I think this is an instance of the symptoms being mistaken for the disease. CGI did not ruin movies, it was the demand for shallow, detached, visual excess that

I think this is an instance of the symptoms being mistaken for the disease. CGI did not ruin movies, it was the demand for shallow, detached, visual excess that has pushed aside story telling altogether in favor of cheap tricks. There are still good stories, but they make nothing like the movies with big explosions and apocalyptic visions ... insert Michael Bay joke here ..., but it's really also just a set of people taking advantage of and serving a systemic, cultural, and civilizational degradation and contraction, or even possibly an implosion. Michael Bay got rich/famous off spamming explosions because that appealed to the masses. People of the past would have likely found all these movies today extremely boring and repetitive, because they are. For example, I can recall exactly one movie I have ever seen that was not a "all ends well" ending. Essentially every single movie today is guaranteed to end a single way. There are no tragedies anymore, it's essentially all comedies (in the classical, not the modern sense), it's this weird mental drug that has been created that feeds only endorphins. It's boring and stunting. Just like movies did not ruin books, CGI did not ruin movies. They are merely phases on a clear degradation of our society and civilization where the people keep making poorer and poorer decisions. It's really not any different than the negative feedback loop of weight gain; more weight, means less likely to work out, which leads to physiological changes that make overeating more likely and has a negative impact on mental state, which acts as barrier to engaging in rigorous physical activity ... which starts the cycle over. "CGI ruined movies" because our society has been getting mentally less healthy and our standards, expectations, discipline, and principles have been dropping like rocks. It's the symptom, not the cause.