The Practical-Effects Backlash Has Become Its Own Dogma

I have been watching the practical-effects discourse harden into a specific aesthetic dogma across roughly the last five years, and I want to argue that the dogma is now doing more damage than good. The specific claim that practical effects are aesthetically superior to digital effects, which began as a reasonable response to a specific industrial overcorrection, has become a reflexive position that no longer tracks what is actually happening in contemporary visual-effects practice.

The position is now deployed, routinely, in contexts where it is specifically wrong. It is being used to dismiss genuinely good films for using digital techniques. It is being used to praise mediocre films for using practical techniques. It has stopped functioning as craft criticism and has started functioning as a specifically tribal cultural identifier.

What the original argument was responding to

The practical-effects argument originally emerged, I think, around 2010 to 2014, in response to a specific overcorrection in the Hollywood visual-effects economy. Studios, led by the then-dominant Marvel productions and the expensive late-2010s franchise films, had adopted a specific policy of doing everything digitally, at specific budget ratios that starved individual effects houses and produced visible compression artifacts in the final work. Films like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and various contemporaneous productions delivered visual effects that were technically expensive, visibly rushed, and aesthetically disappointing.

The specific response from critics, directors, and audiences was: the older practical-effects tradition (Douglas Trumbull, Stan Winston, the specific craft traditions of the 1970s and 1980s) produced visibly more convincing effects at substantially lower budget. The argument was specifically that digital overreach had hollowed out the craft. This was, at the time, substantially correct.

The argument was reinforced by specific directors who committed to extensive practical work. Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight (2008) through Oppenheimer (2023). George Miller on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Denis Villeneuve on the Dune films. Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise on the Mission: Impossible franchise. Edgar Wright on various. These productions specifically committed to practical approaches and produced specifically impressive results. The argument that practical work could still compete, and often surpass, digital work at mainstream budgets, was empirically vindicated across these productions.

How the argument hardened

The specific problem is that the argument, which was originally a craft argument, has hardened into a specific aesthetic position that is applied reflexively rather than specifically.

The dogma now reads, roughly: practical effects are inherently more cinematic than digital effects, any film that uses substantial CGI is aesthetically inferior to a film that uses substantial practical work, the specific physical presence of practical effects produces specific audience responses that digital effects cannot, and directors who commit to practical work are making specific moral as well as aesthetic choices.

Each of these claims is empirically wrong in specific cases. The dogma does not account for the specific cases.

The contemporary work the dogma misunderstands

George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024). The film contains, by some reports, approximately 2,700 visual-effects shots, most of them heavily digital. It is, despite the practical-effects discourse’s specific insistence that Miller is a practical-effects director, a film whose visual identity is produced through extensive digital compositing, background replacement, and digital set extension. The practical stunts are real. Almost everything around the stunts is digital. The film is, on any honest craft analysis, a triumph of digital-practical integration rather than a triumph of practical work alone.

The practical-effects dogma has difficulty with Furiosa because the dogma has specifically claimed Miller as a practical-effects figure. The film’s actual craft demonstrates that Miller’s specific genius is the integration of the two traditions, not the rejection of one for the other.

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). The film uses extensive prosthetic work (the specific body-horror effects, the specific Monstro Elisasue final-act creature) combined with extensive digital enhancement. The practical-effects dogma has celebrated the film as a practical-effects victory. The specific achievement is that the practical work is indistinguishable from the digital work, and both are serving the specific body-horror aesthetic the film is pursuing. Treating the film as a specific practical-effects achievement misses what the film is actually doing.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two (2024). The sandworm sequences are entirely digital. The specific visual achievement of those sequences is a digital-effects achievement, supported by specific practical elements (the deserts are real, the vehicles are real) but primarily dependent on digital work by Weta, ILM, and Rodeo FX. The film is not a practical-effects film in any meaningful sense, and treating it as one requires ignoring the specific visual material that makes the film work.

What the dogma costs

The specific costs of the practical-effects dogma being applied reflexively are visible in contemporary discourse.

Good digital work goes unremarked. A specific digital-effects achievement, like Weta’s work on the sandworms in Dune: Part Two or ILM’s work on specific sequences in The Creator (2023) or Industrial Light & Magic’s work on Asteroid City, is not credited as a craft achievement because the dogma has specifically ruled out digital craft as a category. The specific artists doing this work are, as a consequence, less visible in film discourse than they deserve to be.

Bad practical work gets over-celebrated. A film that commits to practical work at the expense of the specific craft quality of that work (I will not name specific examples because this is a general argument) gets over-credited for the decision to go practical rather than evaluated on the specific quality of the practical work itself. The dogma rewards the commitment more than it evaluates the execution.

Directors get boxed in. A director who is now expected to produce practical-effects work at every opportunity loses the specific flexibility to choose digital when digital is better suited to a specific sequence. The audience and critical expectation forecloses specific creative decisions.

The specific craft conversation gets flattened. A specific visual-effects sequence, whether practical or digital or hybrid, can be evaluated on specific technical and aesthetic criteria. The dogma short-circuits this evaluation by pre-deciding which type of effect is better. The specific conversation about craft is therefore not happening at the level it should be happening at.

What the actual craft evaluation looks like

A specific visual-effects sequence should be evaluated on: whether it serves the specific dramatic moment, whether its physical properties (mass, light interaction, scale, motion) read as believable for the specific world the film is building, whether it achieves its specific effect efficiently, whether it coheres with the specific visual language of the surrounding material.

These criteria are agnostic to whether the effect is practical or digital. A well-integrated digital effect can satisfy all of them. A poorly-integrated practical effect can fail all of them. The specific question is not which tradition the effect comes from but whether the effect works for the specific film it is in.

Specific examples of excellent digital work that serves its film: Alien: Romulus (2024) combines substantial practical prosthetics with digital extensions in ways that made reviewers credit the whole effect as “practical”; the specific balance is substantially digital. Poor Things (2023) uses extensive digital set extension and sky replacement; the film’s visual identity is digital even where it feels painterly and theatrical. The Zone of Interest (2023) uses extensive digital work to create the specific Auschwitz-adjacent environment while foregrounding practical elements in the domestic scenes.

Specific examples of excellent practical work that serves its film: Furiosa (2024) vehicle stunts. The Substance (2024) body horror. Nosferatu (2024) specific makeup and creature work. These are practical achievements deployed within substantially digital workflows.

The specific distinction that matters is not practical-versus-digital. It is craft-versus-sloppiness. A well-crafted effect, whichever technique it uses, serves its film. A sloppy effect, whichever technique it uses, damages its film.

What I am asking for

I am asking for the specific craft conversation to come back. I want critics and audiences to specifically evaluate visual-effects sequences on their craft merits rather than on their technique of origin. I want digital effects artists to receive specific credit for specific achievements. I want directors who commit to practical work to be evaluated on the specific quality of that work, not on the commitment alone.

The practical-effects dogma served a specific purpose a decade ago, when the craft balance had genuinely tilted too far toward poorly-executed digital work. That imbalance has been substantially corrected. The dogma is now impeding rather than helping the craft conversation.

Watch the effects in a film. Notice what works and what does not. Ask why. The answer is almost never whether the effect was practical or digital. The answer is whether the people making the film knew what they were doing with the specific technique they chose. That is the specific conversation the dogma has been preventing.