10 CGI Fails That Totally Ruined Recent Movies
Deepfake Catherine Keener ruined The Adam Project's third act.
CGI is everywhere in movies these days - all but the most low-budget of films will use visual effects for a multitude of reasons, but all in an attempt to elevate the production in one way or another.
Great VFX speak for themselves and can help dazzle the viewer by showing them things that don't or can't exist in real life. But as we all know just too well, bad CGI sticks out like a sore thumb and leaves a movie wide open to crippling ridicule.
While usually a bad CGI scene will get laughed at and the world will eventually move on, sometimes a CGI gaffe can be so egregious and so compromising as to basically derail the entire movie.
These 10 films all suffered from wretched VFX which helped tank the entire production, whether by distracting the viewer from the actual story unfolding, turning a beloved character into a nauseating digital abomination, or simply undermining everything that's actually good about the movie.
If CGI draws attention to itself in a way that isn't awe-inspiring, it can effectively ruin the entire experience, as it did in these 10 recent films...
10. All The Goofy Analyst Effects - The Matrix Resurrections
The Matrix Resurrections is one of the most confounding movies of the last year - an ambitious swing and a miss for writer-director Lana Wachowski, which overreaches with its clumsy meta-commentary while also failing to deliver satisfying action sequences.
There are admittedly several issues which prevent the action from living up to the three previous films: the ugly digital cinematography is a major culprit, and Wachowski's clear disinterest in even trying to match, let alone top, the accomplishments of the original trilogy.
But perhaps the biggest disappointment of Resurrections is that it's utterly lacking in ground-breaking visual effects moments. In an era where spectacle is commonplace, Resurrections' VFX look dead ordinary at best, and in some cases are legitimately unpleasant.
The biggest offender by far is the decision to deploy a visually repulsive effect on the film's villain, the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), during several of his scenes.
For instance, when the Analyst springs a bullet time trap on Neo (Keanu Reeves), the scene was shot with two cameras at the same time, each running at different frame rates - 24fps and 120fps.
These shots were then composited together in post-production to produce the off-kilter image in the final film, which is ultimately more of a stuttery, blurry mess than the compellingly trippy look Wachowski was presumably going for.
Unlike most films on this list, it's less that the fidelity of the VFX were poor throughout than the execution being totally off, ensuring the awe-striking feeling of the first three movies was completely absent.