You know what? I’m gonna buck the trend and not spend several hundred words bashing the movie 2012 over the many splendid ways that it is an awful film. Not a peep on its hackneyed characters, overwrought melodrama, ridiculous premise — even by director Roland Emmerich’s standards — or eye-rolling “twist” ending.

Instead, I just want to point out that I find it incredibly funny that the special effects of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a film Emmerich made 14 years ago, look much, much more realistic than the special effects of 2012.

Why?

Because back in 1996, computer generated effects were just beginning to take off, so the filmmakers had to use the traditional method of miniatures and models to stage all of the scenes of the aliens nuking Earth (with a smattering of CGI for tweaks). This had a two-fold effect of forcing the effects teams to be much more creative in their depiction of the world-wide destruction, which they arguably pulled off quite well, and since they were using miniatures and models which actual exist in a physical state — and not just on a computer — they automatically look more “real.”

Whereas in 2012, in an era where CGI has become so common that it’s made many filmmakers lazy and uninspired in its usage, the effects are all-CGI-all-the-time, and, as a result, posses a soft, unreal, and plain fake feel about them, so all the scenes rendered of the Earth having its gigantic psychotic break and cutting itself end up lacking any emotion whatsoever. We are then sucked completely out of the movie, even if we don’t explicitly realize it.

I swear, the only two filmmakers in the last ten years who have been able to effectively use CGI on such a massive basis are Peter Jackson and James Cameron. I just wish the rest of Hollywood would wake the fuck up and take note.