How Warner Bros. Should Have Made Justice League
5. With More Practical Effects Instead Of CGI
Justice League had a budget of $300 million, which should really have been enough to bankroll some better special effects than the ones it delivered. Steppenwolf, Cyborg, and the Parademons are like bad video game characters, and some of the computer-enhanced action scenes look artificial.
Given that ropey digital effects seem to be a running theme in the DCEU, the filmmakers should have explored practical ones this time around - they could certainly have funded some groundbreaking ones with that kind of money.
There are plenty examples of modern films that shunned CGI and look all the better for it. The sequence in Inception where the Paris cafe explodes was created using air cannons and specialist cameras filming at 1,500 frames-per-second, and that scene in the original Iron Man where Pepper Potts fits Tony Stark with the Arc Reactor was made possible thanks to a prosthetic chest.
There are also examples of films that skilfully used CGI in conjunction with practical effects. The original Jurassic Park, for instance, brought its dinosaurs to life with revolutionary animatronics and papered over the cracks with digital effects - that was 1993 and those dinos still look more convincing than Justice League's Parademons.
Surely Steppenwolf and his minions would have looked superior if the movie had created him using traditional effects, before enhancing the illusion with a few CG tweaks.
If Jurassic Park was able to bring dinos back to life in 1993, just imagine what the right special effects team and a $300 million budget could have achieved today.