Visual effects artists can do just about anything these days—from crafting photorealistic humans to inventing alien creatures beyond our wildest imaginations—yet audiences increasingly complain that CGI looks worse than ever. So what’s gone wrong? According to Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski, the issue may lie in filmmakers’ pursuit of video game aesthetics at the expense of cinematic realism.
Gore Verbinski on Why Modern CGI Looks Worse
“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski told But Why Tho? last month. “So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema.“
He continued, “I think that’s why those Kubrick movies still hold up, because they were shooting miniatures and paintings, and now you’ve got this different aesthetic. It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint.“
“I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards,” he explained. “And there’s also something, a mistake I think people make all the time on visual effects. You can make a very real helicopter. But as soon as it flies wrong, your brain knows it’s not real. It has to earn every turn; it has to move right. It’s still animation, sometimes it’s not just the lighting and the photography, sometimes it’s the motion.“
Verbinski’s own filmography backs up his argument. His movies have consistently featured standout visual effects, and the work ILM delivered on Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest nearly twenty years ago still ranks among the most impressive CG creations ever put on screen. That’s not to say great CGI no longer exists—it absolutely does—but its success ultimately comes down to how it’s used, and whether visual effects artists are given the time needed to make it truly convincing.
It’s easy to forgive rough visual effects in lower-budget movies, but when Marvel’s tentpole blockbusters are dropping the ball, you know the problem runs much deeper.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Verbinski is finally returning with his first film in a decade. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die stars Sam Rockwell as “a man who claims to be from the future and takes the patrons of an iconic Los Angeles diner hostage in search of unlikely recruits in a quest to save the world.” The film will hit theaters on February 13.
