As a child of the ’80s and ’90s, I grew up watching action movies with fancy pyrotechnics, stunts I was not to try at home and pro-Reagan motifs. Granted I’m happy to see the pro-Reagan motifs removed as they are no longer socially relevant, the age of CGI in movies took away that wonderful feeling you got from knowing the explosions and stunts were all real.

Ok, so using CGI for safety purposes is a good thing, but what happens when using CGI gets abused? You get “Star Wars” Episodes One, Two and Three.

Heavy CGI worked in “300,” but it mostly produces an atmosphere in which the acting feels forced and below par. This is why we should all be thankful for director Christopher Nolan.

In both “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” Nolan used CGI to improve the action sequences instead of creating the action sequences. Audiences and critics showed their appreciation for the efforts of realism with their pocketbooks.

However, real stunts and real action does have a cost. In the case of “The Dark Knight,” stuntman Conway Wickliffe died testing a car stunt for the film.

Jackie Chan notoriously does all his own stunts in his movies and provided countless hours of entertainment at the expense of a large number of the bones in his body.

Though CGI can take away from the realism of the action, CGI should still be welcomed when it subtracts significant danger from stunts.

On the other hand, what’s the sense of using CGI to develop the background of a small elevator that could have been built to look much better for less money? This logic resulted in just one of the many scenes from the “Star Wars” prequels that played out similarly to the old “Wing Commander” and “Command and Conquer” between mission cinematic sequences.

A performance like that is inexcusable for a major motion-picture studio. Please, just build the darn set instead of relying on the “green screen of death,” Hollywood.