Director Gore Verbinski told PC Gamer that the arrival of Unreal Engine in visual effects workflows is largely responsible for why some modern movie CGI looks worse than older effects. Verbinski opened by pointing to classic effects that still hold up, such as the T-1000 in Terminator 2, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and the creature swarms in Starship Troopers. He said those examples have aged well and remain convincing decades later.
He highlighted those with contemporary reactions to CGI, noting there is a wider audience distaste for effects that look artificial. He attributed a big part of that shift to the Unreal gaming engine entering the visual effects landscape. “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.”
Verbinski made clear he does not think all uses of Unreal are 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. He explained the technical side of that limitation. “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,” Verbinski 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.”
Verbinski framed the issue as one of aesthetic and technical tradeoffs. Realtime engines prioritize speed and interactive workflows, and he argued those priorities can produce a different look than traditional, hand-crafted visual effects that aim for strict photorealism. For more discussion about Unreal Engine and movie CGI follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, and Instagram.
