I would rate it as Civ 2 > Civ 5 > Civ 4 or Civ 5 > Civ 2 > Civ 4 for wonder completion presentation. A big issue is budget - Civ always has tons of wonders, each one unique (little to no shared assets) and that means each one needs to be done well for a small budget. Choosing a presentation style that can acomplish all it's goals within that budget is vital. To quote Roger Ebert on his review of the sci-fi movie Primer shot on just a $7000 budget "The movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look".
Civ 2 movies where fantastic and most of them could be watched over and over again without losing their emotional power. But they where made possible only by the low graphical bar of the time. Even for Civ 3 those postage stamp sized videos wouldn't have cut it, and as soon as you increase the resolution you lose most of the public domain footage and no budget effects that didn't seem out of place when downsampled to first generation Indio encoded AVI files.
Civ 5 recaptures some of the emotional edge of Civ 2 with the emphasis placed on back on powerful music and a good quote doing most of the work. The oil paintings look good (and epic in some cases) yet cost very little to make. One thing that makes me want to put them ahead of Civ 2 (apart from being more technically up to date) is the pacing - they get done what they have to do in a much shorter time so you're more likely to watch them through instead of skipping them.
Civ 4 suffered from a number of things. One was sameness - most of the wonders where the same construction montage every time (in Civ5 compare feeling you get from Porcelain Tower, Brandenburg Gate and Chichen Itza, despite all of them following the music queue+spoken quote+zoom out on oil painting pattern to a T). Another was that budget problem, the number of wonders diluted the budget too much to be aiming for the realistic CGI look. It's not doing the game any favors when prerendered 3D cutscenes seem to use lower budget models and textures then what players have begun to see in rendered in realtime . Finally the music and pacing was flat - you get the feeling the music and the CGI where done seperately and then joined at the end. The fixed 'construction montage' design seems like it limited the director too much as only a few movies manage to combine all their elements into a cohesive and engaging piece.
Civ 2 movies where fantastic and most of them could be watched over and over again without losing their emotional power. But they where made possible only by the low graphical bar of the time. Even for Civ 3 those postage stamp sized videos wouldn't have cut it, and as soon as you increase the resolution you lose most of the public domain footage and no budget effects that didn't seem out of place when downsampled to first generation Indio encoded AVI files.
Civ 5 recaptures some of the emotional edge of Civ 2 with the emphasis placed on back on powerful music and a good quote doing most of the work. The oil paintings look good (and epic in some cases) yet cost very little to make. One thing that makes me want to put them ahead of Civ 2 (apart from being more technically up to date) is the pacing - they get done what they have to do in a much shorter time so you're more likely to watch them through instead of skipping them.
Civ 4 suffered from a number of things. One was sameness - most of the wonders where the same construction montage every time (in Civ5 compare feeling you get from Porcelain Tower, Brandenburg Gate and Chichen Itza, despite all of them following the music queue+spoken quote+zoom out on oil painting pattern to a T). Another was that budget problem, the number of wonders diluted the budget too much to be aiming for the realistic CGI look. It's not doing the game any favors when prerendered 3D cutscenes seem to use lower budget models and textures then what players have begun to see in rendered in realtime . Finally the music and pacing was flat - you get the feeling the music and the CGI where done seperately and then joined at the end. The fixed 'construction montage' design seems like it limited the director too much as only a few movies manage to combine all their elements into a cohesive and engaging piece.
Don't miss old wonders movies at all.
