Director Gore Verbinski says Unreal Engine is ‘the greatest slip backwards’ for movie CGI

Remember the glory days of CGI in movies? Terminator 2’s liquid metal T-1000, Jurassic Park’s stunning dinosaurs, Starship Trooper’s swarms of giant arachnids. Not only did the CGI look great then, most of the visual effects in those movies still hold up well today, even decades after they were created.

Nowadays, movie fans seem much less impressed by CGI in films. There’s a general distaste for a perceived overuse of CGI in favor of practical effects, and there are a lot of complaints that recent CGI is less-convincing and more fake-looking than it used to be, even in the biggest budget films.

In an interview with But Why Tho?, Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring, Rango, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, was asked why visual effects in movies just don’t look as good as they used to.

“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski said. “So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema.”

Unreal Engine made waves after being used for virtual sets in production of The Mandalorian TV series back in 2020, and usage of the engine has grown more widespread in films over the past few years, such as in The Matrix Resurrections and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

That’s not good news, according to Verbinski. “I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards,” he said.

He pointed out the types of visual effects made with Unreal aren’t necessarily bad. “It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint,” he said.

“I just don’t think it takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way,” he said. “So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand.”

In his new movie, science fiction comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which will be released in theaters in February, Verbinski says he uses CGI, but “we try to be really strict with making at least 50% of the frame photographic. I think that keeps you honest. You can use props as a reference, and when you see the CG replacement, you know how to replicate the real thing,” he said.