I saw Close Encounters on 35mm last year at the Prince Charles, London, and the stuff with the mothership is still spellbinding nearly fifty years later.
Funnily enough the same day we saw The Matrix on 35mm and that held up amazingly well, too, bar the odd shot.
In terms of more recent films, I thought Napoleon and Gladiator 2 mostly used VFX well to recreate old worlds and big battles. There were a couple of janky shots here and there, though.
But in terms of VFX set pieces being impressive, it was probably Valerian from eight years ago. The Big Market and a couple of scenes in the Alpha (should be called Point Central) space station were amazing. But, as is often the case now, other VFX scenes in the film weren’t always as well done.
And as I type this I can think of two sequences in a much more recent film that really impressed me: the crashing into the planetary ring and acid blood in zero gravity scenes in Alien: Romulus.
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