In this month’s main podcast episode, we talked about the tactile fantasy movies of the 1980s. But what happened afterwards? The phase between Jurassic Park and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was probably the peak of a period where the traditional, tactile ways of doing visual effects and the new hotness of CGI overlapped. Then things very much went in the direction of mostly, or even exclusively, CGI – to a large extent at the expense of the tactility of effects work and a certain homogenisation of what visual effects looked like. But does this mean that special effects and visual effects are objectively worse than they were in the 1980s? Can effects still be spectacular and tactile in 2026? Join Alan and Matt as they take two effects-heavy films of the year – Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu – to look at how these use effects, and how, in certain ways, they retain the spirit of late 20^th century special effects work. Where do VFX in the 21^st century fail, and why – and where are they just as magical as what our podcast baristas grew up with? What upcoming effects-driven films are they looking forward to? Join our September espresso for a conversation that goes from the stop-motion magic of Ray Harryhausen via James Cameron’s Avatar franchise to a certain nuclear lizard that likes to plague Tokyo!

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