Originally I wanted this list to be about computer enabled battles, but I was soon drowning in titles. Computers now play an essential part in every movie which needs huge crowds: it's cheaper to render them than to rent them. Be it Goth warriors battling Romans in Gladiator or Chinese eh... military consultants crossing the Korean border in Taegukgi, computer generated battles are now quite common.
But the biggest added value of the use of computers is the total freedom it allows the director, and especially in the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy this relatively new tool has eagerly been used to show us battles that REALLY couldn't be done otherwise.
So this list will be about Computer Enabled Fantastic Battles. I mean, Stanley Kubrick showed the world what amazing things you could do with 8500 extras in Spartacus, but without computers even he would have had a problem with the smallest of skirmishes in my top seven.
The Star Wars Prequels.
I’ll be the first to admit that there are basically three classic Star Wars films, and episodes 1, 2 and 3 aren’t them. So let’s put that whole discussion aside and focus on the sheer spectacle on display in the prequels.
George Lucas got a new set of toys from his effects company ILM to use for the prequels, and he famously kept fiddling with them until the last minute before release. The results were there: each special effects moneyshot of these new movies was gorgeously composited. You could hang them on a wall, framed, and the battle scenes really showed that.
Robots, clones, tanks, monsters... seeing these scenes in a cinema really paid off.
Starship Troopers.
Whether you liked this very sarcastic look on war propaganda or not, in 1997 you were impressed by the battlescenes in (Sir) Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. You had to be, or you had no business watching a science fiction movie with aliens in it in the first place.
Phil Tippett was allegedly depressed when stop-motion fell out of favor during the making of Jurassic Park, stating the art form was now "extinct", but only a few years later he delivered absolutely masterful work with the animation of the lethal giant bugs in Starship Troopers. So ambitious was the scope of the cgi-effects, that the aspect ratio needed to be changed from 2.35:1 to 1.66:1, so rendering times on the busiest shots could be decreased.
Still, the shot of the shuttle escaping the over-run base took three months to render, because of the thousands of individually animated bugs on display.
Respect! And speaking of bugs…
Antz.
Once upon a time, there was a battle of Dreamworks versus Pixar and everybody won, because we got two good films out of it. Both A Bugs Life and Antz were a joy to behold, and both were --at the time-- at the top of computer animation, although they took vastly different design paths. The Dreamworks team made little use of bitmapping and shadows, causing the always demure Steve Jobs of Pixar (yes, AND Apple) to state in interviews that Antz looked like crap.
Well, Steve might have had the slightly better picture with the vastly larger box office, but Antz didn’t look anything like crap. And it won on crowd scenes. It featured not only a bloody battle between millions of ants versus thousands of monstrous termites, but next to that they also had some fun with the toolset, creating cones of ants, and in one remarkable scene even... a wrecking ball.
The Mummy Returns.
Stephen Sommers could hardly be accused of subtlety when he relaunched Universal's Mummy franchise in 1999. People complained about a distinct lack of scares and a surplus of action. So Stephen listened, and made the sequel a straight action-adventure instead.
Well, straight... The Mummy Returns was daft beyond belief. Giant half-men-half-scorpions, cannibal pygmy mummies... there sure was no shortage of weird creatures, culminating in a huge army of 10-feet-high werewolf zombies.
Nowadays that army looks crude in execution, but when the film was originally released in 2001 this was a jawdropper, probably the most extensive and spectacular use of the technology on view. No matter how fake it looked.
The Matrix Revolutions.
If Antz showed that you could have fun by taking crowds into 3D, the Wachowski brothers took that thought a lot further and created whole 3D battlefields for The Matrix Revolutions.
The attack of 250.000 flying robotic squid is a sight to behold.
Sometimes they travel in schools or clouds, then they form snakes, and in the movie’s biggest “we’re screwed” moment, they form a giant hand. With the defense being just a few hundred frail-looking battle-mechs, this war suddenly looked absolutely awesome, and hopeless.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
If there is one director who meticulously looked into every nook and cranny of “how to use computers to do a fantasy battle” it must be Peter Jackson. Now I’m far from the biggest fan of his Lord of the Rings movies, in fact I find the extras on the extended edition DVDs more interesting and entertaining than the films themselves. But I forgive him a lot just for having allowed me to watch a full-fledged Minas-Tirith battle in the cinema.
The sheer amount of screentime given to crowded battles is amazing, and no expenses were spared. The first movie immediately started with a nice sign of things to come, with the shot of Sauron’s explosion containing more than a 150.000 computer-generated people. The second movie had a few epic battles at the end. But Return of the King just blew everything else out of the water. Minas Tirith, and later the even larger (but far shorter) battle at the gates of Mordor, are to this day unmatched.
Avatar.
So much has been said about the financial success of Avatar, and thereby its role in making 3D-cinema the mainstream thing it is today, that you'd almost forget that the film actually has some merit of its own as well.
For starters James Cameron managed to make 3D-cinema look GOOD for a change, and the times I've seen Avatar in a 3D-IMAX are amongst my favorite screenings I've ever attended.
Sure, it loses a lot when watched on a television (3D or not), and repeat viewings unfortunately highlight the weaker moments. But on that largest of screens, in the sharpest of formats, watching the world of Pandora and the huge air battles was nothing short of magnificent.
Awesome even...