Let’s crunch some summer movie numbers: between May and August, Hollywood subjected the moviegoing public to 13 sequels, one prequel, three remakes, one movie based on a theme park ride, three comic book adaptations that weren’t sequels, eight movies with nine-figure budgets, one ‘American Idol’ spin-off, one wide release with a leading role for a woman over 40 (Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday) and one Gigli.

These stats prove what everyone knows about summer movies: they tend to be big, mindless spectacles that can be geared toward the largest possible demographic using pre-sold material. Fine, whatever, we’re used to it. But think back to the good old-fashioned halcyon days of blockbuster hysteria say, 1993 back when a movie like Jurassic Park genuinely wowed thrill junkies by using innovative visual effects in such a way that they honestly overcame the need for an engaging story or well-developed characters.

Flash forward a decade, when many summer releases aim to dazzle audiences by showing impossible, fantastic things they’d never dreamed of seeing before, all through the magic of computer-generated images (CGI). But instead of velociraptors convincingly ripping people in half with their teeth, 10 years of inflated budgets and supposed broken ground in CGI technique have given us movies whose CGI ambitions outreach their grasp.

Think about The Matrix Reloaded, the movie that begs us to ask: what’s the point of saving humanity from mind-controlling machines when the human characters are stone-faced automatons? Watching Neo (Keanu Reeves) deflect an ever-growing army of Agent Smiths (Hugo Weaving) carries absolutely no dramatic weight or suspense, because the audience is distracted by the exact moment that Weaving turns into the flat, lifeless, squishy-looking CGI Smith.

Ang Lee’s sublimely misconceived Hulk has it even worse. There’s nothing wrong with taking a contemplative, Oedipal approach to a story that’s basically about smashing things up real good, but did the drama have to be so murky and stilted? Forget all the complaints about how the Hulk didn’t look ‘real’ enough (what exactly does a real Hulk look like?). The problem was that the film found no way to carry whatever emotional connection the audience had to Eric Bana’s Bruce Banner (not that there was much) over to the all-CGI Hulk. The film never offered any sense that we were watching one character’s transformation, rather than two separate entities.

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle took the phenomenon of cruddy, expensive, useless CGI that merely serves to distance the audience from the action to new heights. In his effort to shoot the film like a Sprite commercial, director McG made even non-CGI scenes look flat, shiny and artificial. In this film, it wasn’t just the falling-helicopter scene and the falling-off-a-building scene that looked artificial. It was the Motocross scene. It was the mechanical bull scene. It was Demi Moore.

Spending tons of money on elaborate visual effects in order to create new, astounding worlds certainly has its place in filmmaking. But when all the time, effort and money leads to blockbuster films that look worse than they did 10 years ago therefore failing to please increasingly jaded audiences it’s time to wonder if scaling back might be for the best.