Movies like "Terminator II" and "The Abyss" (one of my favorites) used special effects to complement the story. Too many movies now use special effects to make up for the lack of a story. Among the worst examples of this is "Con Air", which really is nothing more than a series of explosions linked together by the thinnest of story lines. Simply put, special effects are no substitute for a good story.

Creating world class special effects requires a lot of talent. Several hundred people worked for 3 years to produce the wonderful movie, "Shrek". If you watch the bonus materials, you'll find that they deliberately backed off on the photo realism in some cases because they wanted it to be a cartoon.

I have not seen either "Spiderman" or the new Star Wars movie yet. Those movies are so heavily dependent on special effects and CGI that it puts tremendous schedule pressure on the animators. With that much work, perhaps even the quality of "Industrial Light & Magic" is slipping. It's also possible that some of the better ILM animators jumped ship to start their own companies.

I had the opportunity to work with some animators several years ago. It's harder than most people realize. We were using SoftImage (the same software used for such movies as "Joe's Apartment" and "Jurassic Park") to produce aircraft recognition training materials for fighter pilots. You wouldn't believe the amount of effort it took to render a simple 5 second animation and we were no where near Hollywood quality. I'm "artistically challenged" but we had some very good graphics artists on the project. The learning curve for SoftImage made the Rocky Mountains look like Kansas.