I'd say practical effects peaked in the 80s, then the 90s were the prime for experimenting and blending CG in more limited ways before it took over in the 2000s as you mentioned.AustinAg2K said:
To be fair, movies from the 90s also hold up better than a lot of the movies from the 2000s. The 90s were the peak time for practical effects. The technology was light years better than the 60s, but not yet heavy CGI. Starting in the 2000s, CGI really started taking over. There are a lot of movies that people watched from 2000 - 2010, that they thought looked amazing, and then 5 years later looked like $&#+.
Films like T2, Jurassic Park, Contact, Titanic, Forrest Gump, The Fifth Element, The Matrix, etc., couldn't have been done without CG but it was used really selectively and in groundbreaking ways. Some pushed it a little too far like Starship Troopers and the first Star Wars prequel but they still did some incredible stuff. Peter Jackson also set the bar with some amazing blending of practical and CG for the LOTR films.
A lot of films in the 2000s just tried to do too much and it shows, then in the late 2000s into the 2010s the tech started catching up to the ambition and films like Avatar, Life of Pi, Gravity, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes set a new level for the kind of work that could be done.
