10 Worst Movie CGI Of 2021

The most horrible, ridiculous VFX moments of the year.

Space Jam A New Legacy Don Cheadle
Warner Bros.

It's nothing short of incredible what can be achieved in movies these days, especially with the help of visual effects.

Even the most basic, practically-focused film will employ more VFX than you'll probably ever realise, often to do more mundane things like remove wires, extend sets, and so on.

But on the opposite end, there are those movies, typically blockbusters, that wear their splashy CGI on their sleeves, gleefully showing it off to the world and reminding everyone just how damn expensive it was to produce.

But not all movies can be Avatar, and so it's not surprising that even mega-budget movies can suffer from CGI moments that fall totally flat.

Whether due to time or budget constraints or other unspecified issues during post-production, films often end up delivering shockingly sub-par VFX, while the filmmakers hope that audiences will be too wrapped up in the story or spectacle to notice.

But in the case of these 10 films released this past year, audiences certainly did notice, from hilariously bad CGI action to horrible green screen, terrible digital doubles, and everything in-between.

Whether they're generally good movies or not, these moments all left audiences wondering what went wrong...

10. Yelena Gets Yeeted - Black Widow

Space Jam A New Legacy Don Cheadle
Disney

For a $200 million movie that took almost two years to release after shooting wrapped, it's shocking how poor some of the VFX are in Black Widow.

This is especially, predictably true in the film's CGI-heavy finale, particularly in the infamous sequence where Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) uses a weapon to disable villain Dreykov's (Ray Winstone) aircraft.

The entire exchange between Yelena and Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) suffers from mismatched lighting - their faces are much brighter than they should be - and poor CGI smoke, but the real kicker? The explosion that propels Yelena into the air.

The two shots of Yelena flying through the air are impossible to take seriously. It's incredibly obvious from the movement of Yelena's body that she's being pulled on a wire rig - nobody caught in a real life explosion would ever arc through the air with their weight being distributed like that.

Sure, it's a silly action scene in a ridiculous Marvel movie, but our brains can still detect, even unconsciously, when the physical rules of the world don't add up. Simply, this beat looks embarrassingly shoddy for an MCU production.

Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.