The first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies were some of the best-looking films of their time, with top-tier visual effects work that remains impressive to this day. For Gore Verbinski, the director of all three of those initial films, the visual effects in those three films are still so impressive that it stands above today’s Hollywood blockbusters, but according to Verbinski, that’s more to do with the tools VFX artists are using now, namely the game engine powering Fortnite and countless other modern games: Epic Games’ own Unreal Engine.
In an interview on ButWhyTho.net, Verbinski laid out his beef with Unreal Engine, claiming that the rise in filmmakers using it for modern VFX is making modern films look worse than they did over 20 years ago. For Verbinski, it’s all to do with how Unreal Engine handles light, giving modern films a “gaming aesthetic” that he believes pushes them into an “uncanny valley.”
“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski begins when asked about what, in his mind, qualifies for VFX to be “done right” and how VFX work has changed in the last two decades. “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 in the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface scattering, and how light hits the 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.”
That’s the first part of Verbinski’s answer, and it’s overall not the spiciest of takes, but its likely what he said next that got a heated reply from Pat Tubach, the VFX supervisor at Epic Games, who it so happens worked in Hollywood VFX for years on several blockbuster movies, from The Mummy, to Jurassic Park 3, to the Avengers, and, as luck would have it, all three of the original Pirates of the Caribbean movies, before working at the Fortnite company.
“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 water. In the first Pirates movie, we were actually going out to sea and getting on a boat…I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards.”
Suggesting that Unreal is a step backwards from Maya in such a strong way is likely what emboldened Tubach to hit back at Verbinski, who gave this statement to IGN:
“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!”
Unreal Engine is not without its faults, but the improvements Epic has put into it over time have genuinely made it look better than ever, and made games look better than ever (even if it doesn’t always help a game’s performance). Verbinski isn’t wrong to point out that people don’t necessarily want their movies to look like Fortnite, but neither is Tubach when he points to the fact that you can only get so far by blaming the tool an artist uses.
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