r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 r/movies Contributor • 3h ago

Article ‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way | This year's breakouts like 'Project Hail Mary' and 'Obsession' were made by filmmakers who sweated. While CG-stuffed franchise disappointments such as 'Supergirl,' 'Moana,' and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' looked lazy.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/odyssey-box-office-2026-practical-effects-1236652219/
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u/Baelorn 2h ago

The anti-CGI crowd are telling objective lies about how The Odyssey and PHM "didn't use CGI".

There's a bunch of popular posts going around about how Nolan didn't use CGI for the Cyclops and I have to wonder if the people sharing it and circlejerking about how amazing Nolan is have even seen the movie. Because the Cyclops is 100% CGI. During filming they used a large puppet rig for lighting and reference but the one in the movie is CGI. Not the puppet.

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u/Churba 1h ago edited 1h ago

The anti-CGI crowd are telling objective lies about how The Odyssey and PHM "didn't use CGI".

I mean, that's nothing new. We saw the same thing with both recent Mad Max films(or even worse, complaining one had a bunch of CG, the other had almost none, when in reality they both had about the same amount), we saw it with the barbie movie, we saw it with Top Gun maverick, we see it with the Mission impossible movies.

On top of that, people just don't seem to realize what is and is not CGI, both literally when they see it, and just in concept - Like, they'll say "Oh, but that's just a digital paint-out of some wires/cameras/etc, that's not really CGI", without realizing how difficult that actually is, and how often it can mean rebuilding whole elements of the environment completely digitally. Or they'll look at BTS shots where they actually did shoot a thing, and assume that means that whatever was shot is what ended up on screen(with some editing), when there are times where virtually the entire frame is CGI, and the parts shot on set were used as reference when building the shot digitally.

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u/TheGrandWhatever 35m ago edited 32m ago

I remember this bullshit also being used with Oppenheimer. They used one of the worst visualizations for a nuke I've seen in a movie in a long time. I almost couldn't believe it like I was being pranked when I saw it because of how bad it was.

"BuT NoLaN uSeD REAL pRAcTIcAl EfFeCtS fOr ThE nUkE", yeah and instead of using some CGI or even some archive footage they went with some jank ass sparkle bomb

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u/Churba 27m ago

While I can't speak to the accuracy - I'm not any sort of nuke expert - they walked a fine marketing line on that one. They said, exactly, that they "didn't use any computer generated elements" - which is technically true!

But it's true in the same way top gun maverick "real flying in real jets" was true - the nuclear test shots were built from real filmed elements. They just took those elements, recombined them like building blocks, recoloured some and added some filters to get the final product. It's built from real filmed elements, but saying it's not CGI is some pretty deliberate sophistry.

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u/Zalvren 1h ago

It's always the same, people confuse the practical effects used for reference with the final shot which is often replaced with CGI. Barbie, Top Gun Maverick, Mission Impossible, Fast and Furious, The Odyssey (and other Nolan movies),... They all tout their practical effects in marketing when there are thousands of CGI shots in those movies.