10 Worst CGI Moments From 2022 Movies
5. Digitally De-Aged Catherine Keener - The Adam Project
While not the worst offender of lacklustre digital de-aging on this list, The Adam Project is certainly the most extensive.
Shawn Levy's not-bad time travel adventure film makes the bold decision to have its primary villain, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), travel back 32 years in the past to meet her younger self.
And despite the incredible advances made in de-aging tech in the last five years alone, the younger version of Sorian looks more like a deepfake somebody cooked up on their underpowered laptop over a lazy afternoon.
Viewed as a single image it's not bad, but as a persuasive human character in motion it falls straight into the uncanny valley: it's always clear we're looking at Keener's oddly-rendered younger face pasted on top of a stand-in.
In some shots her face doesn't even look tracked properly, like it's about to slip off the stand-in's real face at any moment.
It's especially troubling as the younger Sorian is on screen a lot in the third act, and though the ambition is laudable, a $116 million movie should probably be capable of better than this. And if they weren't, they should've just hired another actress to play the younger Sorian.