That sucks. So many directors don't get how to use CGI in movies. A healthy balance of physical effects and computer animated make for the best experience. Example: Jurassic Park, even today has more life like and believable monsters than say, the recent AVP movies.
I agree and with the "gonna suck" prediction above. CGI seems to work best to enhance model work and physical effects rather than in replacing them. I've never seen total CGI work that looked believable to me. I'm always thinking how "painterly" it looks. Even good CGI. I watched
MacArthur the other day and was impressed with what they did in certain scenes with matte paintings. Much more "real" looking than anything in
Pearl Harbor or even some of the scenes in
Flags of Our Fathers.
And if they'd enhance it a little by being able to animate the smoke it would've been absolutely convincing.
I think part of the problem with those movies is we have real world frames of reference for how things are supposed to look. And also the shot choices, all those zooming fly by's that look too much like video game cutscenes, that could never be physically filmed by chase planes. Takes me right out of the story.
But CGI apes? No thanks, double. As fakey as the war machines have looked in the movies I've mentioned, most CGI animals look even worse. They don't move like real animals, they "morph" and flow. King Kong wasn't too bad but that's mainly because they motion-captured him and had a good actor do the actual performance.
What's wrong with just state of the art prosthetics, a la the "re-imagining?" That's about all they got right in that flick. I doubt anyone's going to go see a
PotA movie thinking, "All right, CGI monkeys will make THIS one better than the others!"
