10. Tron (1982) – Light Cycles

While Tron made approximately eight dollars at the box office, there’s no denying the film’s historical impact when it comes to CGI. Toy Story director John Lasseter once famously noted, “Without Tron, there would be no Toy Story.” Even though Tron wasn’t necessarily the first flick to use CG, it was the first to do so in order to create a fantastic, fleshed-out, hyper-real world which was simultaneously larger than life and utterly believable.

And while many aspects of Tron were computer generated (the tanks, Jeff Bridges’ pal Bit, and most of the landscape), no scene can be described as more memorable or awesome than the light cycle chase. As Tron and Flynn zoom around a virtual arena leaving solid light trails in their wakes, it’s difficult not to feel the speed and excitement of the chase – despite the fact that the cycles don’t actually exist.

9. The Abyss (1989) – Pseudopod

It took a full seven years for the Academy to recognize the power of CGI come Oscar time, and it took The Abyss to make them do it. James Cameron’s underwater sci-fi flick garnered an Academy Award for Visual Effects thanks to its rendering of the pseudopod, an entirely water-based lifeform which, while only appearing in one scene of the film, looked pretty damned cool.

8. Terminator 2 (1991) – The T-1000

The T-1000 built upon everything visually spectacular about The Abyss’s pseudopod, making it the single most impressive CG creature ever created to date. Whether we’re talking about the T-1000’s impressive ability to literally walk through prison bars by partially liquefying himself, or his tendency to turn his arms into brutal stabbing weapons, the T-1000 still remains one of the few blockbuster baddies to actually benefit from the power of CGI. Where many CG antagonists tend to look goofy (the troll in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone comes to mind), the T-1000’s CG aspects made him appear powerful, futuristic, and completely indestructible.

7. Jurassic Park (1993) – “Welcome…to Jurassic Park”

When initially developing Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg wanted to use the stop-motion talents of Phil Tippet to create his reptilian creatures. Upon seeing Industrial Light and Magic’s prototype render of a computer generated velociraptor, however, Tippet turned to Spielberg and sighed, “I think I’m extinct.”

He was right. After audiences had witnessed the beauty and horror of Jurassic Park’s CG dinosaurs, they didn’t want to go back to the days of miniatures and stop-motion. Can you really blame them?

6. Forrest Gump (1994) – Meeting celebrities

While Gump’s special effects most certainly show their seams fourteen years later (Gump’s interview with John Lennon is especially painful, as the ex-Beatle’s mouth digitally contorts and extends to almost absurd dimensions), one can’t understate how damned impressive they were during the film’s release. 60 Minutes did a piece on the effects team, highlighting their ability to insert Forrest Gump into archival footage alongside Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy. In 1994, it seemed complex as all hell.

5. Toy Story (1995) – The world’s first fully CG animated film

Toy Story was the film which gave birth to the CG animated feature, and subsequently inspired a half-dozen “two buddies who don’t quite get along go on an epic quest to save something” CGI flicks (think about it – Shrek, Monster’s Inc, Ice Age, et cetera). Apart from being a fantastic movie in its own right, Toy Story proved that audiences were willing to accept and relate to entirely computer-generated media.

4. The Matrix (1999) – “I can dodge bullets?”

As the film which more or less pioneered the entire concept of “bullet time,” nearly every subsequent action flick of the 21^st century owes something to The Matrix. While the film also showed us a hell of a lot of impressive practical stuntwork (the martial arts and gunfighting scenes, for instance), The Matrix also wowed international audiences with its innovative use of computer graphics and CG camera movement.

3. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) – The Uncanny Valley

Final Fantasy singlehandedly bankrupted Square Pictures. Not because it was awful, of course, but because it was so incredibly meh. The story was uninspired, the characters bland, and, most notable of all, the animation stiff and creepy. It seemed that Square had managed to find the Uncanny Valley -- that area of robotics where artificial life forms look just human enough to be somewhat convincing, but just artificial enough to be terrifyingly awkward and disturbing – and build an entire movie around it.

It didn’t go over so well.

2. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) – Pretty much the entire thing

Filmmakers are officially no longer bound by physical reality. In Kerry Conran’s first (and thus far, only) film, he combined live actors and green screen to create a gorgeous, otherworldly adventure film in which his only limit was, quite literally, his imagination. Granted, the story was pretty bland and the green screen effects would later be outdone by Sin City, but Sky Captain was still the first to try the technology out.

1. Beowulf (2007) – Climbing out of the valley

I’ll admit it: Beowulf doesn’t represent a particularly large step forward in the history of CGI, but it’s a step nonetheless. Where critics and audiences expressed disgust and horror at the uncanny wax museum creations in Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express, they reacted much more positively to the CG versions of Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie, and Anthony Hopkins in Beowulf. The film was still criticized for having a dull plot and a gimmicky 3D aspect, but it nonetheless demonstrated that technology has begun to move out of the uncanny valley – however slowly.