Sure, CGI is a wonderful tool for movie-makers, allowing them to craft scenes and special effects (SFX) that would otherwise be impossible or merely too expensive to create. Indeed, some movies would never have seen the light of darkened cinema halls if it weren’t for this wonderful technology.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in James Cameron’s Titanic – one of CGI’s finest moments.

As Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of US software giant Microsoft Corp put it, the No.1 benefit of information technology is that “it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. …. in a sense, it is all about potential.”

From the time CGI was first used, in 2D in the Yul Bryner 1973 classicWestworld and in 3D in its 1976 sequel Futureworld, then on to the movies of CGI’s greatest proponent, George Lucas, the technology has been integral to bringing the visions of some of the greatest directors to the silver screen.

But I’m also reminded of the line by US politician Mark Kennedy, who said, “All of the biggest technological inventions created by man – the airplane, the automobile, the computer – says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness. “

When bringing visions to the screen is as simple as giving orders to a bunch of programmers with the latest computer workstations, a bit of the art is lost. When you don’t have to painstakingly build, and justify, every single scene and stunt, it’s easy to get carried away and pack in everything you can.

Directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron used CGI effectively in their genre movies by seamlessly marrying it with real-live action in Jurassic Park (1993) and Aliens(1986, pic below).

I remember many of the “urban legends” surrounding Ridley Scott’s obsession with perfection, especially in his 1982 sci-fi noir classic Blade Runner.

One was that he hired publishing consultants to come up with ideas of what kind of magazines would be around in the kind of dystopian future he had envisioned, had them do mock copies of these magazine covers – down to the detail of their front-cover blurbs – and then had them printed out.

All this to populate a newsstand that flashes past the viewer as the futurist bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) chases the replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) down a street.

Or how shooting had to be held up for one day as he tried to get the perfect angle on a pencil on the desk of Deckard’s police chief Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh).

Contrast this with the climactic battle scene in 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Movie, where it was so easy to draw up one dragon that debutant director Courtney Solomon threw in hundreds as a mere after-thought. The obscure 1981Dragonslayer had more charm and atmosphere, its single dragon more foreboding and fearsome.

While the relative “ease” by which moviemakers can bring anything to the big screen may mean a certain lack of moderation and meaningfulness to their inventiveness, the converse can also be true, I admit.

The gritty and enormous amount of effort put in by SFX legend Ray Harryhausen with his pioneering stop-motion model animation work saw the directors milking it for all its worth in movies such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), with their long, drawn-out SFX sequences.

Blood, sweat and tears: Futurist bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in director Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic Blade Runner; for which Scott was obsessed with perfection.

But there was a certain charm there too.

If anything, it’s non-genre directors who have made the best use of CGI in terms of enriching stories. One of the best examples is 1994’sForrest Gump, in which the CGI use was seamless and transparent. The technology was used to “erase” the legs of war-wounded Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise) and to insert Forrest (Tom Hanks) into historical video footage. You wouldn’t have known at all that computers were used for these effects.

Directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron have also used CGI effectively in their genre movies by seamlessly marrying it with real-live action in Jurassic Park (1993) andAliens (1986).

Indeed, Cameron managed to make CGI so grittily real in his 1997Titanic that you could practically smell the brine in the seawater and the oil on the engine parts.

And while without CGI it would have been nearly impossible for Lucas to have brought his Star Wars franchise to the big screen, it would at least have also made it impossible for him to have changed that character-defining moment in that “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

In the original Star Wars bar scene, the charmingly amoral rogue Han Solo (Ford, again) fired first at the bounty hunter Greedo (some guy in a costume) because he was, after all, a rogue, and it would have been the smart thing to do.

When Lucas released an SFX-updated version in recent years, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope saw Greedo firing first, hitting the wall a few feet away from Solo in moviedom’s second-most appalling miss. (The most appalling miss occurs in the same movie, with Solo using the “parsec” – which denotes distance – as a measurement of time in the Kessel run).

Finally, the most damning condemnation I can give CGI is that it allowed New Zealand director Peter Jackson to screw up the final instalment ofThe Lord of the Rings.

After receiving feedback that the Legolas Greenleaf (Orlando Bloom) action sequences had had the fanboys drooling, he did minor re-shoots and added in CGI-heavy sequences to make The Return of the Kingmore about how “kewl” the Elf was in the Battle of Pelennor Fields, rather than about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) finally coming into his legacy.

The one was all about special effects; the other was about story. I may be a big sci-fi and fantasy fan, but guess which one I prefer?