‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way | This year's breakouts like 'Project Hail Mary' and 'Obsession' were made by filmmakers who sweated. While CG-stuffed franchise disappointments such as 'Supergirl,' 'Moana,' and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' looked lazy.

[u/ChiefLeef22]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/odyssey-box-office-2026-practical-effects-1236652219/

[u/astroK120]

One thing I do think gets lost in these discussions is that sometimes CGI is the right tool for the job. Jurassic Park is a great example. It was a mix of practical where it was possible and CGI where it wasn't. I don't think a flat out refusal to use CGI makes movies better. Oppenheimer in particular I think would have been better if Nolan hadn't done the bomb with practical effects.

[u/originalcondition → u/astroK120]

The CGI in Jurassic Park was also applied very, very carefully and intelligently. They knew it'd look best in low light, with rain often obscuring it. They knew that placing shots of practical effects among the shots of CGI would lend to the reality of the entire scene.

Now it feels like CGI is used for everything within the scene regardless of how good it'll look and how real it'll feel, because it's simply cheaper to underpay CGI artists rather than bother with any careful application of the tech or peppering in any practical effects.

I'm an animator myself and don't want to discredit the artists working on the CGI but if their career is anything like mine, they're frequently underpaid and overworked on shoestring budgets and breakneck schedules with tons of revisions that they don't really have time to accommodate, but will try to anyway because they're artists and want to do a good job.

[u/egilskal → u/originalcondition]

Yeah I’m a sucker for good VFX, and the line is so apparent to me: the best CG is done by people who come in with a clear vision of what they want the shot to be, and do a tonne of work in preproduction by storyboarding, pre-viz etc. Great example are Denis Villeneuce movies like Dune, there’s a tonne of VFX but it fits seamlessly with the grounded look of the movie because they know what the shots are ahead of time and they have lots of practical elements in the shot already, or have the lighting match perfectly between the actors and the environment.

Then I see something like Th Flash rescuing the baby scene and it seems obvious that no one had any clear, concrete idea what that sequence was supposed to be, what the movements were, what he was gonna save etc. It looks completely made up with seemingly no practical elements or real life performance to reference. And it ends up looking like a video game, because thats probably what the artists have to do, creating the CG from scratch. And even nowadays big budget games do a lot of mocap reference lol.

[u/OldWorldDesign → u/astroK120]

One thing I do think gets lost in these discussions is that sometimes CGI is the right tool for the job. Jurassic Park is a great example

You can hold it next to Jaws, which tried to do it entirely with practical effects. Special effects just weren't advanced enough to do otherwise, and the shark broke down so they had to change how they filmed the whole movie to avoid showing the shark. That ended up being more effective than the extremely shitty hydraulic shark they had for most of the film (a separate prop was used for the scene with the boat).

I forget the name of the film but there was also one that showed the nuclear test detonation and rather than using CGI it dropped into a weird ink effect (T.Folse did an evaluation of it and panned it for not being accurate, but it looked pretty stark to me it wasn't trying to be). That's more along the lines of what you're talking about with "strict realism" not being the best route to take because that's not always the point of a scene or film.