J.C. Hutchins laments the loss of visual effects from the 1970s and 1980s in the age of CGI.

You’ll likely call me a nostalgic proto-curmudgeon, but bear with me. I’ll cite Star Wars. I’ll take the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi over the pod race in The Phantom Menace any day. Same goes for the stop-motion AT-AT snow walkers in The Empire Strikes Back over whatever the walking tanks were called in the prequel trilogy. Same goes for the hand puppet Yoda, versus the its frog-hopping pixel-powered prequel version.

Why? Because, as anachronistic as it sounds, this stuff looks more “real” to me than the newer stuff—and it’s that “reality” that cements my belief in those fantastical worlds. I believe this buy-in hinges largely on those old school limitations: the necessity of physicality; the demand that a thing be built before it could be filmed. The effects actually occupied real space, had literal dimension, and obeyed familiar (and completely unconscious) audience expectations of gravity and physics.

Read the whole thing. I agree with it wholeheartedly. CGI can be used to enhance visual effects (see, for example, Forrest Gump or Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies), but only because they’re enhancing something that’s already there.