I don't know enough about films to know that if he said was accurate, but it's stuck with me.
I was about 16 when The Matrix came out and I find it interesting asking people who were born after it came out what they think about it, if they've seen it their reaction is typically (much like me with The Shining) "seemed alright", while for me at the time the movie was phenomenal and in terms of many of its special effects, unlike anything I had ever seen before.
Some stand up better than others.
Appreciating "modern" before modern times requires taking the production date into context and being aware of what contemporary media was doing.
Unfortunately, the entire reason you're watching famous media decades later is because contemporary media is comparatively boring.
F.ex. How many people who have seen Citizen Kane have seen Louisiana Purchase? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_in_film
But the original one was just so brilliantly made
Gibson’s strength was that he could describe—in an accessible way—concepts that were quite foreign to most people at the time.
Tolkien's importance is that the specific kinds of creatures he wrote became the default for virtually all subsequent authors and the popularity/quality of the works were pivotal in establishing fantasy as a "proper" genre.