10 Secrets That Made Recent Movies Awesome
There's a reason that Mutant Mayhem's Turtles have such great chemistry.
2023 has been a great year for movies so far - even with a few notable missteps - and a testament to the ingenuity of talented filmmakers bringing their distinct cinematic visions to the big screen.
And while it's easy to reduce this down to confident directors working with good scripts and committed casts, there's always more to it than that.
In the case of these 10 movies, each had a nifty production secret which played a large role in their overall success, no matter that audiences totally took it for granted.
From the mind-boggling technical execution of a hyper-complex set-piece to smart production design and a fastidious commitment to doing things The Hard Way, these hit movies all did something incredibly unique to achieve their mesmerising end result.
And yet, to look at the film, it's easy to miss what's going on underneath the hood entirely, which is nothing if not a testament to the filmmaking skill on display.
These films may have made it all look easy, but given the sheer amount of time and effort that went into pulling everything off, it was surely anything but...
10. The Nuclear Explosion Was Recreated Practically - Oppenheimer
While Oppenheimer was in production, director Christopher Nolan revealed that the historic Trinity nuclear bomb test had been recreated practically for the film.
This prompted some very funny, hopefully not-remotely-serious speculation that Nolan actually detonated a nuclear weapon for real in the deserts of... somewhere.
Nolan, who favours practical effects over CGI wherever possible, did however execute the jaw-dropping test scene with entirely in-camera effects, employing a combination of miniatures, forced perspective photography, and other secret techniques to pull it off without computer assistance.
It's known that Nolan went to the New Mexico desert to shoot the sequence, and the explosion involved use of gasoline, propane, aluminum powder, and magnesium to generate a sufficiently large and bright reaction on-screen.
The end result is certainly an impressive testament to the tactile quality of practical effects, and hopefully Nolan might be a little more forthcoming about how he and his crew pulled it off once Oppenheimer hits home video.