Rob Bottin’s work is extraordinary. Everything the man did made you believe that the fantasy figure you were looking at could really exist. Look at the difference between his Robocop and the rebooted version of Robocop. The rebooted version is clearly a guy in a suit. Bottin’s Robocop has enough little details to…

Likewise the impossible mirror shot in Contact:

Dabney Coleman was robbed of the Oscar that year

HOW DO YOU LEAVE OUT LAWNMOWER MAN!?

Also missing: David Fincher’s Panic Room! That film is the epitome of fluid digital effects that you never even notice.

Even more so.

Facepalm - I meant Argonauts

Most people today tend to forget what a revolution Roger was when it came out. I was at WorldCon the year it won the Hugo. As I was walking by the convention center room being used as a theater I saw a friend waiting outside. He said they were about to show _Roger Rabbit_ and he was trying to decide whether to watch…

All Inception did re: contorting cities was one short scene of Paris folding. Doctor Strange goes much further in its first 5 minutes alone, and then keeps going. 

What, no Sack Lunch? Don’t you wanna know how the director got the family into that sack?

The evolution of effects in the 1960s is phenomenal. It’s hard to believe that Ten Commandments and 2001 were made in the same decade.

“Gump portends a future Hollywood where every movie is an effects movie.”

For the record, regarding “The Thing”, you rightfully talk about Rob Bottin’s legendary effects work, but the embedded YouTube clip is of the one creature design NOT made by Bottin. Stan Winston made the dog creature as a favor to Bottin, because Bottin was falling behind on the film’s other creature designs.

Ha, definitely making a statement by not including Avatar. That reeks of “This movie was such shit and it’s such a stain on the art of filmmaking that it’s still the biggest movie of all time that we’ll choose to ignore it, the way audiences have ever since it made its billions and went away.”

Koba is flat-out great in the second one, but I burst into peals of embarrassing laughter when Gary Oldman says “I’m saving the human race” and blows himself up, setting off the wettest fart of a bomb ever that barely knocks out 10 apes (tops) and even gives space for Jason Clarke to neatly roll to the side and escape…

As a huge practical effects buff, I’d say Aliens blows away Alien. The Queen was an amazing large scale animatronic.

Thank fucking god. I’ve been sitting here for five minutes trying to remember the name of that movie that’s like Contact but with a space wizard. Seriously, thanks. That was gonna bug me all day.

People may not like it or even outright hate it, but there’s no way that The Fountain isn’t on this list. The space scenes are some of the best that I’ve ever seen.

The recent Apes trilogy gets monotonically worse with each film. The middle entry had a decent antagonist in Koba (in contrast to the pale & nonsensical imitation of Kurtz in the next film), but the humans are boring and it’s rather dumb how apes who haven’t used human technology before are able to carry out a…

One bit of SFX that stands out to me that isn’t listed here... People will laugh at first but the Brendan Fraser “George of the Jungle”.