10 Movie Scenes That Should've Used CGI

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is a brilliantly visceral period thriller that gets so much right, but comes unstuck during the sequence where protagonist Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) sics a black jaguar on his pursuers, which kills one of their number before they stab it to death.

Obviously most of the sequence wasn't shot using a real jaguar, though rather than realise the attack through primarily digital means, it was instead a crude combination of occasional CGI and a goofy-looking animatronic puppet.

In many shots it's hilariously obvious that a stiff, scarcely animate jaguar puppet has been thrown at the actors and is being clumsily manipulated by a stage hand off-screen, when given the chaotic nature of the sequence, an entirely CGI jaguar would've probably passed muster quite easily.

Sequences like this are tough to pull off on tight budgets, and with Apocalypto being made for a fairly svelte $40 million, it evidently didn't quite stretch to a fully digital animal.