His Harry Potter installment The Prisoner of Azkaban was arguably one of the more human entries in the film series, balancing necessary CG elements with the revelatory weight of Harry’s lineage and Cuarón’s organically tempered camerawork. (Children of Men, shot in a space somewhere between POV and verité style, is an even stronger example of how the director reflects the underlying humanity in his narratives through technique, and includes one of the most beautiful and harrowing continuous tracking shots ever put to film.)

This isn’t a new trend.

Pathos is what makes these stories work so well, and the technological limitations present in Gravity’s contemporary setting seem to promise an imminent, character-driven intensity rather than big, dumb sci-fi popcorn. There is no armada of megaton, fusion-drive leviathan, no alien menagerie, no humanoid androids just off-kilter enough to trigger an inner neurological response here. That’s not a bad thing.

But for all its grounding, Gravity isn’t quite out of the bounds of its own uncanny valley: the virtual environment it takes place in.

You’ve probably experienced the effects of the uncanny valley. A psychological concept floated by Japanese robotics scientist Masahiro Mori back in 1970, it attempts to explain why we find artificial or humanoid reproductions unsettling compared to a living, breathing human.

Tron Legacy’s young Jeff Bridges is pretty creepy.

The most common exposure is probably seeing CG characters in films, and the valley’s boundaries should be immediately evident to anyone that’s ever watched an effects-based creation in a movie and found it more creepy than convincing. (And the more “human” these rendered lifeforms try to be, the less we’re generally convinced of their authenticity.)

Since we can’t reconcile reproductions of ourselves with how our brains already know humans look and behave, the uncanny valley has been restricted to the existential confines of whatever’s made in, or at least closely resembling, our own image. The results aren’t guaranteed to work.

Earlier efforts like the cast of Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf or David Fincher’s de-aging Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button feel more like shiny facsimiles rather than physical beings (to be fair, Beowulf was completely CG, though it touted then state-of-the-art mo-cap of the actors’ faces).

Which dips deeper into the valley?

Of course, the sheer amount of detail visual effects can push increases with every passing wave of tech advancements, and it’s become significantly easier in the past few years for filmmakers to push rendered characterizations in a way that’s believable on-screen. But there’s an inherent insult in all this facial and bodily progress, too. With the past decade having seemingly been spent almost entirely on making improvements to “living” visuals, whatever art direction remains has suffered.

This isn’t a new trend. When George Lucas revisited Star Wars for the series’ needless, abortive prequel trilogy, two of the three new films were shot all-digitally and each were stuffed with so many CG created sets and setpieces that the actors may as well have been running around in a ‘90s point-and-click adventure game.

The result – a universe whose abrupt divorce from the reality of palpable sets and locations was replaced with a digital landscape nearly 100 percent made from computers – is about as credible as it is easy to take seriously.

With Lucas having also digitally tampered with the original trilogy so many times already in various video releases, that’s a long pall cast over the series, and one Disney is going to have to approach with a lot of caution in order to rise up.

Some legacy.

It’s like I’m really there!

Compare that to the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, which counteracted CG additions to its Middle-Earth with both the natural beauty of New Zealand and some amazingly detailed sets the cast could walk on, not to mention a population of thousands of flesh-and-blood extras in makeup and costume. Which universe seems more real?

It’s not uncommon for genres like sci-fi and fantasy to rely on dense, fantastical worlds whose construction costs would be astronomical if spaces were primarily handmade and used in mostly location-shot scenes in order to bring them to life on-screen. Movies are a tech-powered industry, and it’s clear that a certain amount of visual effects are needed to pull off some types of fiction. That doesn’t mean anyone should get an automatic free pass to abuse CG as a catch-all. Yet this is exactly what Hollywood seems to be skewing towards.

No one should get a free pass to abuse CG as a catch-all.

Not even Peter Jackson is immune. Thus far his return to Tolkienian fantasy with The Hobbit has felt generally hollow and lifeless, thanks to an incredible amount of superfluous CG. Rather than once again capitalizing much on terra firma with a mix of practical and digital effects, the Middle-Earth of 2012’s An Unexpected Journey is almost unrecognizable.

Lacking any sense of physicality, the film’s dwarven cities, elven sanctuaries and underground goblin shantytowns alike are broadly painted as videogame cutscenes rather than tangible locations of wood, stone and steel. When held up to the original trilogy, the difference is jarring. It was heartbreaking to see that familiar realm I so loved in Lord of the Rings reduced to so many 48 FPS-tailored pixels, and I found it almost impossible to not be repeatedly taken out of the story because of it.