CGI has revolutionized filmmaking - effects that were previously thought impossible to achieve on-screen can now be realized with a computer. Films such as the 2013 game-changer Gravity wouldn't have been possible without CGI. But sometimes it has its limits. Have you ever watched a film that wasn't a video game adaptation and thought: "Wow, this might as well just be a video game"? Films nowadays seem to get massive budgets for the sake of rendering CGI sets and characters... and part of me wants to plug a controller in and start playing. Here, then, I've rounded up "10 Movies That Were Pretty Much Just Video Games," be it due to the frequent use of CGI, or just thanks to the overall look. Probably best to skip over the article if you haven't seen a film as spoilers lie within (also: I'm only allowing one film per franchise)...
10. The Last Airbender
I've never properly watched the cartoon from which this film was adapted, so I can't really level insults at it based on being disloyal to the source material. However, I will point out the gratuitous amount of CGI on display here, as well as the cash-in 3D which I swear was never utilized once. Everything about this is fake: the water effects are pathetic (from what little I've seen of the TV show the elemental attacks look devastating). Instead, we got M. Night Shyamalan's fetish for slow and melodic pointlessness. The sets were all green-screen and the fact that the actors were poor made it pretty obvious that they were in a studio lot somewhere waiting for the take to end so that they could go and get some pizza from the buffet. The CGI-rendered ships may very well have been the precursor to Assassin's Creed IV because every sequence looked like they used an Xbox 360 to draw them up. To be perfectly honest, this film would have probably been better off as a video game, though both movie-goers and gamers should avoid it.