Tag: movies

Star Trek is more important than Star Wars, and here’s why.

trevor

The Force Awakens opens in less than a week, and yet I can’t help but be just as excited for the Star Trek: Beyond trailer that’s going to precede it. Part of this is just the kind of nerd I am – I grew up at a particular time in the ‘90s when there was no Star Wars except for the odd broadcast or the Special Editions, but there were two Star Trek series on television and movies in the theatres. Now, there’s tons of quality Star Wars entertainment. Just…

Correction: That Wasn’t Ultron!

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Well, it was, but not the Ultron we’re going to get in Avengers 2. When I posted earlier this week about how slick and not Transformers-y the new Ultron design was, I referenced this image: Well, I had pretty well ignored the fact that right below that picture was this one: My motivated thinking led me to believe that this was a dressed-up image for the big splashy cover, a way to get the Transformers audience on board, instead of being the actual Ultron design. But alas, no luck. A little bit…

Avengers 2’s Ultron is a fresh take on movie ‘bots

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It’s kind of amazing how little we’ve actually seen of Avengers 2, the follow-up to Joss Whedon’s incredibly successful 2012 superhero mashup flick. You’d think that we would have had more leaks on a production that big. Still, it’s worth the wait. The movie’s villain, Ultron, has finally been revealed, and he looks awesome. He is the anti-Transformer; instead of going the route that director Michael Bay and ILM went with their staggeringly complex robots, some of which bled into Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, Ultron is a slick, modern throwback to science fiction serial villains…

The work that goes into making Spider-Man swing is incredible

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Sony Imageworks, the company behind The Amazing Spider-Man’s visual effects, has done a spectacular job of making Andrew Garfield’s digital double a realistic, believable entity — so much so that a lot of the shots I expected to be a combination of live-action shots of a stuntman in a suit and animation are just straight-up digital. What they do more than most VFX houses is that they seem to trust in simulation, whether it’s simulating cloth or even muscles juggling with the force of punches or steps. It adds a realistic dimension to what may…