9. Avatar
Anyone whos seen The Hobbit will have noticed a stark visual difference to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. While the original Oscar scoopers had a classic look, merging fantasy with the vast, but realistic looks of classic epics, The Hobbit has a much cleaner brighter feel. While both trilogies utilised the untouched natural beauty of New Zealand, the method with which the more fantastical settings of the series have been created has changed massively. Whereas The Lord of the Rings used a merging of expansive miniatures (lovingly titled bigatures by the production crew) with the natural landscapes for the outdoor vistas and a blend of creative camera angles and make up to create creatures of all different shapes and sizes, a substantial amount of The Hobbits wilder elements are being created entirely in a computer. Not necessarily a bad thing (look at the response to Life of Pi), the use of CGI in The Hobbit is incredibly distracting; more so than in Rings, it looks like the characters arent really part of the world. And as the numerous dubious recreations hedgehogs, spiders and birds show, CGI just isnt up to the point of being able to successfully mimic animals. Obviously Avatar isnt entirely the source of this - the original Rings films themselves, or anything else to come out of Weta Digital are as much to blame but it was the first massive film to push CGI environments to their limit.