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People Are Absolutely Losing It Over The Laughably Bad CGI Backgrounds In ‘Death On The Nile’

Death on the Nile
20th Century Fox

If you were one of the major stars cast in the 1978 film version of Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie’s beloved Hercule Poirot romp, you got a vacation out of it, too. The entire production was filmed on location, in Egypt. If you were cast in the new, plagued version starring and directed by Kenneth Branagh, you weren’t as lucky. Despite taking place in North Africa, the entire film was shot on a studio lot in Surrey, England, far from the pyramids of Giza.

Of course, you’d never know that to look at it! Or would you? The long-delayed murder mystery, which didn’t performed as well as the last Branagh-Poirot outing, recently hit Hulu, and now people are noticing that its movie magic isn’t always so magical.

A clip recently went viral showing some of the CGI backgrounds an army of techies whipped up to create the illusion that it was filmed in Egypt, all while the cast, among them Branagh and Annette Bening, was stranded in less sunny England. And, well, it’s not terribly convincing.

“I believe CGI is getting worse even as the tech advances,” one person wrote. “I don’t know if it’s laziness or cost cutting but so many shots look so much worse now than in the nineties. Look at these shots from DEATH ON THE NILE. It looks like it was shot at a local tv station’s weather map set.”

The filmmakers can’t even blame the pandemic on the lack of real location shooting. Nile was filmed back in 2019, before COVID turned film shoots into social distancing land mines, and long before one of its stars, Armie Hammer, was outed as an alleged sex freak and was subsequently no long all that present in the advertising.

As the clip made its way across social media, there were tons of jokes at its expense.

Some pointed out the real problem is with the lighting of the real-life actors not matching the CGI.

There were also other examples of bad CGI backgrounds from the movie.

The images look even worse when compared with the ’78 version of Nile with Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Mia Farrow, and more, which, again, was actually shot in Egypt.

Some, though, came to its defense. Sort of.