Every decade or so there’s a documentary made about special effects in Hollywood and, inevitably, George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic is a centerpiece.
That makes sense. No one can legitimately question the ways that ILM has transformed the movies, and Encore’s “Industrial Light and Magic: Creating the Impossible” (9 p.m. Friday) capably presents the touchstone ILM projects that advanced the art of special effects.
Director Leslie Iwerks walks viewers through the films in which special effects took technological leaps forward, both the hits (“Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park,” “Forrest Gump”) and the misses (“Young Sherlock Holmes”), peppering the one-hour documentary with commentary from effects experts, directors (Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Jon Favreau) and actors (Robin Williams, Samuel L. Jackson).
“The history of all the films we’ve done goes into every movie that we’re doing right now,” explains ILM visual-effects supervisor Scott Farrar on the way advances in special-effects techniques build on one another.
“Creating the Impossible” shows how one effect begat the next, how the water tentacle in “The Abyss” led directly to the liquid-metal Terminator in “T2: Judgment Day.”
Jackson discusses his comfort acting opposite the space where a computer-generated effect will later be added and dismisses actors who complain about that sort of work. He sees effects as a helpful addition to the storyteller’s toolbox.
“The ability to continue to make us believe what we see is the true genius of what these guys do,” he says.
But I do wish this documentary were a little less reverential and a bit more inquisitive.
“Creating the Impossible” feels like it could have been an in-house project that ILM made to pay tribute to itself. Surely there have been more overt conflicts through the years as technology advances.
The film briefly touches on the discomfort some ILM employees felt as effects moved into the digital, computer-generated realm, but it would have been interesting to learn the politics of the decision to scrap stop-motion dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” which had already been tested, for the digital creations audiences saw on-screen.
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