Gore Verbinski Believes Hollywood’s Overreliance On Unreal Engine Is “The Greatest Slip Backwards” For Photorealistic CGI In Movies

Filmmaker Gore Verbinski is uniquely plugged into the world of visual effects after making feature films like his billion-dollar earning “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy and the animated pic “Rango” (reuniting with actor Johnny Depp), both employing extensive motion/picture capture technology. He now has some choice words for the state of photorealistic CGI in Hollywood, saying that the reliance on using the video game industry’s Unreal Engine is part of the problem of the evolution not moving forward.

Speaking with the fine folks over at But Why Tho? (via PC Gamer) promoting his new film, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” Verbinski talks about the gaming tool as “the greatest slip backwards” when asked why modern VFX doesn’t look as good as it used to. Notably, his “Pirates” films employed some of the more fantastical VFX for Bill Nighy‘s Davy Jones and his damned crew on The Flying Dutchman, as those decades-old shots still hold up in comparison to some modern CGI use.

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“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski said of the state of modern VFX and his concerns about the overreliance of Unreal Engine. “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 Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards..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,” the director 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.”

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Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine 5 (launched years ago and was pivotal for creating digital sets for projects like “The Mandalorian” alongside use in films such as “The Matrix Ressurections” and “Ant-Man 3“) has been a tool often used by the video game industry for modern game releases, but it still has limitations and isn’t exactly a one-to-one for photorealistic visual effects, being mainly developed for game creation.

UPDATE: Epic Games has sent along the following statement from Pat Tubach, VFX Supervisor at the company, defending Unreal Engine’s use in the industry.

“It’s inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI. It’s true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures – but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software. Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases, final pixels. I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done—and I should know—I was one of them!”

Gore Verbinski’s latest sci-fi pic, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” will hit theaters on February 13.