I think that might just be survivor bias. You don't remember, or have never watched, the bad pre-CGI movies.

It really depends.

Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts were both stop-motion animations for much of their effects. The artifice is obvious but ages well.

Forbidden Planet uses a mix of practical effects, mattes, and hand-drawn animations (the monsters of the Id). Again, fairly obvious, but all told, ages fairly well.

And 2001: A Space Odyssey, only ten years later, has effects many of which could be contemporary. Shots of Discovery in particular are near perfect, and I found the effects in the 1984 sequel, 2010 to be worse in regards -- the sagging of a supposedly zero-G bridge was one that still registers with me.

But there are also lots of bad examples. Many of the James Bond franchise sequences involving flight or spaceflight are pretty obviously cheesy. The effects from Superman are hit-or-miss. Rear and front-projection effects, especially in automobile scenes, where auto occupants clearly aren't in the same physics as the vehicle, are quite distracting to me (and date to the 1930s).

The thing about practicals -- model effects especially -- is that you've got a real physical object at play, and that's going to have depth and other elements which are still hard to capture in CGI. Though blends of CGI with live-action (the epiphany for me was True Lies which pioneered much of this) can be highly convincing. The key is subtlety.

This is definitely a problem in comparing current productions (movie, music, book, whatever) to older productions. A lot of modern science fiction is crap, IMO. But so was a lot of the stuff in the 1950s or any other decade. But if you go back to read 1950s scifi you find a great collection of books and stories because they're the ones that survived.

The challenge, then, when considering movies is to see who seems to be doing it well in the modern CGI-era. IMHO, Neill Blomkamp seems to be doing a good job in his movies. At least in the context of visual production. And then we can also find examples of bad or excessive CGI (Michael Bay, Peter Jackson in the Hobbit trilogy). It's probable that there are a large number of modern (say 2000 forward) movies with effective use of CGI that'll age very well, but we have to sift through the crap first.

It's also likely that there are a lot of narratively good movies that are going to age poorly because of poor CGI.

EDIT: Don't let me comment sleep deprived. I've cleaned up the language in the second paragraph.

Example of good CGI that most people do not recognize/remember as CGI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Gump#Visual_effects

You have a point, of course. Also the whole "everything old was better" effect, to which I'll admit I'm prone.

However, I think part of the problem with today's CGI is not only that it's so often badly done; I think the main problem is the excessive application of it.

CGI can be used tastefully or poorly; here Sturgeon's law applies. The thing is, nowadays CGI (especially when badly done) is more convenient than the traditional ways of old movies. Note I'm not arguing using them isn't a trade-off; just that they are way more convenient than traditional SFX. You can do lots of CGI in your movie, especially if it's the cheap kind and you don't have any good taste. I'm no film-maker, but I guess in the past, even bad SFX directors were constrained in what they could do, and how much they could do. You wouldn't have been able to sprinkle your movie with that many poor effects, simply because even bad effects were expensive and hard to do. And this applied even more to good effects!

With decent film-makers, the "let's try to do the best with limited resources" effect kicked in, and I think it's one of the best and most motivating effects for artists, whether they want to admit it or not.

Take a look at the classic example of George Lucas' Tattooine and Mos Eisley. In the original, because budget was limited and SFX harder to do, it looked like a desolate Western-inspired town in a barren desert planet. You can just picture the tumbleweed rolling by, a few strangers in the streets eyeing each other, the silhouette of the occasional monstrous beast of burden in the distance.

After SFX became more practical, and Lucas retooled the scene, almost everyone who isn't him agreed it was worsened instead of improved. Because now he had the budget and the tools to "improve" the scene, he added buildings, lens flare, lots of fake-looking computerized beasts everywhere (where before, the obviously fake-looking rubber beasts were used sparingly because they were expensive AND fake), robots, until every feature of the SFX toolset had been used at least once. The effect of a barren, desolate desert town was lost because access to easier CGI was available and George Lucas knew no restraints.

I think George Lucas didn't change; what changed was his budget and access to better tools. In a way, worse tools made him a better film-maker.

I suspect a similar effect applies to many modern CGI-fests: they probably wouldn't be superb movies anyway, but they are made even worse by unrestrained access to CGI tools.

Absolutely. If you look at the Phantom Menace today, the CGI looks like a bad video game. The "real" Star Wars trilogy aged fantastically; the stuff done as miniatures looks miles more convincing than the best CGI on offer in 1999.

I bet we'll get to "good enough" CGI someday given the amount of money and effort being dumped into it, but it might take a long time. The details are going to be the hardest part for sure.

I'd actually disagree with this. A lot of what is remembered about the first SW trilogy is sanitized a lot by the many re-releases Lucas has made over the years.

Off the top of my head, for example, in the original original trilogy, R2D2's color panels switched from blue to black on the shots where he was seen in space so as to not conflict with the chromakey color used to shoot the space background. I'd argue something like that is much worse than bad CGI: even though the shots looked plausible visually, it actually made me wonder if R2D2 was still on the ground and we were looking at a different R2 unit (or, in other words, actually injected some uncertainty into the story the filmmaker was attempting to tell).

I think it's more a case of how well the special effects was done regardless of whether it's CGI or not.

Jurassic Park for me still looks as real now as it did back then.

I think there is also an element of how we watch movie scenes today, compared with how it was done in the past.

For instance, if you want to see the ending of Terminator with the stop-motion animation, today you'd just go to youtube and watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KeniFoiT-0

It looks pretty decent, but that's not really terrifying anymore like people remember it.

In the past though, if you wanted to see that scene, you probably sat through the entire movie. When you do that, I think the effects in that scene work much better. That is because the rest of the movie was conditioning you, getting you excited. Setting the stage for how things in that universe work and look. Seen within the full context of their movies, old special effects hold up much better IMHO.

Another movie where I think this is in strong effect is the original Robocop. ED-209 in the boardroom is much more effective after sitting through the opening of the film.

See, it's funny, because I actually got to see Jurassic Park again recently on a big screen.

On the one hand, I certainly found it immersive as a piece of storytelling, but I could also clearly see the transition between CGI dinosaurs and puppet ones. The flipping between methods didn't trick me as well as it has sometimes in the past.

Probably the best practical SFX I've ever seen would have to be John Carpenter's The Thing. The way the monsters worked--goddamn, shivers up my spine. Also, one of the tightest and suspenseful movies there is, even after the first viewing.

I'd add the vivid and memorable CGI characters of Gollum and the T-1000. Also, many Pixar and post-merger Disney creations, though maybe a different standard applies there.