I've had a strange experience this last week or so. A number of high profile trailers have emerged, some for films I've been waiting to get a good look at, and I've watched a few random things that have been coming up frequently on GAF, and amongst friends. Watching these trailers, something really struck me. How really terrible the CG looks to me. This could be for a few reasons, maybe they're not finished, maybe they're objectively below industry standards, and maybe I've changed. I did notice while looking at my blurays, I have almost nothing with significant CG that either isn't fully animated, like Wall-E, or isn't Avatar.
What's strange is I don't believe any of those three things are the case. Some of them are from finished films, they're all of major budgets, with top CG studios providing the work, and to test if I really had grown disdainful of CG, I watched Avatar again, and it is as stunning as I remember.
I had gone through and grabbed screens of offending scenes, to support this post, unfortunately, it's hard to see just how shit they look when they're not moving mostly. But certainly Man of Steel, Star Trek, Pacific Rim, The Hobbit, Life of Pi and World War Z were amongst them.
I happened to watch Inception the other day too, and that has some really horrible CG. Obviously there is tons of effects I couldn't even notice, in almost all films, digital set extensions, etc, but for some reason, I appear to really hate these major CG elements, and they stand out horribly every time I see them. For whatever reason, Avatar appears to be the lone exception. If anything, it's the live action I don't like in Avatar oddly.