Leave it to Gore Verbinski - the guy who made a theme park ride into a billion-dollar franchise - to throw a grenade into the visual effects industry's love affair with Unreal Engine.

In a refreshingly candid interview with PC Gamer, the Pirates of the Caribbean director didn't mince words: "I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards."

Now, before the gaming crowd comes for me: Unreal Engine is incredible at what it does. It's revolutionized game development and real-time rendering. The problem, according to Verbinski, is that Hollywood has started using it as a shortcut for film visual effects - and the results look, well, like video games.

"I just don't think it takes light the same way," Verbinski explained. "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."

This is the technical stuff that most audiences can't articulate but absolutely feel. There's a reason why Marvel movies increasingly look like cutscenes - because they're literally being made with the same tools. And while Verbinski acknowledges that Unreal "works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you're in a heightened, unrealistic reality," he argues it's a disaster "from a strictly photo-real standpoint."

Here's the thing: Verbinski isn't wrong. Compare the creature work in his Pirates films - particularly Bill Nighy's Davy Jones, which still holds up beautifully - to the Unreal Engine-heavy effects in recent blockbusters. Davy Jones felt like he occupied real space, caught real light, cast real shadows. Modern CGI creatures often feel like they're hovering slightly outside the scene, no matter how much digital artists try to integrate them.

The problem is efficiency. Unreal Engine is faster and cheaper than traditional VFX pipelines. Studios can iterate in real-time, directors can see results on set, and bean counters can watch costs drop. But speed isn't quality. And when every blockbuster starts looking the same because they're all using the same game engine with the same lighting models and the same shortcuts, we lose something essential.

Verbinski calls it "this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema," and he's identified exactly what's been bothering me about modern blockbusters. They don't feel cinematic anymore. They feel like expensive tech demos.

Now, I'm not saying we need to go back to practical effects for everything - though God knows I'd welcome more of that. But there's a middle ground between 1990s animatronics and video game engines. It's called actual visual effects artistry, and it requires time, talent, and money that studios increasingly don't want to spend.

The irony is that Verbinski made his name with big, VFX-heavy spectacles. But he understood that visual effects should serve the story, not define it. When Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy shared the screen, you believed they were actually looking at each other - even though one of them was entirely digital.

Can you say the same about the third-act CGI battle in most Marvel movies? Or Star Wars projects? Or... well, pick your franchise.

Hollywood has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Every new tool gets overhyped, overused, and eventually integrated properly once everyone calms down. Maybe Unreal Engine will get there. But right now, Gore Verbinski is the director willing to say what a lot of us have been thinking:

Your $200 million movie looks like a video game. And not even a particularly good one.