Favorite practical effects: The war rig vs. the berm
There’s a lot of things I love about this, but one of them is that this movie is OK with fudging stuff to get the desired result. It’s completely obvious in this gif (and now when you go back to watch the movie) that the War Rig lines up with a nice neat line of fine sand to create this practical effect on location. However, the result looks fantastic onscreen so I just don’t care. (I can’t even imagine how lame this would look if they’d tried to do this CGI.)
It’s totally obvious that the rock riders in that scene are going off huge motocross jumps too. But, who cares? It is a ridiculously OTT world, we established that back when… not sure when, but at the very latest when the Doof showed up. And it’s used as backdrop for the actually cool stuff - the characters and their conflict - rather than trying to use the stunts to make the movie cool.
There is something in here about how to do world building and suspension of disbelief, but I can’t quite put it together yet.
Right…I think we will forgive a lot when we’re emotionally engaged–we either won’t notice or we won’t care. That’s the #1 thing. If a movie loses your emotional engagement, the illusion starts falling apart very quickly.
Also, I think MMFR really excels at setting a tone in its opening scenes and just committing to it all the way through. People are doing all kinds of bonkers stunts that you probably wouldn’t survive in real life…but we also see that they can get hurt and killed and captured and vehicles can crash and get destroyed. The movie does a really, really good job of blending a sense of genuine danger into all this kamikrazy action…which helps with the emotional engagement once again, because you are actually afraid for the characters.
BTW, I’m still in awe that the sand was a practical effect. I thought it was digitally enhanced with a particle simulation at least.