Mad Max Fury Road and Top Gun Maverick are arguments. The case for practical effects in the era of total digital capability.
The CGI revolution that began with Terminator 2 in 1991 was, by the mid-2000s, complete. Almost every effect that a film might want to achieve could be produced digitally. The economic argument for digital — cheaper at scale, more flexible in post-production, less constrained by physical safety considerations — was overwhelming. The directors who continued to commit to practical effects were doing so against the industry's structural drift.
Twenty-five years into the post-CGI era, the case for practical effects has, surprisingly, become stronger rather than weaker. This essay tries to lay out why.
Three specific qualities are still genuinely harder to achieve digitally than practically. First: weight. Heavy objects move differently from light objects in ways that digital animators have to consciously animate but practical objects do automatically. The audience reads weight unconsciously; digital weight is often subtly wrong in ways viewers can identify without being able to articulate the issue.
Second: light interaction. Real objects scatter, absorb, and refract light in ways that depend on their actual physical properties. Digital materials require simulation; the simulation is, at the current state of the art, very good but not perfect. The 'uncanny valley' problem in CGI characters is, partly, a light-interaction problem. Real skin in real lighting still looks different from rendered skin in rendered lighting.
Third: performer commitment. An actor performing an action against real consequences moves differently from an actor performing in front of a greenscreen. Tom Cruise's continued practical-stunt work on the Mission: Impossible films is partly about commercial branding (the films market on Cruise's actual risks) but it also produces footage in which the actor's physical commitment is visibly genuine. The audience reads this commitment as authenticity even when they don't consciously identify why.
The most-discussed contemporary case for practical effects is Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). George Miller's two-hour Namibian-desert chase was shot with approximately 150 modified practical vehicles, real stunt drivers performing the vehicle-to-vehicle stunts, and most pyrotechnic effects produced in-camera. The CGI is significant but largely supplementary — replacing skies, adding particle effects, occasionally extending vehicle damage.
The result is action filmmaking that does not look like comparable digital-driven work. The vehicles move with the actual weight that internal-combustion engines pushing several tons of metal at desert speeds actually produce. The stunt performers are physically present in the frame, performing for real cameras, with real fall distances behind them. The film's defenders argue that no entirely-CGI version of the same sequences could have produced the same visceral effect.
Christopher Nolan's filmography has, since The Dark Knight (2008), included a series of practical-effects sequences that the industry generally would have produced digitally. The Dark Knight's truck flip in downtown Chicago was a real truck being really flipped on a real downtown street. Inception's rotating-hallway sequence was a real rotating hallway built on a soundstage. Interstellar's rural cornfield was a real 500-acre cornfield grown on location. Tenet's Boeing 747 crash was a real 747 (purchased from a salvage yard) being deliberately driven into a real hangar. Oppenheimer's Trinity test was a practical pyrotechnic effect.
The commitment is expensive. The 747 sequence alone cost more than fully digital alternatives would have. Nolan's argument, articulated across multiple interviews, is that practical effects produce footage that audiences read as real because, at the underlying photonic level, they are real. The camera is recording actual events. The digital pipeline that would have replaced them is, however good, recording simulated events that the audience perceives — usually unconsciously — as constructed.
The cases where CGI has won are real and substantial. Creature work above a certain scale (large monsters, alien beings, fantastical animals) is now almost always digital. The pre-CGI tradition (the practical xenomorph in Aliens, the practical T-Rex in Jurassic Park) has been almost entirely displaced by digital creature work. The reasons are not aesthetic — they're operational. A digital creature can be re-animated for additional sequences without re-rigging the practical effect. The creature's performance can be refined in post-production. The schedule risk is significantly lower.
Environment work is also now almost entirely digital. The vistas of Dune: Part Two's Arrakis are partially digital extensions of practical sets. The Pandora environments of the Avatar films are almost entirely digital. The Mandalorian's StageCraft volume (the LED-wall production technology developed by Industrial Light & Magic) is the contemporary state of the art for environment-driven productions. The audience accepts the environments as real because they are visually consistent and credibly rendered.
The practical-vs-CGI argument is, in some sense, a false binary. Almost every contemporary major film is a hybrid. The Christopher Nolan films are mostly practical with digital cleanup. The Marvel films are mostly digital with practical inserts. The Mad Max films are practical-heavy with digital extension. The question is no longer 'practical or digital' but 'what's the right mix for this specific sequence.'
The directors who will continue to be visually distinctive across the next decade are the ones who can articulate, project-by-project, what each effect type is best at and refuse the industry-default solutions. The Christopher Nolan and George Miller approach — choosing practical when it serves the film, choosing digital when it does, but always making the choice deliberately — is the working model that contemporary cinematographers and directors increasingly cite as foundational.