10 Terrible Movies That Were Actually Groundbreaking

Though widely touted by Sony as cinema's next big event film, 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a colossal letdown - a beautiful but ultimately hollow vessel which flopped hard at the box office and quickly evaporated into the cultural ether.

Yet while its characters and story were totally forgettable slop, it's hard to shake just how widely lauded the film was for its technological breakthroughs.

Chiefly, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was the first "photorealistic" computer-animated feature film ever made - a truly tectonic filmmaking achievement for 2001, enough that many feared the lifelike animated humans could end up replacing flesh-and-blood actors within a matter of years.

And even though The Spirits Within's visual imperfections are considerably more apparent when viewed today, in terms of pure visual verisimilitude it's still a staggeringly impressive piece of work, and effectively laid the track for more persuasive digital photorealism in the years that followed.