‘Greatest slip backwards’: Pirates of the Caribbean director says Unreal Engine makes films look too much like games

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinksi has criticised the increasing use of Unreal Engine in film production, saying it makes movies look too much like video games.

Unreal Engine is used frequently to create visual effects in today’s movies and TV shows, with notable examples including The Matrix Resurrections, The Mandalorian and the Fallout series.

In an interview with But Why Tho, Verbinski – who directed The Ring, Rango, the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films and the upcoming Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die – was asked why the look of visual effects in films has changed over the past 15 years, and why people believe they don’t look as impressive as they used to.

Verbinski replied that the use of Unreal Engine to produce and animate visual effects quicker than other 3D applications such as Autodesk Maya has resulted in some movies looking less realistic and closer to an ‘uncanny valley’ effect seen in games.

“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski replied. “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.

“I think that’s why those Kubrick movies still hold up, because they were shooting miniatures and paintings, and now you’ve got this different aesthetic. 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.

“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. 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.

“And then just what’s become acceptable from an executive standpoint, where they think no one will care that the ships in the ocean look like they’re not on the water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat.”

Verbinski reiterated that making something look realistic in a still image is one thing, but it’s the way that image is then animated which can make the difference in getting moviegoers to believe what they’re seeing.

“I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards,” he stated.

“And there’s also something, a mistake I think people make all the time on visual effects. You can make a very real helicopter. But as soon as it flies wrong, your brain knows it’s not real. It has to earn every turn, it has to move right. It’s still animation, sometimes it’s not just the lighting and the photography, sometimes it’s the motion.”