10 Most Unnecessary Times Star Wars Used CGI
Why hire a guy who looks EXACTLY like young Mark Hamill, only to paint over his face?
CGI is just another filmmaking tool like any other - in the hands of smart filmmakers who know when to wield it, it can be miraculous, while those who make overzealous use of VFX at every possible opportunity risk ruining everything.
It would be ridiculous to inherently chide the Star Wars franchise for its use of CGI, yet it's also fair to say that the series' obsession with boundary-pushing effects has yielded some mixed results.
Inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the subject, we've dug back through the Star Wars live-action movies and TV shows to uncover those VFX moments which felt the most pointless of all.
To the surprise of nobody, you can expect to see a lot of the prequels on this list, but also plenty of representation for those unsavory changes George Lucas made to the original trilogy on subsequent re-releases.
Again, CGI has brought Star Wars fans many wonderful things over the years, yet the franchise also stands as a cautionary tale of what can happen if creatives don't know when to put the paintbrush down and just stop...
10. Anakin Floats A Pear - Attack Of The Clones
Because devoting so much of Attack of the Clones' screen time to the toe-curlingly corny romance between Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) apparently wasn't bad enough already, George Lucas had to throw overzealous VFX nonsense into the mix, too.
Who among us can forget the infamous scene on Naboo where Anakin and Padme are having dinner, and he uses his Force powers to steal Padme's pear off her plate, slice it up, and then levitate a chunk back to her?
Even ignoring the fact that eating a pear with cutlery is serial killer-tier behaviour, it's painfully obvious that the pear is a digital asset rather than the real deal. If you look closely when Anakin cuts into it with his knife, the physics just don't look quite right.
More to the point, the pear is excessively shiny in the way that the real-life fruit wouldn't be, further underlining its artifice.
While the gag itself is basically pointless, it could've been achieved practically with relative ease on a $115 million production. After all, how much does fishing wire and a couple of pulleys cost?
Yet George Lucas' borderline-fetish for using CGI wherever possible in the prequels led to utterly bizarre moments like this.