Film/{{Predator}}, Film/EdwardScissorhands, Film/IronMan1. The man was a special effects god! Proof, if it's needed, watch ''Film/Terminator3RiseOfTheMachines'', then ''Film/TheTerminator''. The original's effects have held up better. For added awesome, combine Winston with Industrial Light and Magic. The "go-motion" blurred effects aren't particularly good, but that's not Winston's work (the huge Terminator puppet is). But then look at the 2nd one. First the skeletons at the beginning, that is 100% Stan Winston. See the scene where they made an animatronic Arnold? As in a torso of him? You do, but you don't see it. Where he walks down the hallway with a grenade launcher firing tear-gas, it's not Arnold. That's one of Winston's effects. May he rest in peace.

* Anything that Stan Winston has ever worked on. The dinosaurs in ''Film/JurassicPark'', ''Franchise/{{Terminator}}'', the Film/{{Alien}}, the Film/{{Predator}}, Film/EdwardScissorhands, Film/IronMan1. The man was a special effects god! Proof, if it's needed, watch ''Film/Terminator3RiseOfTheMachines'', then ''Film/TheTerminator''. The original's effects have held up better. For added awesome, combine Winston with Industrial Light and Magic. The "go-motion" blurred effects aren't particularly good, but that's not Winston's work (the huge Terminator puppet is). But then look at the 2nd one. First the skeletons at the beginning, that is 100% Stan Winston. See the scene where they made an animatronic Arnold? As in a torso of him? You do, but you don't see it. Where he walks down the hallway with a grenade launcher firing tear-gas, it's not Arnold. That's one of Winston's effects. May he rest in peace.

** [[https://i.imgur.com/3344mJj.jpg The Torterra]] in the 'Casting Detective Pikachu' video has lots of detail such as scales and marks over its body. [[spoiler: Seeing a bunch of them artificially enlarged to the size of islands is like something out of ''Film/JurassicPark''.]]