Like in the first film, the tornadoes conveniently got bigger and stronger to build to a climax with an F5, all in the space of a few days. Very realistic that was.
Maybe they'll have one at the end that would almost be the equivalent to what an EF6 would be like, if such a thing existed.
I actually wrote on Quora how unrealistic it was that they went through the Fujita scale from 1 to 5 in the first film (when in the book, they only technically had 3 or 4 tornadoes they actually chased). In real life, you never get a sequence like that when chasing. In fact, you're lucky if you can even get to see one tornado every few days during Chase Season, never mind one for each day of a 5-day week like they did in the original film.
shareYeah, I guess if this was going for realism in terms of chasing tornadoes in the space of a few days, it would be a road trip movie.
Also the USA has actually been short on EF5 tornadoes for the past decade. At least I don't believe there have been any recorded EF5s that have killed anyone since 2013. It's the longest that drought has been since records began. Be funny seeing this film again tick off all the various sized destructive tornadoes in a compact degree of time and location.
One thing that's really nice is, the CGI in the original film still holds up, and the size, shapes, and colors of the tornadoes is accurate.
shareThe special effects do hold up quite well I agree. This was at a time when big budget CGI was still quite fresh too so it made a more exciting experience watching these films back then. It's harder now to impress with CGI after all these years of it being used.
shareThere are several reasons why the CGI isn't as impressive these days:
1.) The human eye registers at 25 frames per minute when watching a film. Part of what makes a CGI addition to a film realistic is to run the animation at 25 frames per minute. These days, the studios seem to have forgotten that, and run at a much faster speed, making the CGI parts of the movie look more like a video game than realistic, which breaks the illusion.
2.) In the 90s and early 2000s, special-effects workshops combined practical effects, such as models, mock-ups, and even puppets, with their CGI additions. It worked really well because part of what you saw really was tangible and made from something "real," whereas today; they use nothing but blue/green screens and use no realistic points of reference anymore. Not only does it look fake, but cheap as well.
3.) No thanks to Disney's greedy and demanding model of cranking out MCU and Star Wars films 1-3 times a year instead of every 3 years, things got very difficult for people working on graphics designs for movies because they were being squeezed for time, instead of being allowed to finish and refine their work. They're pretty much experiencing the same behind-closed-doors abuse that cartoon animators have had to deal with for over a century, where an impatient studio that doesn't remember how hard and arduous the process is, pushes to get a product out before it's even ready or polished. Small wonder many graphic artists have quit Disney and Lucasfilm because of this; and as a result, desperate studio heads started grabbing inexperienced students from the local colleges who hadn't even graduated yet.
I don't disagree with any of your points. I do also think it's simply not as impactful as it used to be after years of it being used, superfluously so in many cases. You still get films today where CGI is applied really well and the films are beautiful to look at i.e. Dune, Blade Runner 2049, Avatar, Prometheus etc. but the wow factor has died down and the advancement in CGI special effects has been more minimal as it's gone along. Like we've said, the effects in Twister have aged well and could probably fit in seamlessly with today's CGI. Same with Jurassic Park. I saw Starship Troopers last night, that is another one. I've not noticed much difference between the 2 Avatar films in terms of CGI quality despite the 14 year gap.
It's lost its freshness and the improvement hasn't been as stark in all these years since compared to improvements in special effects over long periods prior to the 21st century, in my opinion.
To be fair, nobody really appreciates it anymore until someone like Disney F's up with it.
Plus, there are ways that CGI is much more subtle, such as backgrounds that look real, versus supernatural/sci-fi creatures. There was a video I watched on the BTS for "The Shape of Water," where a ton of CGI was used to recreate 1960s Boston in the background, or landmarks needed for the story, and without the video showing what the post-production team had done, it's very easy to fool the human eye into thinking that was all real.
One of many things I love about Guillermo del Toro's movies is, he's a stickler for using as little CGI as possible, and putting in as many practical effects as he can get away with until he has no choice but to use CGI, and it works!
Yeah it always works better when they blend CGI with real practical effects. CGI can do the job some of the time but if you overdo it then it can undermine the result you're hoping to achieve and start looking very fake. No matter how hard they try, a completely CGI character is no replacement in authenticity to an actual character.
I can't imagine it's too much fun for the actors either having to interact with green screens and invisible objects. We don't want practical effects to become a dying craft.
With CGI characters (Lucasfilm pioneered this particular filming technique), if the character is close in size to a human, it's easier to have an actual actor (with the proper prosthetics and physical acting abilities) to stand in for their character and provide the voice, and it makes it much easier for the regular actors to make eye contact the right way, as well as physically interact with the character.
I don't believe practical effects will ever truly die out, considering it's not necessary to use CGI for everything. Plus, practical effects are "cheaper" and easier to set up compared to CGI. In fact, some film-makers deliberately dump CGI in favor of more practical stuff because they find total CGI doesn't look right, like what happened when they were making the Dark Crystal tv show. They found the audience had an easier time connecting with the characters when they used actual puppets, rather than completely animating them with CGI (they still used it, but only for brief scenes that would have been impossible to film with a puppet).
It won't be the same movie but I'm sure it'll have similar beats as the original with an EF5 tornado at the end.
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