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Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood-by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic. The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM's style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.

Julie A. Turnock tracks the use and evolution of special effects in 1970s filmmaking, a development as revolutionary to film as the form's transition to sound in the 1920s. Beginning with the classical studio era's early approaches to special effects, she follows the industry's slow build toward the significant advances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which set the stage for the groundbreaking achievements of 1977. Turnock analyzes the far-reaching impact of the convincing, absorbing, and seemingly unlimited fantasy environments of that year's iconic films, dedicating a major section of her book to the unparalleled innovations of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She then traces these films' technological, cultural, and aesthetic influence into the 1980s in the deployment of optical special effects as well as the \"not-too-realistic\" and hyper-realistic techniques of traditional stop motion and Showscan. She concludes with a critique of special effects practices in the 2000s and their implications for the future of filmmaking and the production and experience of other visual media.

Delineating the contours of the ILM aesthetic is important to denaturalizing it so that it does not go by unnoticed. However, one must also recognize the ideological implications of a style of realism in popular cinema that clings so tightly to a 1970s New Hollywood model. What does it mean that for most effects practitioners and filmmakers their unthinking notion of perceptual realism is (a version of) 1970s New Hollywood realism? And how does this connect to the future of ILM in the context of the Disney conglomeration? The ILM house aesthetic was originally conceived as a way to photorealistically

In the 2019 remake of The Lion King, King Mufasa proclaims to his son, Simba: “Everything the light touches is our kingdom.” While this line also appears in the original 1994 version, the words carry new valence in this era of Disney’s photorealistic reboots of its earlier animated features, when the “light” that touches entirely animated landscapes and characters is digitally generated. Because Disney’s market share accounted for nearly 40 percent of the North American box office (as of 2019 before disruptions caused by COVID-19), its decisions—more than any other single studio—control much of the industry as a

Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, by Jan-Christopher Horak, is reviewed.

Due to special/visual effects’ ubiquity in nearly all high-profile filmmaking today, it would be Dlogical to assume that the effects business, under the direct conglomerate control of the studios, is a lucrative and stable one. However, as described in the introduction, this assumption is wrong. As George Lucas and Scott Ross (quoted just above) insist, one thing becomes abundantly clear when studying the recent Hollywood effects business: it is not an efficiently run, profit-making venture. But if the effects business does not make money, how does it stay in business? It primarily sustains itself through an economic logic more in