TWITCH-O-METER: Computer Enabled Fantastic Battles

5: The Star Wars prequel trilogy.

I'll be the first to admit that there are basically three "StarWars" movies, 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 are there: each special effects moneyshot of these new movies is gorgeously composited. You can hang them on a wall, framed, and the battle scenes really show that. Robots, clones, tanks, monsters...seeing this in a cinema really pays off.

4: 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 died during "Jurassic Park", but only a few years later he delivered absolutely masterful work with the animation of the lethal giant bugs in this film. The aspect ratio allegedly 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 overrun base took three months to render because of the thousand individually animated bugs on display. Respect! Speaking of bugs...

3: Antz

It was Dreamworks versus Pixar and everyone won, because we got two good pictures out of it: both "A Bugs Life" and "Antz" are a joy to behold and both were 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.

2: 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 squids 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 a few hundred frail-looking battlemechs this war suddenly looked absolutely awesome, and hopeless.

1: The Lord of the Rings

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 allowing me to watch a full-fledged Minas-Tirith battle in the cinema.The sheer amount of screentime given to crowded battles is amazing, no expenses spared. The first movie immediately starts with a nice sign of things to come, with the shot of Sauron's explosion containing more than a 150.000 people. The second movie had nice 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 unmatched.

This concludes my list, and if you spot any serious oversights please mention them! If it's a film I haven't seen yet I'll be very grateful indeed if you point me toward it.