11 Movies that Changed Our Idea of Good CGI Forever

CGI is becoming an increasingly important part of nearly every movie we see in the cinema these days. From the completely CGI “live action” remake of Lion King, to the Marvel blockbusters like Avengers: End Game and Spider-Man: Far From Home. To be honest, it feels like we take a lot of this CGI work for granted, but every great movie of today was built on the foundation laid by movies that came before them. Here are 11 movies that changed the way we think of CGI forever.

2001: A Space Odyssey

It might be cheating (a bit) to put 2001: A Space Odyssey on a list about CGI and special effects. That said, this movie completely changed the entire genre of sci-fi movies, movies set in space, and a lot of cinema in general. Kubrick used mostly practical effects to depict spaceships, new planets, and space. The effects in the movie were so good, that some people even believe he directed a “fake moon landing”! That’s a testament to how good the effects in that movie were.

Interstellar

When I said that Kubrick influenced the genre of sci-fi, I wasn’t kidding. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar took a lot of queues from Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. From shots of lonely spaceships floating in space to the music – Interstellar is chock full of 2001 references.

But we’re here to talk about CGI, and the most jaw-dropping use of CGI in Interstellar is the depiction of the black hole. The VFX team had to create a whole new way of working with computer graphics to make this happen. They had to work with the astrophysicist Kip Thorne to learn how gravity, light, and matter behaves in the event horizon of the black hole. In fact, their depiction of the black hole was so accurate and groundbreaking, that an entire academic scientific paper was published talking about the process and studies involved.

Star Wars: A New Hope

While we’re on the topic of sci-fi movies based in space, I have to mention Star Wars. This movie also worked with a lot of practical effects for spaceships, but the depiction of plasma blasters and lightsabers alone has made this movie a huge centerpiece in the history of CGI in cinema.

Avatar

Few people talk about Avatar now (unless it’s too ironically call it their favorite movie), but Avatar did some groundbreaking things with its use of CGI. It won an Oscar for best CGI, it created a whole new, fictional planets with the use of CGI, and it’s gone down in history as both one of the most expensive movies ever made and one of the top grossing movies ever made!