6 Special Effects Flaws You Never Noticed (And Can't Unsee)

It would honestly be less weird if they also had perfect teeth and hair -- that the nice nails are the only detail they overlooked draws your eyes right to them. There are other weird reality-jarring moments too, like the fact that every time our motley gang of survivors strolls through a neighborhood that's been abandoned for years, all the lawns are freshly cut. But the nails seem like an easy fix. It's 2016 -- you can't tell us "Nail Dirtier" isn't on some makeup artist resumes.

To be fair to Lucas, he's far from the only director to use CGI to get around his actor's flaws and, in doing so, accidentally creating new and far more unsettling flaws. In 2001's The Score, which is either about a heist or one sports fan's desperate attempt to find out how his hockey team is doing, an elderly Marlon Brando had completely run out of fucks to give and proved less than cooperative during filming. And so, struggling to coax a smile out of the surly septuagenarian, the director manipulated one onto his face and made Brando look like an alien attempting its first mimicry of human emotion.

Then there's Blade: Trinity, whose production could generously be described as troubled, or less generously described as a movie where both Wesley Snipes and the director went mad with power and then wasted their power on trivial bullshit. At one point they needed a shot of Snipes opening his eyes, but he refused to open them for reasons that have been tragically lost to history. They had to CGI the shot, and so what should have been the film's easiest scene instead makes Snipes look like one of the hideous creatures of darkness he's supposed to be purging from the Earth.

You may have noticed a trend here, in that it's kind of a hail Mary for movies that are falling apart at the seams.

Filming underwater is expensive and time-consuming. You need to give your actors and crew special training, waterproof your equipment, and make sure you don't come within moments of accidentally drowning James Cameron or his actors. It's way easier to throw your fucks aside and shoot "dry for wet." That's when you stick your cast in a smoky room full of fans, tint everything blue in post-production, and hope no one notices the pretty obvious effect. Here's Sam from Lord Of The Rings flailing around in front of a fan, with some bubbles added later to draw attention away from just how unusually unwaterlike the rest of the water looks.

And here's the crew from The Spirit explaining how they got Eva Mendes to wave her hands around in front of a green screen like a beached mermaid. Unfortunately, they don't go on to explain why they made The Spirit in the first place.

Then there's "day for night," where, rather than shoot in the dark because that's hard and stuff, night scenes are filmed during the day. And then, you guessed it, they later have a filter slapped on them so they look like they're applying for a spot in the Blue Man Group. This isn't just a cost-saving measure for cheap and/or lazy productions -- multiple Oscar and Cracked "Holy Shit Did You See How Awesome That Movie Was, You Guys?" Award nominee Mad Max: Fury Road did it. You probably didn't notice in the theater because of your intense sexual arousal, but it's more obvious when you sit down and watch it at home.

Because that's what night looks like, right? You go outside and everything's just ... blue? That's why you can catch characters squinting like they're overwhelmed by the harsh light of the moon -- they're actually looking into the sun.

Jaws did the "day plus blue equals night" trick too.

We're not saying they should have sent her out into the water at midnight and just prayed that nothing bad happened, but man, it's one of those tricks that's totally convincing right up until you notice it, at which point you'll never be sold again.

Back when Disney was just a small, friendly empire instead of a globe-spanning monolith, they too reused footage. That doesn't mean you can see Sleeping Beauty shoot Bambi's mom, but if you watch Robin Hood you'll see some dance scenes where the characters have identical moves to the dances in The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, and Snow White. They just took old animation and traced over it, meaning some of the greatest animators in history used the same technique that you used to emblazon Batman on your Trapper Keeper and convince your classmates that yeah, you can totally draw like that.

Even Citizen Kaneborrowed from The Son Of Kong to cut costs. They reused background footage for a picnic scene, which is why the greatest movie ever made suddenly has freaking pterodactyls soaring through it like it's someone's goddamn fan-fiction.

This has been a special effects trick forever -- in The Ten Commandments, when Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea by threatening to shoot if it didn't do as he demanded, they just filmed a bunch of water pouring into a trough and then ran it backwards.

And in The Big Lebowski, when the ringer suitcase is thrown out of the Dude's moving car, the portly and not particularly competent Walter manages to throw it in a surprisingly majestic arc. That's because, after a bunch of attempts that realistically resembled someone throwing a suitcase out of a moving car (that is, badly and boring to watch), they just had the driver back the car up and stick his hand out the window while someone off camera whipped it at him in a nice, graceful arc. And once you see it, you'll never un-see it.

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