'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'

I know what you're thinking. You read the headline and thought "this is what Vader's kept me waiting six weeks for? His thoughts on Michael Bay's latest Spectacular Spectacular?"

Transformers began as a cheaply produced animated television show in 1984, devised to sell the new range of toys created by Hasbro. The basic premise - a race of robotic beings bring their eons old war to Earth, where they indulge their fetish for imitating human tech (cars, trucks, the odd fighter plane or portable CD player) - is so mind bogglingly moronic that bringing any expectations of sense or drama to a movie adaptation can only lead to disappointment. What was truly depressing about Michael Bay's Transformers (2007) was not what a poor effort the film was, but rather the fact that the movie-going public embraced it as the best that the contemporary Hollywood action film had to offer. Everyone drank the Kool-Aid and made the film a tremendous hit at the box office, as though we'd all made an unspoken pact to forget about films like Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan).

Most film critics, I felt, were too kind to Bay's film. The general feeling seemed to be that decrying the films lack of quality would be a waste of time in the face of a multi-million dollar marketing onslaught and rabid fan expectations. Conversely, reviews of the new sequel - the just released Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - are a bit harsh for what, to my eyes, is essentially a larger helping of the same dish Michael Bay served up in the first film.

Michael Bay is regularly given ridiculous amounts of money to make films with, and yet his films look like the work of a director who desperately needs to go to film school. His grasp of visual grammar is so poor that his action sequences are usually incoherent messes. The first Transformers was actually a better experience on home video - Michael Bay's restless cameras and ADD editing become more comprehensible on a smaller screen.

The new film has all the exact same problems and virtues as the first - an opening action sequence set in Shanghai is spectacularly staged, but had me confused at times as to which of the robotic machines on screen were good guys or bad guys. The only time the poor editors are permitted to linger on a shot for longer than 2 seconds is when the visual effects team have come up with a particularly spectacular shot involving complex particle animation. In fact, visual effects buffs - fans of rotoscoping, rendering, and compositing - will find much to enjoy during the excessive running time.

Elsewhere, it can be said that Shia LeBeouf once again demonstrates how fortunate the franchise is to have such a charismatic and capable actor to hang all the silliness from - as in the previous film, he is always believable, even when given the most ridiculous of scenarios to enact. John Turturro seems more comfortable here than in the first outing, and finds a better screen rapport with LeBeouf. Megan Fox - so fresh in the first film - is starting to resemble a Transformer herself from a misguided devotion to cosmetic work. She enters the film backlit and draped across a motorcycle, as though Bay forgot for a moment he was shooting a film instead of a pin-up calendar. Kevin Dunn and Julie White return as LeBeouf's parents, and again we are given a pair of capable and naturally funny actors wasted in thankless roles - the sequence where White, as Judy Witwicky, gets high on brownies during a visit to her son's college is a prime example of the type of "humour" we can find in a Transformers film. The audience I saw the film with was laughing, which is a little depressing.

The film is top notch technically, but is that really saying much when the budget is in the realm of $200 million? Composer Steve Jablonsky is no hack, but he's provided the film with another identikit, one-size-fits-all score (much as he did for the first film), aided by several credited additional composers, a team of orchestrators, with a prominent "thank you" to Hans Zimmer in the end credits. The film has made something like $200 million in five days, so it's unlikely that Hollywood will learn any lessons or attempt to make any improvements when the franchise makes the inevitable third outing.

No way to kick-start a franchise - 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan'

This one's for Vance...

Popping Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer) into the PS3 the other day was an enjoyable reminder of what a truly terrific film this is. The phenomenon that is Star Trek has an interesting history - the original television series ran for three seasons before being cancelled due to poor ratings, despite a hardcore fanbase. It promptly rose from the dead as a huge hit in syndicated re-runs around the globe, leading to the production of an animated television series (with most of the cast from the live action show returning) which ran for a couple of seasons in the early 70s. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was involved in an attempt to launch a second television series in the late 70s. The project - called Star Trek: Phase II - was abandoned after the huge success of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), with Paramount (the studio who own the property) deciding the time was right for a big screen version.

Many elements that were devised for the television project ended up being adapted for the first feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise). At the time the most expensive motion picture ever produced, the film - which is ponderous, humourless, and dull - became one of the notable box office disasters of its time. Despite the poor reception of the film, Paramount were willing to give the franchise another shot. The makers of The Wrath of Khan were fully aware that they were being given one final spin of the wheel, and were determined to go out with a bang.

The bang was big enough to re-ignite the franchise, which is actually kind of unfortunate: Khan is a great space opera/revenge story, but also a wistful meditation on growing old and facing mortality. Which didn't really leave the story much place to go over further films: the age of the main cast, having already been used for maximum emotional impact, is reduced to increasingly cheap gags in the following sequels.

Khan also boldly left the world of Star Trek in disarray - Kirk (William Shatner) is re-united with an old flame, Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch), as well as meeting for the first time her son by him, David (Merritt Butrick), now a grown man who despises everything Kirk stands for. Not to mention having his closest friend Spock (Leonard Nimoy) sacrificing himself to save the USS Enterprise and her crew.

The following two films (which, with Khan, comprise a loose trilogy) are stuck attempting to create drama whilst restoring the status quo. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984, Leonard Nimoy) takes everything back, with Spock resurrected via plot devices which had been planted in Khan (you know, just in case), Carol Marcus inexplicably vanishing between films, and David killed off by the Klingons - his death would be promptly forgotten until it resurfaces in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, Nicholas Meyer) to motivate Kirk's deeply felt hatred of the Klingons, here manifesting as resistance to the failing Klingon Empire's attempts to make peace with the Federation.

Search for Spock does destroy the starship Enterprise - surely the most fetishised spaceship in all science fiction cinema. The ship is regularly showcased in indulgent effects sequences, the camera lovingly gliding across its lines and curves as it leaves spacedock. Composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner even create passable orchestral renditions of the sound of the ship zooming off at warp speed. The destruction of the ship in Search for Spock promisingly turns her crew into a group of vagabonds cruising the galaxy in a stolen Klingon warship, but again, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, Leonard Nimoy) demonstrates that no-one's playing for keeps.

The final scene of The Voyage Home has the crew (with Kirk demoted from Admiral to Captain, another step towards ensuring the status quo) presented with a brand new, identical Enterprise, this one with the letter A appended to the registration number. Similarly, potential romantic interest Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) - who travels with Kirk and co to the 23rd century from her native 1986 at the end of The Voyage Home - did not appear in any further films. Which is probably a good thing - my recent re-viewing of The Voyage Home revealed her to be a remarkably unhinged character, valuing her captive humpback whales over human relationships, offering Kirk and Spock a ride when all the evidence she's seen of them so far points to them being a pair of possibly dangerous lunatics, and finally abandoning her entire life to travel three centuries into the future at the drop of a hat.

The Voyage Home was the one true box-office smash out of the films featuring the original cast, but it seemed nothing could make Paramount executives forget the amount of money they had lost on the first film, as they kept applying pressure to keep costs on the films down - Khan reuses several visual effects sequences from the first film, and The Voyage Home keeps the Klingon warship cloaked (and hence cheaply invisible) for most of the running time.

The confident teaser poster for The Final Frontier had

people talking. Of course, no-one had yet seen the film.

Or perhaps their tight fist on the budget of the 1989 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was down to a lack of faith in debutante film director William Shatner. The completed film - an unmitigated disaster - is not helped by substandard visual effects work, the result of an unwise decision to look at more cost effective alternatives than Industrial Light & Magic, who had provided visual effects for the previous three films. In terms of narrative, The Final Frontier is the most negligible of the films - the series had jumped through hoops to essentially hit a huge RESET button on the story, and Shatner's film never even vaguely threatens to end in any manner other than the whole crew back together and sailing off in the Enterprise. More than any of the other films, it resembles a poor episode of the original show - it remains the only film which never even has aspirations to do anything grander for the big screen. Which in a strange way is kind of charming: the film may be shite, but it's affectionately made shite. With one blow the franchise had lost all the goodwill generated by The Voyage Home, which remained the only one of the films to appeal to an audience broader than the Star Trek fanbase.

By this time, the franchise had returned more successfully to television in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), which would be followed by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and finally (so far) Enterprise (2001-2005). The cinematic franchise, however, resembled a pull start motor that just wouldn't ignite - Khan was a reboot of sorts, throwing out most new elements that had been introduced in The Motion Picture, and the sixth film, The Undiscovered Country, was devised to give the cast a decent send-off and wash out the after-taste of The Final Frontier.

Khan director Nicholas Meyer returned for this film. Again, the studio applied downward pressure on the budget, forcing set pieces to be scaled back and mandating the use of existing sets from the then in production television shows. The character of Saavik - a Vulcan cadet introduced in Khan and played in that film by Kirstie Alley (Robin Curtis played the role in the following two films when Paramount was unwilling to meet Alley's asking price, and the character was left behind on Vulcan at the beginning of The Voyage Home) - was originally included in the script in an attempt to lure Alley back to the role. Alley was unwilling to return to the role, and the character was re-written as Valeris (Kim Cattrall), which made it pretty obvious that she was a member of a conspiracy to prevent the Federation and the Klingons making peace - anyone who appears on the bridge of the Enterprise and is not part of the main cast ultimately exists to die, or be a bad guy, or both. Had the character been Saavik, her betrayal would have perhaps carried more emotional weight - in any case, Nimoy and Cattrall make the most of the situation. Cattrall - who was a livewire presence in many films in the 80s (many of them silly comedies) before belatedly coming to superstardom as Samantha Jones in Sex and the City - certainly demonstrates a greater commitment to the idea of playing a Vulcan than Kirstie Alley ever did. Where Alley was unwilling to sacrifice glamour and feminine allure, retaining her own Brooke Shields eyebrows and long flowing hair, Cattrall presents with shaved temples, angled Vulcan eyebrows and a dark bob.

Kirstie Alley as Saavik in The Wrath of Khan

- unwilling to lose her glamour to play a Vulcan.

Kim Cattrall as Valeris in The Undiscovered Country

- showing a bit more commitment.

It was safe to break some things for good by this time - Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) is finally given the command of his own starship, an idea which had been considered as early as the third film but abandoned when William Shatner protested, wanting to remain Captain to the entire crew. It was, after all, intended as the final film to feature the original cast, and anyway the drama of the Klingons wanting to become part of the Federation was preempted by The Next Generation, which is set some 70 years after the original show (but had been running for a few years when The Undiscovered Country was released) and has a Klingon officer serving on the Enterprise D. Nevertheless, rather than acknowledging that the crew of the Enterprise might have at some stage retired, lived the rest of their lives, and died, The Undiscovered Country wraps up with them sailing off into the blinding sunlight in the starship, before the signatures of the main cast are animated on screen (signing their own names rather than that of the characters) to the fanfares of Cliff Eidelmen's score. The suggestion seems to be that they sailed straight into myth.

Three years later, The Next Generation also made the transition to the cinema - Star Trek: Generations (1994, David Carson) was the first of four films which went through a familiar cycle of destroying and promptly replacing the Enterprise, making empty promises to develop character relationships, giving the Captain - this time around, Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) - one-film-only special guest love interests, and giving cast members the chance to direct. The films played to an increasingly disinterested public and disappointed fanbase, with only one box office hit - Star Trek: First Contact (1996, Jonathan Frakes), another time travel story directed by a cast member which matches Jean Luc Picard with the appealing Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard, another potentially good addition to the cast who gets left behind at the end of the film). The advertising material kept promising that each film was bigger, better, and more action packed than the previous one, but the truth is Paramount was always a bit timid with the marketing of a new Trek film, at least until the currently screening J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise, simply titled Star Trek (2009).

It is easy to imagine Paramount's marketing department breathing a huge sigh of relief that they are no longer saddled with trying to sell a cast mainly aged in their sixties to the much coveted youth demographic. This time around, those form fitting Starfleet uniforms adorn the hot young bodies of the likes of Chris Pine (Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), and Zoe Saldana (replacing Nichelle Nichols as Uhura). As a reboot, it's a step in a promising direction, although it remains to be seen if the inevitable sequels will attain the sort of storytelling boldness which eluded the previous run of films.

New Blu-rays

JB Hi-Fi (where I usually go shopping for DVDs and BDs) has an ongoing "buy 2 get 1 free" promotion for Blu-ray discs. Which is great if you want to buy The Transporter or Prince Caspian. However, if you're like me and hate the majority of Hollywood films these days, and what really gets you going is the release of 30 year old favourites in High Definition, then you're shit out of luck. That bright yellow sticker signaling a disc is part of the promotion never adorns the likes of The Thing or RoboCop.

And so it goes with my latest Blu-ray purchases, both old favourites that I was delighted to see appear on the format.

The stark one-sheet for Poltergeist.

Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper) was never very well served on DVD, despite being released a couple of times. The first release - which I bought - had a good 16:9 transfer but seemed to have been sourced from inferior elements. It was re-released for its 25th anniversary, with a new transfer but still tellingly lacking any kind of special features which offer any real insight into the notoriously troubled production. The Blu-ray release also lacks any decent special features - the docos on the discs are about real life poltergeist phenomena rather than any behind the scenes looks at the making of the film. The HD transfers, however, are stunning.

The film is a top notch production all-round, never mind the ongoing dispute over who's responsible for directing it: the film clearly bears the strong stamp of co-writer/producer Steven Spielberg, who oversaw post-production (with his regular editor Michael Kahn) without Hooper's involvement. Nevertheless, I feel that Hooper's personality is evident in the film, partly in a couple of the more effective scare moments, but mainly in the heightened hysteria of the performances - Dominique Dunne's screams of 'what's happening? WHAT'S HAPPENING?!?' in the climax could only have been drawn out by the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

The film is a product of the very best Hollywood at the time had to offer. James H. Spencer's production design looks great in High Definition, as does Matthew F. Leonetti's rich anamorphic cinematography. The innovative visual effects by Industrial Light and Magic (under the supervision of Richard Edlund) are still striking today. And then there's the great sound-mix, put together by a talented team which included Alan Howarth, who was just beginning a fruitful collaboration writing scores with John Carpenter. And the sound on the Blu-ray disc makes the most of Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar nominated score. 1982 was a banner year for film scoring, with extraordinary works from James Horner (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian), and John Williams (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the Oscar winner that year), but Goldsmith's Poltergeist was a stand out even in this company. This is a score that can do anything - from evoking everyday suburbia to calling up forces from the other side that are wondrous, mystical, and terrifying by turns. It is strong both in melodic writing and jagged shocking rhythms. A truly wonderful score.

But what really makes Poltergeist endure is the cast. Everyone is great - from Spielbergian moppets Heather O'Rourke and Oliver Robins to Zelda Rubinstein's medium and Beatrice Straight's warm portrayal of the kindly Dr. Lesh. Holding the film together though are the gorgeous Craig T. Nelson and the beautiful JoBeth Williams, both delivering career best performances as Steve Freeling and his wife Diane. They bring credibility to even the most outlandish sequences with their thoroughly believable characterisations, completely selling every single moment. The (to my mind) unfairly maligned Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986, Brian Gibson) retained some of the spirit of this film by bringing back most of the cast and such key behind the scenes players as Richard Edlund (now heading up his own effects firm, Boss Film) and Jerry Goldsmith.

The one-sheet for Escape From New York - iconic.

Escape From New York (1981, John Carpenter) continued Carpenter's run of commercial hits which started with Halloween in 1978 and would screech to a halt in 1982 when he made The Thing, his first film for a major studio. It's a genuine "high concept" thriller - in the future world of 1997, Manhattan Island has been walled off to create the world's largest prison, and when the United States president (Donald Pleasence) is forced to make an emergency exit from Air Force One due to a hijacking and is trapped in New York, the authorities send in notorious vigilante Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, in a role that would define his action film persona) in a desperate rescue attempt.

The film starts off strongly and then kind of runs out of steam once Russell (at his hottest in this film) lands in the streets of Manhattan. Here the main menace is provided by a pack of Mad Max cast-offs, the same kind of crazies in leather with punked up hair that would also appear - with a similar lack of effectiveness - in later Carpenter films such as Ghosts of Mars (2001). However, with a cast including Lee Van Cleef (throwing every bit of Kurt Russell's cynicism right back at him) Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine (at his hammiest), and Adrienne Barbeau (Carpenter's then wife, providing a splash of busty B-movie sleaze) and rounded out by Carpenter regulars like Tom Atkins and Charles Cyphers, it never gets boring.

As usual for an early John Carpenter film, the small budget is belied by the technical ingenuity, with ace production designer Joe Alves creating the dystopian world of 1997 New York in the then fire ravaged streets of St. Louis, aided by the typically bold widescreen camerawork of cinematographer Dean Cundey. The electronic score was the first collaboration between John Carpenter and Alan Howarth - a working relationship which would see a significant increase in the musical and technical sophistication of Carpenter's scores - and the inventive low budget visual effects were created by a team which included future uber-director James Cameron.

The towers of the World Trade Center were indeed still standing in 1997, when the film is set, and one can forgive Carpenter for failing to predict - in 1980 - that New York councils would take an increasingly effective zero tolerance policy towards crime. It's tricky stuff, this future speculation business - there are dozens and dozens of science fiction films which have, over the years, been transformed from amazing visions of the future to catalogues of anachronisms and wrong-headed speculations. Of course, the great films remain great films - 2001 wasn't how Stanley Kubrick saw it, and it's looking pretty likely that 2019 won't be how Ridley Scott saw it, but the issues touched upon in their films - Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Scott's Blade Runner (1982) - remain relevant and potent, no matter how many logos of now extinct businesses are featured. Sadly, that cannot really be said of Escape From New York, but it remains an entertaining and effective action film.

James Mason et al...

The other night I was doing some random internet searching - mainly on "living fossils" such as the Coelacanth - and ended up finding this superb page detailing scores of different designs for Captain Nemo's submarine the Nautilus from Jules Verne's prescient piece of speculative fiction 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Inspired, I dug out my region 1 DVD of the 1954 Walt Disney film, looking forward to revisiting it. Unfortunately, our old DVD player is becoming a little tempermental and refused to load the disc.

In desperation, I put it in the PS3, knowing full well that it is locked to region 4 and wouldn't play the disc, as was indeed the case. What to do? I'd developed a craving for a 1950s adaptation of a Jules Verne novel, preferably starring James Mason.

Fortunately, I have a region 4 disc of Henry Levin's 1959 film Journey to the Center of the Earth, another childhood favourite. While still fun, it's a poor substitute for 20,000 Leagues..., that's for sure. On the plus side, it's colourful, James Mason and Arlene Dahl have a terrific love/hate relationship, much of the effects work was terrific for the time (they sure had some cojones to shoot daytime scenes on a beach and then stick matte paintings on the top to place the location footage inside a gigantic subterranean cavern), and Bernard Herrmann provides a typically wonderful score, all thundering timpani and moody church organs.

It would have taken balls to even attempt

an effects shot like this in 1959.

On the minus side, Henry Levin's direction is static, the film takes a little too long to get going, some of the sets and effects work have not dated well, and James Mason's Oliver Lindenbrook lacks the magnetism and sex appeal of his Captain Nemo. Not to mention the terrible songs shoe-horned in to the film due to the presence of Pat Boone. I might be being a little harsh, but I was really in the mood for James Mason with a beard, Kirk Douglas singing to a friendly seal, Peter Lorre's shiftiness, and a fight with a giant squid. Some iguanas with rubber appendages stuck on to turn them into Dimetrodons just didn't do it for me tonight.

I followed up with another favourite of my youth, Jack Arnold's 1955 giant-spider-run-amok flick Tarantula. This one's full of classic 1950s stiffness, with characters stopping still to deliver exposition to each other, and a bizarre mix of progressive feminism and sexism in the character of of Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (Mara Corday), a clever scientist in her own right who quips "beauty must come before science" as she absents herself from the lab to keep a hair appointment. The giant spider itself is superbly realised for the most part through high speed photography of a real tarantula matted into location photography (often the shadows of the spider were also matted in, providing an extra kiss of realism), and it would be remiss of me not to mentioned an early uncredited role for Clint Eastwood, playing one of the fighter pilots who come in at the end to napalm the beast to oblivion.

Great Matte Paintings #5 - The Thing

Perhaps I should rename this series Albert Whitlock's Greatest Hits. These are shots from John Carpenter's 1982 paranoia classic, The Thing. First, the live action footage of actors against a bluescreen...

The live action footage composited on top of an Albert Whitlock painting of a crashed spacecraft...

A frame from later in the shot, demonstrating the patch of light shifting across the craft and the crater wall, a subtle touch which adds realism to the shot...

And two further shots of a second matte painting from later in the scene, again demonstrating the effect of shifting shadows on the painting...

Great Matte Paintings #4 - Dune

Dune (1984)

Although he supervised all of the matte work for the production, this was the only painting in Dune painted by Albert Whitlock himself. A gorgeous painting, brought to life on film using typically genius Whitlock touches such as live action smoke elements and shifting shadows (there's another great example of this technique in John Carpenter's The Thing), as well as the more self evident model spaceships (a terrific piece of design by Tony Masters) composited into the shot.

Albert Whitlock

Albert Whitlock with his matte painting for Dune (1984).

Great Matte Paintings #3 - The Birds

The Birds (1963)

I could fill dozens of these posts with matte paintings from The Birds. Albert Whitlock's extraordinary work is peppered throughout the film, helping to create the township of Bodega Bay, replacing sunny blue California skies with dark thunderheads and most famously in the stunning closing shot, representing an unprecendented (in 1963) complexity of compositing. The shot here is my favourite, however - a trademark Hitchcock oblique extreme high angle, reducing human civilisation to geometric blocks on the screen and people to mere dots. A piece of live action footage nestles right in the centre of frame - a lick of flame across a carpark. As if that wasn't enough, the shot is soon filled with dozens of swooping gulls, each one painstakingly rotoscoped by hand.

Here's the painting, showing the black area where the live action footage will be inserted.

Great Matte Paintings #2 - Dune

Dune (1984)

This one is a pretty extraordinary piece of work. The painting - by Syd Dutton working under the supervision of legendary matte artist Albert Whitlock - was on two separate pieces of glass (one for the foreground cables) and had spaces left in for exposure of live action footage of extras walking around on wet concrete. Further exposures of live action overlays for bursts of steam and flame...

 

...plus a miniature cable car shot against bluescreen...

 

...plus a motion control camera move tilting up to follow the cable car...

...make for one of the great matte paintings of the 80s.

Great Matte Paintings #1 - The Blob

 

The Blob (1988)

This Chuck Russell directed and Frank Darabont scripted remake of the 50's sci-fi favourite was not a box office success and is now largely forgotten. Which is a shame, as it's a clever and exciting B movie which captured the appeal of the genre in a similar fashion to the more fondly remembered Tremors.

The matte painting here is from the opening of the film.

The painting - by matte artist Robert Scifo - was photographed using split screens, dividing the painting into eleven horizontal strips, each shot with a slightly slower camera move than the strip beneath to impart a sense of three dimensional perspective to the painting. A roll axis was added to the camera as well, making the shot look remarkably like a real helicopter shot. It's an interesting comparison to a similar opening shot from The Witches of Eastwick a year earlier. That one was an actual helicopter shot, but shot with a high tech gimbal so steady that it made the shot look like a matte painting!

Foreground clouds were photographed as a live action element and composited into the shot by Dream Quest Images, who had been doing striking work in the couple of years leading up to The Blob in films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and were not far off winning Oscars for work in films like The Abyss. Throughout the 80s, there were two big effects companies in the Hollywood effects industry - Industrial Light and Magic and Boss Film. Dream Quest was the first new fx kid on the block to really give these two companies serious competition in terms of innovation and quality of work. Of course, seven years later the industry became dominated by digital technology and the number of fx houses producing world class work ballooned. Still, in the age of Digital Domain and fx houses in Europe and Australia becoming well known, Dream Quest held their own, being bought by Disney and producing terrific work for Mission to Mars. And then being unceremoniously shut down by a studio that decided it didn't really need a costly in-house fx facility after all. But I digress... here's a screencap from the tail end of the shot, after the composited clouds have cleared the frame...