Good review. I remember seeing this movie in the theater at the time of it's release.
At the time I was disappointed by the limousine escape sequence mostly.
The 3D CGI effects are excellent, and I personally believe that modern movies are using less-realistic CGI now because there are plans to make it impossible to recognize the cutting edge CGI for the purpose of "faking' events.

Roland Emerich's team really killed it with Independence Day because what a lot of people don't realize is alot of that wasn't CGI. They actually built scaled down models of the White House, Empire State building, and the LA building, and blew them up with explosives. But then also used CGI for the more expansive scenes.
They also built scale models of the alien ships.

Another movie with very clever special effects is the film Tremors with Kevin Bacon.
The "Grabboid" breaking into Bert & Heather's basement scene stands out especially because they used a sort of mechanical hand puppet monster composited into the basement with them shooting at it. Really excellent work for the time it was done.

For horror film effects though, I'd point to my all time favorite horror/sci-fi thriller starring Kurt Russel called The Thing. The alien visual effects in that movie are so disturbing. But then, I think back to an even older film Riddley Scott's Alien. That movie still looks absolutely amazing even today.