Bingowings said:

While the CGI makes some of the concepts in those films easier to render I am tempted to think that some of the sequences were built around the ability to make those images rather than to illustrate the story in the best way possible.

The water tendril in The Abyss looks good to this day but is it necessary to the story?

Terminator 2 (putting aside my belief that it wasn't that good and not at all necessary) sometimes used CGI to make core story concepts possible but like The Abyss was often used to tediously show off what was then possible and shoe-horned it into the story.

But The CGI aspects of the Robert Patrick character do make the movie better, simply because it shows the difference between the Arnold Terminator Model, and a new advanced Robert Patrick Terminator model. So in that sense, Cameron succeeded because you are seeing the technology of the Terminator right in front of your face.

Now of course Cameron, Spielberg, Lucas, etc, all want to use the CGI to show off something new to the fans, but Cameron doesn't go overboard in T2 and The Abyss where the movie becomes a videogame with actors. They use CGI specifically to tell the story better, and I have no problem with it.

I'm sure we have all talked about this before, but Coruscant is a CGI environment that looks exactly like the real environment from Bladerunner.