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. felt like he occupied real space, caught real light, cast real shadows. Modern CGI creatures often feel like they're hovering outside the scene, no matter how much digital artists try to integrate them.