8 Recent Movies That Grossly Over-Estimated What Their CGI Could Do
6. Life Of Pi
Yann Martels novel Life Of Pi is an incredibly vibrant book, its visuals playing a large part in the book being labelled as unfilmable (a phrase thats slowly losing meaning with every contradiction); you simply couldnt do the film without use of CGI. But in making last years successful adaptation, Ang Lee, no stranger to poor CGI after Hulk, severely over-egged the pudding. Simple sequences - an Indian street, a French swimming pool - are fully realised in a computer to keep the location budget down, feature some shaky models reminiscent of Titanic's whole ship shot, ultimately leaving us with a real world sharing much of its style with the fantastical stuff to come. But the real overestimation is the animals. While theyre certainly impressive in design with some incredible detail, they still end up on the cartoon side of the uncanny valley; that innate ability discussed earlier gets a real work out in Life Of Pi, going off in every scene (and entering overload when we meet the meerkats). Darren Aronofsky is following this route with his high concept Noah in a couple of months and from the trailer things havent improved.
