Part of this was because moviegoers had yet to accept CGI as anything more than a novelty. As journalist David Morgan observed in 1993, "audiences were always aware that what they were watching was carefully crafted special effects." Which is why for all of Terminator 2: Judgment Day's success and technological innovation, its effects didn't so much sweep audiences away as it did elicit "How did they do that?" reactions. For effects to truly break, their creators had to advance the technology to the point where the seam between illusion and reality completely disappeared.

Jurassic Park did that. Spielberg told Tom Shone (for Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer) that when he saw Industrial Light and Magic's first test shots of the dinosaurs, he felt as though he was "watching our future unfolding on the TV screen." George Lucas, who was also there, recalled "it was like one of those moments in history, like the invention of the light bulb or the first telephone call... A major gap had been crossed and things were never going to be the same." He was right. In the words of Shone: "Jurassic Park heralded a revolution in movies as profound as the coming of sound in 1927."

Jurassic Park's revolution was technological, but more importantly, it was popular. If Spielberg and Lucas saw the future of cinema in those shots, it was the public who made that future a reality. Sam Neill and Laura Dern's stunned awe upon seeing a real-looking brachiosaur on its hind legs eating from a tree was a perfect mirror of our own. Audiences believed. When that dinosaur's feet came down with a thud, the reverberations rippled past dumbstruck viewers and into moviemaking itself.

Two years later, the world witnessed the first CG character in a main role (Casper), more realistic CG-rendered animals (Jumanji), and the first feature-length computer-animated movie (Toy Story). Between 1996 and 1998 special effects films started to create entire cities, armies of creatures and destructive disasters in films like Dragonheart, Independence Day, Twister, Mars Attacks, The Fifth Element, Starship Troopers, Titanic, and Godzilla. It was an exciting time to witness how far CGI's capabilities could be pushed. By 1999—when The Mummy, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, and The Matrix contributed their own technological forward leaps—computer-generated effects weren't assistive moviemaking tools anymore. They were the driving force of entire films.

Now, almost no major-studio movie is made without CGI—even Oscar-baiting dramas like Social Network, or comedies like The Campaign and the coming The Hangover Part III. Trailers now have more CG shots than all of Terminator 2. Budgets have swelled into the hundreds of millions. Of course, this has led to a lot of bad films getting made. And special effects have become so pervasive, they've lost much of their capacity to cause wonder. Today, it's nearly as common for audience to pan a film's effects (like those in I Am Legend, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Green Lantern and even King Kong's dinosaurs) as it is for them to praise it: We've gotten so used to CGI that the illusion, the sense of realness that pervaded Jurassic Park, is dead.