10 Recent Movies That Grossly Overestimated What Their CGI Could Do
CGI is no substitute for soul.
Love it or hate it, CGI is used in almost every single Hollywood movie nowadays, from cleaning up continuity errors in the smallest indie films to creating entirely digital characters in $200 million tentpoles.
It can be a fantastically inventive tool when used by talented artists for the right reasons, yet as we all know, it's too often employed as a technical crutch and a lazy shortcut, or simply stretched beyond its convincing bounds.
And while this past year has certainly delivered a shedload of great CGI in movies such as Avengers: Endgame, Detective Pikachu, Spider-Man: Far From Home and even not-terribly-good movies like Alita: Battle Angel and Dark Phoenix, there are many more productions which had an inflated idea of the problems CGI tech could solve.
And so, we have these 10 films, most of them CGI-slathered blockbusters which cast aside practical solutions and more modest effects-driven sequences in favour of offputting digital bloat - the cinematic equivalent of over-stuffing yourself with candy floss.
Whether the movie as a whole was good or not, and no matter the passion (or lack thereof) on offer, these films were all incredibly optimistic about what VFX could do for their production, and the results were often mocked by audiences en masse...