A refreshing departure from big budgets, epic CGI, and superstar actors, fans are naming films that are great because they didn’t have one or more of the typical predictors of success.
Redditor SerDire got the broken ball rolling by asking, “What movie do you think was ultimately made better because of it’s [sic] limitations?”
The Redditor then cited Jurassic Park, which apparently “only had like 6 minutes of CGI dinosaur footage in the whole movie.” According to them, director Steven Spielberg was smart because he “knew what he had and what was still out of reach so showing just enough CGI made the movie all the more better.”
The king of the less-is-more approach, Spielberg actually developed it by accident while making his first hit film, Jaws. Coincidentally, that’s the highest upvoted movie in the Reddit thread.
Because the animatronic shark prop kept malfunctioning, Spielberg showed very little of the creature until the end, which is now such a popular horror strategy that it has a name, “Monster Delay.” Other adopters include Alien, Predator, The Mist, and Cloverfield.
Another Redditor chose the medieval farce flick Monty Python and the Holy Grail, whose budget was too small for horses, so they simulated the sound of horse hooves with colliding coconuts. It ended up fitting “with the group’s absurdist approach to comedy.”
Redditor Tr0nLenon mentioned Ex Machina, which “won best visual effects with a total film budget of only 15 million,” while KegZona shouted out Clerks, which was filmed at the convenience store where director Kevin Smith worked—but they could shoot only at night when the store was closed.
Among the other cited films are Gattaca, The Blair Witch Project, and the original Star Wars trilogy.
If you think of another film that was improved by constraints, we implore you to add it to the thread.