Gore Verbinski, the Hollywood movie director known for the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring, and The Lone Ranger, has stated that the use of Unreal Engine in for making visual effects in movies is one of the main reasons films are looking more like video games nowadays.
Speaking with But Why Tho, Verbinski was asked why he feels movie effects have changed so much in the past 15 years or so, noting that many people feel they don’t look as good anymore. In fact, the effects seen in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — a movie that Verbinski directed — for the character of Davey Jones is often viewed by fans as looking better than anything out today, despite the film being 20 years old.
For Verbinski, using Unreal Engine as a replacement for Maya to make effects is “the greatest slip backwards.”
I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape. 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 did have a brief career in video games too, as he was working on the Xbox 360 title Matter, which would have utilised Kinect. The game was announced at E3 2012 and set in a universe similar to Tron, but was cancelled a year later.
[Source – But Why Tho via VGC]