Watch the first Jurassic Park and the newest installment back-to-back.
 
Watch any of the first three Star Wars movies and the 4th one (Episode I) back-to-back.
 
Watch any 20th-century movie where lots of things explode, and compare to recent stuff that's 100% CGI.
 
Even the very best all-digital effects can't compare with actually blowing something up or even having a guy in a rubber suit. Those raptors in the first Jurassic Park were guys in suits, and they were scary. The T-Rex blowing snot onto the window was a puppet, and it was scary. When the Alien burst out of the guy's chest, the actors' shocked responses were genuine - they hadn't been told in advance what was going to happen. Not as convincing as if they'd been told to pretend something was happening that would only be rendered in later.
 

Oh....one of them guys are you?
 
You just got Micheal Bay's attention.....

bitflipper
Watch the first Jurassic Park and the newest installment back-to-back.
 
Watch any of the first three Star Wars movies and the 4th one (Episode I) back-to-back.

Ouch! These suggestions sounds painful.
 
But your observation is interesting. I may have to eventually give one a go. I am curious now.
 

The original Star Wars movie space scenes just looked so more solid than any modern CGI.

I'm not a big fan of computer animated cartoons either, the characters just don't seem to have much character, theyre like clip art.

Hmm...  And these forums are all digital.  Explains a lot. 

Regarding the OP, I couldn't agree more.... I think back to some of the great effects in the original Poltergeist movie.... those were way better done than modern CGI. However - even in that movie, the simplistic "stacking chairs" creeped me out more than anything else - still does.

Yes I agree to a certain extent, and horror movies are a good example. The Exorcist, The Omen, Nightmare on Elm Street (budget of just $1.8 million compared to $26 mill for the abysmal CGI remake) all made the most of the techniques of the day.
 
However, when you watch something like the 'Helm's Deep' section of 'Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers', that's where CGI really comes into it's own, just astonishing.
 
I hated 'Jurassic World' btw, they forgot all about having characters you can care about, and...a story.

+1 Bit
 
And that is not even mentioning the remake of Lawnmower Man:
 

bitflipperEven the very best all-digital effects can't compare with actually blowing something up or even having a guy in a rubber suit. Those raptors in the first Jurassic Park were guys in suits, and they were scary. The T-Rex blowing snot onto the window was a puppet, and it was scary. When the Alien burst out of the guy's chest, the actors' shocked responses were genuine - they hadn't been told in advance what was going to happen. Not as convincing as if they'd been told to pretend something was happening that would only be rendered in later.
 

I wonder how much of this is technological and how much is just good film making. 
 
Today they want to show off what they can and it always seems to be "more, more, bigger, more". 
With analog special effects, the directors had to carefully edit a scene to get the maximum reaction out of what was possible - IOW they had to do their job.

drewfx1
 
I wonder how much of this is technological and how much is just good film making. 
 
Today they want to show off what they can and it always seems to be "more, more, bigger, more". 
With analog special effects, the directors had to carefully edit a scene to get the maximum reaction out of what was possible - IOW they had to do their job.

And they had to actually blow stuff up, while exposing very expensive high speed cameras cast crew and neighborhood to the effects, and if something went wrong, do it over again from building the model. The cost of digital effects is almost certainly less than staging the kind of thing they do in the box today. If there were analog ways to do some of the stuff we take for granted now, it would have been done in the 1930's.