Do you like CGI?

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This thread is for people who want to talk about works of fiction they like or hate that are made entirely with CGI.

I don't mind all-CG films, so long as the story is good instead of soulless. I watched "Frozen" for the first time a few months back, and loved it so much I bought the soundtrack (still waiting for a decent price on the Blu-Ray).

I think I liked it more when computers were more primitive, and generating CGI environments and characters / creatures on such a grand scale as we have today was not possible or practical. Currently, CGI can start to ruin movies - examples I would cite include the recent Superman film with Russell Crow, or The Avengers, where the physical size or quantity of enemies on screen just gets to be outlandish and unbelievable. Or the 2nd Star Wars trilogy where the films seemed to be almost intended as a vehicle to present a tour-de-force of CGI prowess on the part of the effects people, rather than to further the story of Star Wars. The other thing that disappoints often is when the movement of CGI generated characters / monsters doesn't look realistic and is a bit distracting - a good example would be the first Spiderman film with Toby Macguire. That said I do like CGI in a lot of movies, even in some movies that do suffer somewhat from some of these flaws they do have redeeming aspects as well - examples would include the Matrix Revolutions and the Matrix Reloaded. And I really loved one of the first TV shows to make extensive use of CGI - Babylon 5 - it didn't always look 100% convincing but it served its purpose.

Producer to director:
Here's 200 million dollars. I want you to turn it into 400 million after expenses.
Director: Well I have no ideas for a story. I don't do stories about characters, plot, or story line.
Producer: No problem. I own the film rights to "X" (insert movie title). We'll call it a reboot.
Director: OK. We CGI everything. We turn our hero into a psychotic who hates the human race. We turn our villain into a power hungry maniac who loves killing people and who hates our comic book hero even more than he loves killing people. We start off with CGI dragons from LOTR, add a few space crafts, have lots of explosions and feature new and different ways of blowing people up. The key to our film is starting off with a couple of people being killed, have our hero agonise over people being killed, have a few more people being shot, dismembered and blown up, and then build it up towards the end with lots of people being killed.
Producer: Make sure you have the hero kill the villain at the end of the movie.
Director: We always do that.
Postscript:
Movie makes 500 million dollars after expenses.
Critics hail the director as a genius who has found a new angle to project our comic book hero.

Only when it's done well. I've seen some really crappy CGI that clearly was cartoonishly unrealistic. But it's used at it's best in movies like Jurassic Park, and all it's sequels, where the dinosaurs (at least in my opinion) looked real. I must say, though, I truly miss the days where animatronics and puppets were used in movies like John Carpenter's The Thing. In the Carpenter movie, you knew the fear inspiring object was actually present in the scene; very different from the images later painted by computer onto the film, as with the miserable prequel to Carpenter's masterpiece.

Some of the CG in the prequel is remarkably good, which only makes the bad CG stand out more due to the contrast. It reminds me of Peter Jackson's King Kong remake, the CG of which was stunning for Kong but embarrassing pretty much everywhere else. It's amazing how uneven it can be from scene to scene in a film; though I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise, since these days they often have separate effects studios handling the CG for different elements. Creatures are done by one studio, buildings and backgrounds by another, etc. Sometimes it all comes together beautifully, like in District 9, but you also get horribly uneven patchworks like The Mummy Returns, which has both some of the best and worst CG I've ever seen.

Thing is CGI is not over used and done properly looks great. But today filmmakers use it out of laziness and over use it and it looks bad, even simple things.
For example, the first Jurassic Park from 1993 still looks good today, because they did no over do it, used real locations, used a lot of models and puppets and practical effects to blend them in the CGI.
Terminator 2 Judgment day from 1991 or the Abyss from 1989, both are famous for their CGI and they still look good today, again because they didn't over use it.

Sadly today they shoot half of the films on green screens then replace the green screen with whatever background and then throw in even more CGI, and it looks really bad and doesn't ages well at all, for Example Star Wars episode 1,2 and 3 (the prequels) they look bad today.

Another thing is even simple stuff, like gun shots, in the 90's and before when people got shot they used squibs and blood packets and it looked good, today they just throw in CGI blood and it looks awful, it looks fake and you can tell it's not real and bad looking, nothing will ever replace the exploding blood packets and the unpredictable way real liquids gushes out.

And then you have movies with no CGI and that still look amazing today like Blade Runner, all practical effects, all optical, all mate paintings.

So what I'm saying when CGI is used with parsimony and with practical and real effects then it's fine, if you can't tell there is CGI then the magic works and you have been tricked by the filmmakers.

Has for films 100% CGI, they don't count, they are usually animation films and that is another discussion.

Some CGI is okay, but too much of it is a bad thing. Have you seen Green Lantern (2011)? Ya, that was well, first it was an awful movie, but second it's graphics made me want to throw up from all its green fakiness. Other times, such as with Frozen (2013), it turns out to be really beautiful. I think how they use it is really important too. If they use it for pretty much anything it's not that special and seems a waste. In Huge (2011), the CGI they used was absolutely breath taking and in Life of Pi (2012) the tiger and ocean were really well done.