The 10 Worst CG Effects in Movies That Could Afford Better
Posted at 5:05 AM Apr 17, 2008
By Zac Bertschy
It happens to everyone: you plop down $12.50 to check out the latest over-hyped effects-laden summer blockbuster and right there in the middle of the spinning CGI wizardry, there’s some effect, some scene that sticks out. It doesn’t quite look right, doesn’t match with the rest of the film. Sometimes it looks like the effects team popped a squat over the negative.
Even worse is that in today’s hi-definition age, we revisit movies that may have blown our proverbial socks off in the theater, but displayed on the unmerciful resolutions that plague today’s plasma screens, they look abysmal. In hindsight, some of these hold up better than others. Here are a few that don’t.
10) Star Trek: Insurrection - Death by Face-Smudge
To be fair, it’s not like Star Trek movies have ever had spectacular effects. Normally they’re completely utilitarian, unobtrusive and don’t really look all that different from the TV show. Insurrection, which has the dubious honor of being probably the crappiest Star Trek movie ever (tied perhaps with Nemesis and Star Trek V) broke that tradition of humility.
The film’s chief villains are the Son’a, a bunch of cloak-wearing douchebags who artificially extend their lives using this machine that stretches and folds their skin, which makes them look like they have their faces perpetually stuck in a wind tunnel. They’re in cahoots with Admiral Dougherty, a corrupt Starfleet officer who’s helping them harvest some fountain-of-life stuff to… well, it doesn’t matter, but the deal goes south and Dougherty winds up finding his head trapped in the skin-stretching machine, the result of which looks like the artist simply dropped these frames into Photoshop and used the smudge tool to widen his eye sockets (the terribleness starts at :30). It looks even worse than when God’s ethereal head is chasing Captain Kirk around and shooting lighting from his eyes at the end of Star Trek V. Seriously.
9) Van Helsing - Giant Vampire Mouths
Easily the worst movie in criminally untalented director Stephen Sommers’ filmography, Van Helsing continued Sommers’ bad habit of getting $150-million-plus budgets to produce terrible summer tentpoles based on Universal’s classic monsters. After two financially successful yet soul-crushing Mummy flicks, he produced this steaming turd, which crams in all the other Universal monsters into one ugly convoluted crapfest.
The effects are largely passable, with the notable exception of these giant vampire mouths seen at 6:31. Sommers must have some kind of obsession with stretchy monster mouths, because the mummies in his earlier films could also stretch their maws out like this for no discernable reason. Not only is the effect completely unconvincing and silly-looking, it doesn’t even make sense—why would a vampire even need to do this? In case it needs to swallow a whole chicken?
8) Spider-man - The Pumpkin Bomb
It’s tough to rip on the first Spider-man movie. By all accounts, it’s a decent superhero movie, which in the early part of this decade was still a rare thing. Sure, it’s easy to make fun of the Green Goblin’s ridiculous Power Rangers costume, but beyond that, it’s a solid effort. The only problem is that the effects haven’t aged well at all and really weren’t that great in the first place.
There are plenty of ugly, badly-composited effects shots in this movie but for a brief summary that includes almost every CG mistake that pops up over the film’s run time, all you need to do is watch the scene where the Green Goblin attacks Times Square during a Macy Gray concert (who, incidentally, is also a sign that this movie hasn’t aged very well). There are bad green screen shots, rubbery CG-puppets jumping around, and worst of all, a poorly-conceived shot of a Pumpkin Bomb going off that disintegrates the flesh of a handful of partygoers, turning them instantly into a pack of hilarious cartoon skeletons that immediately collapse. At first you’re thinking “no way can the effects get any worse than these shots of CG Tobey Maguire leaping around” but then that Pumpkin Bomb shows up and you’re proven wrong.
7) The Matrix Reloaded - The Burly Brawl
Warner Bros. made a huge fuss over this sequence during the run-up to the premiere of the first Matrix sequel (after which an entire nation of nerds struggled to find the exact right anguished noise to express utter letdown), using it in all the trailers, talking it up on the junket circuit. The concept was, admittedly, pretty solid: Neo fights a hundred Agent Smiths. Sounds like it could be pretty cool, right? Wrong.
At several moments during The Matrix Reloaded the entire film turns into a mediocre cutscene from a PlayStation 2 game (at 5:42 in the video above, specifically), and nowhere is it more apparent than this sequence. For the first few minutes it’s pretty clear that they’ve got Keanu Reeves on a wire kicking around stuntmen in suits, but as soon as enough Agent Smiths get into the room, it immediately becomes a CG cartoon, featuring countless Gumby-esque Hugo Weavings getting knocked around like pinballs with no real weight to them. It looked bad in 2003 and it looks hideous now.
6) Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace – Yoda’s Odd Transformation
It’s pretty pointless to sit around and complain about how unbelievably sucky The Phantom Menace is; it’s been said a million nerdy ways by a million nerds since the film was first spat into multiplexes back in the summer of 1999. That said, the visual effects are really the only elements in the film that are difficult to legitimately criticize. They’re still pretty solid even today; the CG has largely aged well.
Except for Yoda. For whatever reason, Lucas decided to have someone make a really crappy-looking Yoda puppet and used that instead of just applying the technology they’d already developed to give birth to the universally reviled Jar-Jar Binks. They could have had a full-CG Yoda, as seen in the two sequels, but instead we get this awful puppet. But that’s not the mistake here – for two wide shots, when Obi-Wan is kneeling in front of the Jedi master, Yoda becomes a shaky, shambling CG creature. They very next shot he’s back to being an awful puppet. It’s jarring and obvious; apparently, though, Lucas has replaced crappy puppet Yoda with less crappy Episode III-style Yoda in preparation for an upcoming DVD re-release of Phantom Menace, which is desired by absolutely no one.
