10 Movies That Ruined Awesome Cinematic Tricks

There is nothing harder to recreate as a digital effect than the human form - our faces and bodies are so subtly complex that it's little surprise even the most talented VFX houses have struggled to produce believably lifelike digital doubles of actual people.

The tech is impressive, no doubt, but the debate over whether or not actors were on the verge of becoming obsolete was well and truly stamped out by the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Digital doubles were created of both Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, using reference material from the earlier Star Wars films, to resemble their younger selves - Fisher being four decades older and Cushing having died back in 1994.

The thing is, these VFX doubles are impressive to a point, yet aren't ever believable as living, breathing people: the subtle musculature of the face, and especially the glassiness of the eyes, looks ever-so-slightly off, such that we're never convinced we're looking at an actual person.

Many fans noted the doubles as unbelievable, and therefore opined that Hollywood was still a long way off from fully vaulting the uncanny valley where plausible VFX humans are concerned.

In fact, arguably the most effective digital double to date was in Blade Runner 2049, where a clone of replicant Rachael (Sean Young) appears briefly.

As near-photoreal as the effects look, the fact they're not quite 100% accurate feeds into the unsettling nature of the scene, that we're supposed to be weirded out by this Rachael clone.

Where flesh-and-blood people are concerned, it just doesn't work, and Rogue One jumping the gun on this tech before it had fully matured arguably damned it for the foreseeable future.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had far more success with digital de-ageing of living actors who perform the role fully on-set - namely Samuel L. Jackson's stunning de-aeging in Captain Marvel - yet constructing a digital double over the top of a stand-in performer is far trickier to get right.