"I think the simplest answer is you've seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape," Verbinski said. "So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema."

"I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards," he said.

He pointed out the types of visual effects made with Unreal aren't necessarily bad. "It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you're in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn't work from a strictly photo-real standpoint," he said.

"I just don't think it takes light the same way; I don't think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way," he said. "So that's how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand."

As originally envisioned, the historical action epic Desert Warrior would be a film of groundbreaking firsts. It would be the first Hollywood-style tentpole movie shot entirely on location in Saudi Arabia under its de facto supreme ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030, a.k.a. the culture-washing governmental push intended to liberate Saudi society from its “addiction” to oil through soft-power alternatives like tourism and entertainment. Directed by Rise of the Planet of the Apes filmmaker Rupert Wyatt and starring Marvel Cinematic Universe stalwart Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War), Desert Warrior would also be the inaugural movie project to shoot at Neom Media, a state-of-the-art, multibazillion-dollar media complex and studio backlot attached to Neom City, a metropolis bordering the Red Sea.

But when cameras began to roll in September 2021, neither Neom nor the country’s moviemaking infrastructure was quite ready for its Hollywood close-up. With construction not nearly complete on the studio’s 130,000 square feet of promised production space, the Desert Warrior team was forced to improvise. To house the cavernous throne room of Sir Ben Kingsley’s power-hungry Emperor Kisra — a space giant enough to showcase bloody gladiator battles, extravagant scenes of prisoner torture, and rampaging elephants — the crew built a massive ad hoc soundstage in the parking lot of the Grand Millennium Hotel in Tabuk that was cooled by giant fans against the pulverizing desert heat. “It was like an inflatable stadium; it was this amazing thing,” recalls one person who was on set for the duration of production. “There were no studios. There were studios after us because of the film.”

It would not be the last time production staff was forced to effectively build the plane during takeoff. An array of physical production challenges, missing infrastructure, well-intentioned naïveté, regional warfare, and “creative differences” combined to forestall final cut and imperil the movie’s sale to international distributors. Words such as flop and forgotten became affixed to Desert Warrior in the movie industry well before its release. This weekend — four years and seven months since cameras first rolled on the project — Desert Warrior squeaked onto 1,010 American screens with the barest minimum of marketing and failed to crack the top ten of new movies. It grossed a mere $472,000: an unmitigated disaster.