“I’m limited by the technology of my time…”- these are the words of Howard Stark to his son Tony from Iron Man 2. Surprisingly, the same can be said about visual effects in Hollywood movies. There is a reason why we are ready to forgive Hollywood Movies with Bad VFX that came out in the early 2000s and before.
That’s because visual effects themselves were new at the time and limited by technology. As days went by, they got better and better to the point where we get a film like Avatar: The Way of Water that made us search for ways to tell ourselves that what we are watching can’t be real. But there are some movies that, despite the availability of pretty advanced visual effects, failed to put them to good use.
In this article, we are going to talk about 10 Hollywood Movies with Bad VFX; so bad that it is unbelievable. One has to wonder what made the makers say yes to the result despite it being so clear the effects are bad. While some are overdone, others seem incomplete; some are just unconvincing while others are outrageous. Here we go.
10 Hollywood Movies With Bad VFX
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
It pained to see Hugh Jackman’s iconic character being subjected to such ludicrous visual effects. Despite having a huge budget (almost the same as Transformers which came out two years before this one i.e. 2007), you can easily figure out how visually different they are. In the video above for example, we can easily make out just how slow Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson is swinging his swords.
What adds to the disastrous result is the weak visual effect that has been added to show how quick he is. And this is one of the many scenes that hurts eyes, especially the final fight between Logan, Victor, and Weapon X. Overall, it seems that visual effects artists who worked on the movie left their work midway and ran away. Definitely the first one in our Hollywood movies with bad special effects list.
The Hobbit Trilogy
Directed by the great Peter Jackson, The Hobbit trilogy has its fair share of very weird and bizarre visual effects that make us say only one thing: why? In trying to do justice to J. R. R. Tolkien’s source material that speaks of dark adventures, the movies lose sense of reality and seem cartoonish. The bloom that often covers almost the whole shot further adds to the uneasiness. And it just feels bad to have such a loved trilogy with such a stellar cast to be subjected to such careless execution.
Cats (2019)
A cringe-fest of cosmic proportions, Cats, a musical, is as bad as it gets in terms of visual effects. And the thing is that there are not a lot of visual effects in the film. But the characters, which are computer generated, are enough to make you feel wretched. The worst part is that the film managed to make even Ian McKellen and Judi Dench look bad. While the former did somewhat manage to add a spoonful of class to his role, the latter was miserable.
For a movie directed by Tom Hooper who also made The Danish Girl, The King’s Speech, and Les Misérables, this one was unexpectedly bad. Why he chose to go for it, only he knows.
Justice League (2017)
The release of the highly anticipated superhero movie took the form of utter despair for the fans. Be it the infamous mustache of Superman or the very human Steppenwolf, this movie mocked its very significant characters. It is as if Whedon deliberately decided to ruin the DC project. Then the release of the Snyder Cut further proved how badly overdone the visual effects of Justice League are. Naturally, when there is material to compare, flaws get clearer. Thank god for Zach Snyder.
Green Lantern (2011)
It takes really bad visual effects in a movie for an actor to make fun of it in two other movies. Easily at par with X-Men Origins: Wolverine in our list of Hollywood Movies with Bad VFX, Green Lantern was nothing short of ludicrous. For a character with such a deep arc in the comics, the movie didn’t even bother to explore it. Why they chose to make the whole suit CG is a question I am still searching the answer to. And then there is the fully computer-generated villain Parallax. Nothing can be taken seriously in the movie. Thankfully, Ryan Reynolds was saved by 20th Century Fox.
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Black Panther (2018)
How can anyone forget the video game battle between T’Challa and Killmonger at the end of Black Panther? The truth that came out much later, and was even part of a huge debate regarding the mistreatment of VFX artists by Marvel, is that they didn’t have much time to work on that whole sequence. But even then, this scene was too much to be overlooked. And disregarding the fight scene, the overall visual effects in the movie aren’t that good either. But we can forgive them, can’t we?
Jurassic World (2015)
Let’s just admit that neither dinosaurs can be faked nor the fear of dinosaurs. So when Chris Pratt motions the velociraptors to halt in Jurassic World, we know that there is either nothing in front of him or people in dinosaur costumes. This is enough to throw our suspension of disbelief out of the window. None of the dinosaurs are real and nobody even tries to replicate what Steven Spielberg did in the original Jurassic Park i.e. he made animatronic dinosaurs and he made a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Granted the production houses don’t want to go through all that trouble but then they should try to make the creatures look as real as possible by pushing the boundaries of the effects. For instance, watch Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV+. Just watch some clips on YouTube and you will know what I’m talking about.
Aladdin (2019)
Aladdin and Lion King, both came out in 2019. And just by looking at them, you can understand the lag that the former suffers in terms of visual effects. We know that both are aimed at kids and adults alike but Lion King has that seriousness that is not at all present in Aladdin. Visual effects are used to add to and complement practical effects and not vice-versa. The street urchin and his monkey and the whole of Agrabah seem cartoonish. And as far as Will Smith’s Genie is concerned, there, too, things could have been much better. Goofy alert all over again!
Flash (2023)
Another addition to DC’s failures, Flash is pure goofiness. The makers didn’t even bother to ensure that the visual effects matched the vibe that DC movies carry. They just took a ton of visual effects and dropped them over almost every scene in the movie. As a result, Flash is funny, his twin is even funnier and Supergirl is plain unconvincing. On top of all this, they crossed the line by making completely CG versions of Nicholas Cage, Henry Cavill, George Reeves, Jay Garrick, Christopher Reeve, Helen Slater, and Adam West. It’s disgraceful and disrespectful to the very canon.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
The final addition to our list of Hollywood Movies with Bad VFX is the very new Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Well, you can only make an 80-year-old Harrison Ford do so much as the great Indiana Jones. So Disney had to resort to visual effects. And they also made a younger version of him. Can we just accept that face replacements don’t work anymore unless they are really good? Like Logan-level good? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny suffers from the same bombardment of visual effects and misses the very soul that makes an Indiana Jones movie stand up to its legendary theme as composed by the immortal John Williams.
Which of these movies do you think has the worst VFX? Do let us know in the comments below.