10 More Awful Times Movie Actors Were Combined With CGI

5. Uma Thurman - Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

Medusa Percy Jackson Thurman
20th Century Fox

Poor Uma Thurman always gets stuck playing rubbish nature-themed villains, and while her Poison Ivy was really, really bad, at least the character wasn't saddled by some flat-out laughable visual effects augmentations.

The Lightning Thief kick-started the Percy Jackson film series, a Harry Potter wannabe all about Greek mythology, fantasy, magic, and monsters. The film contains appearances from a Minotaur, a three-headed Hydra, and Steve Coogan with a terrible goatee, but the worst offender in the villains department is easily Thurman's Medusa, who might have been fun to watch had her snake-hair not been so incredibly distracting.

Obviously it would've been difficult to create a wig made out of snakes so a CGI assist was needed, but there had to be a better way to execute the character than this. If you stare at the scene long enough, all you start to see is Thurman's face floating in mid-air as your eyes begin to pierce right through the mess of pixels enveloping her head.

But by far the most naff thing about Medusa is the fact that the snakes' shadows are wildly inconsistent. Some of them cast really obvious ones on her face, while others just... don't? It makes Thurman's face weirdly bright, a lot more than it should be. Obviously, the filmmakers wanted the audience to be able to make out their star's face, but eliminating shadows only hampered the blend of CGI and actor that the scene needed to get right.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!