Do You Think CGI Has Regressed In Cinema?

What film has your favorite CGI? Mine is without a doubt 'Independence Day'. The first time I saw it in theaters I was absolutely blown away. I knew after that I wanted to make movies. Every one or two years, I will rewatch it, and the effects still kinda hold up today. The less said about the sequel, the better, but making it without Will Smith was a terrible decision. The first film came out in 1996, but is it better than what we see today? Remember the glory days of the mid 2000s with the 'Transformers' and 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' series? Most superhero films today are blasted by critics for rushed VFX with crazy turnaround times and overworked artists.

'Pirates Of The Caribbean' and 'The Ring' director Gore Verbinski, in an interview with But Why Tho, talked about why he thinks CGI in movies has regressed. And it has to do with Unreal Engine, a program built for video games.

“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape. 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."

"I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards. 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 just don’t think it takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way. So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand."

And then just what’s become acceptable from an executive standpoint, where they think no one will care that the ships in the ocean look like they’re not on the water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat.”

Do you think CGI has regressed in cinema? Comment below with your thoughts.

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Source: But Why Tho?

Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures/Disney/DC