10 Times Movies Should've Used CGI

Christopher Nolan tends to avoid using CGI in his movies unless absolutely necessary, preferring to achieve as much in-camera as humanly possible. And in the case of his war epic Dunkirk, he refused to use VFX to create larger crowds of soldiers on Dunkirk beach.

Crowd duplication is an incredibly basic effect that's basically invisible when executed right, and yet, Nolan preferred to expand the crowd size through practical means - that is, using cardboard cutouts placed at a distance to stand in for flesh-and-blood men.

It's a laudable effort, yet one of the most common complaints about the film is how oddly empty the beach looks given that hundreds of thousands of soldiers were ultimately evacuated from it.

Nolan's fastidious commitment to doing things "for real" evidently stung him a bit here - it's still a terrific film, but using CGI to really emphasise the scale and chaos on the beach would've done it wonders.

The mesmerising Dunkirk evacuation scene from Joe Wright's Atonement, which is very obviously packed to the gills with digital refinements, feels so much bigger than the equivalent in Nolan's film. Regardless of which of the two is ultimately more accurate, Nolan's version feels oddly pared-down and dare one say, not that cinematic.