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Special Effects Lessons From JJ Abrams' Star Trek
brumgrunt writes "JJ Abram's hugely successful — on many levels — reboot of Star Trek has, for Den Of Geek, brought to the fore a lesson about special effects that many movie makers have been missing. Surely it's time now that special effects were actually used properly?" (The new film is not without some goofs, though only a few of the ones listed by Movie Mistakes' nitpickers are sciency.)
don't rely on special effects for content
Some movies are made to entertain people between the ages of 4 and 70 (i.e. spiderman). The wider the age range, the less room there is for typical plot elements, because younger audiences get bored quickly. Some movies are pretty good just because of their CGI alone. I might be risking my geek-card here, but none of the new Star Wars were actually that boring due to all the big-budget CGI/effects.
I went to the theater and the movie left me empty. I wasted time and money there and got nothing of value in return. This movie is so shallow you couldn't get your fingertips wet in it. If it were at least funnier or something. Instead you get scenes passing by with light speed while you sit there wondering: did I miss something? I must have, I haven't seen anything important yet. Half the movie in and it still feels like it hasn't started yet.
If you haven't seen it yet, don't. Download a pirate version first and if you like it, only then go to the cinema.
I specifically DIDN'T go see this movie because all the trailers made it look like a CGI-driven action-fest (a la Michael Bay). I hate those kind of movies. If this movie is NOT that, then its trailers did it a grave disservice.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
After all the reviews I guess maybe my expectations were too high, but personally I thought this movie was actually pretty cheesy. The whole series of coincidences and bad acting starting with meeting Spock on the planet's surface was just ridiculous. Also, if you have this "red matter" that can create a black hole, why bother to drill to the center of the planet? Hell, you could drop off a black hole around Pluto and still easily destroy the Earth depending on it's size, but at the very least just putting it right next to the Earth would certainly do the job. This movie was more of a shoot-em-up and didn't show any of Kirk's ingenuity like we see in the Wrath of Khan, which I think will probably always stand as the best Star Trek movie ever made. I had always imagined Kirk was much more subtle with his "rigging" of the kobayashi maru test and I was really disappointed to see such a blatant and brainless resetting of the entire program as opposed to a small alteration that gave him just enough of an edge to win somehow.
Amen - the shaky camera ruined it for me, and makes it unwatchable on IMAX.
This is a movie that was practically ruined by lens flare and/or screen whiteouts in almost every scene. The cinematographer also insisted on having camera shake in at least 50% of the scenes, even if the ship was moving relatively smoothly though space. If there wasn't camera shake, the camera angle was coming up from the actor's feet at a 35 degree tilt. In sum, the cinematography was distracting and truely, genuinely, terrible.
The new film is not without some goofs, though only a few of the ones listed by Movie Mistakes' nitpickers are sciency.
Uhh... What Star Trek movie were you watching?
Because in the one *I* watched, they traveled through the event horizon of a black hole, and came back out again (although, this is actually an interesting question over in Trek-land; warp engines let you travel FTL, so could you escape a black hole? I mean, after the tidal forces ripped your puny ship into it's component atoms, of course...)
Or, how about the "space dive", where they leaped out of a shuttlecraft and suddenly lost all their inertia? How about re-entering the atmosphere in a space-suit without any worries about friction or heat?
Or how about that giant drill? Why did it fall when they cut it off the ship? If the ship was in geosynchronous orbit, then the drill must have been traveling slightly slower than geo-synchronous orbital speed; it should have very gently drifted eastwards.
Those antipiracy dots are really annoying. Especially when you try to sneak them into a half-second of a special effects burst. Saw a couple in Star Trek, and at least four in Angels & Demons. In each case, there was an explosion or other high-contrast light and they tried to sneak in a few frames of antipiracy dots.
Although I think that technology is lame and unnecessary, there are a zillion less obvious places to put it...
Advice: on VPS providers
Perhaps it's just me, but I think special effects have gotten worse, not more impressive, over time.
A good example would be the scene where Wolverine is playing with his new adamantium claws in front of a mirror in the latest X-Men movie. You can't miss the fact that they have been added to the movie with a computer.
What gives? In the first movie, I believe, they used props. They looked real enough.
What about the first Hulk movie? I haven't seen the movie, I'll admit. But from the trailer it was obvious the CGI did not fit into the movie at all. Remember Jurassic Park? How fricking old is that movie? How can it be that it looked more realistic than newer movies?
Is this just a matter of using the computer too much? Is it a lack of care or skill? I don't know. I just know that these things didn't jump at me, figuratively speaking, so much five to ten years ago...
I can break the movie down into 10 words: I'm Captain Kirk and I'm going to kick your ass.
Star Trek was not a thought provoking movie. It didn't raise many of the ethical and moral questions that TOS and TNG did - in fact, it went so far as to shit all over that idea (one of the last scenes with Nero, Kirk chooses violence over peace). It also wasn't a deep movie - beyond the story of the TOS crew meeting each other there really isn't much there.
To me this wasn't a problem. It was an entertaining TOS-type movie (not to be confused with the TOS crew in a Roddenberry movie, ala ST1-4), with corny action movies, dead red shirts, the classic theme, the classic voiceover, and Kirk being a badass ("I've got your gun").
Overall it was a fun movie. It's no Godfather II, but it's certainly not a pile of shit like Twilight. Artistically, it's bunk. Entertainment wise, it fits the bill, and gives the Star Trek series the new legs that, in my opinion, it so desperately needed.
(And if you don't think Star Trek needed new legs, I'll say this: The later episodes of DS9 and Voyager sucked. Warp 10 being "everywhere at once"? The magical anti-borg shielding? Don't even get me started on the Enterprise episodes, or the three movies prior to this one)
What I learned:
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Speaking of the fight scene on the space drill, it was very poorly choreographed. I understand John Cho spent months on fight training, and it showed. It takes years of training to make that kind of stuff look good. If they wanted to do that, they should have hired a Hong Kong fight choreographer, who knows how to make an actor with limited expertise look good. It's kind of a shame, because Cho starts the scene with that Chow Yun Fat "I'm going to kick your ass" look, but it fell flat after that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nemo was told what year it was.
He waited 20 years to capture old-spock.
He had *plenty of time* to figure out that Romulus had not been destroyed yet, and *plenty of time* to realize that it would now be trivially easy for him to prevent the destruction of Romulus himself. Once he captured old-spock, he had the red matter. So he could have flown over to the star and sucked it up in a black hole a full century before it would go supernova and destroy Romulus.
They tried to explain that in his brief conversation with captain Pike, when he refused to accept the statement that Romulus wasn't destroyed. But after a full 20 years of floating in the void of space, you would think he would have calmed down just a tad.
So, he qualifies as a stupid bad guy. Given this story line, if he had been intelligent, he never would have been a bad guy, and we really wouldn't have had much of a movie. But I don't care. Movie writers should not rely on weak plot devices like that one to make a movie. Make your bad guys smart, damnit.
I also wonder how a mining ship got such kick-ass military grade torpedoes, and how he managed to maintain morale and loyalty in his crew for the 20 years they spent sitting on their asses, but I won't belabor those points.
Unlike the other replies to this comment, if he wasn't chased into the cave, how would you feel about him randomly stumbling across elder Spock??
How would you set that up?
That would have felt totally hackneyed in a more random setup than how it happened. The fact that you wonder about why he was chased by hungry predators rather than wondering at the totally improbable odds of coming across Spock is a testament to how well planned and executed that was imo!
If you cut it out, you'd have a better movie.
Exactly. In a movie that was overall had pretty tight editing, that scene stood out as completely unnecessary. I mean, there are a hundred reasons why Kirk could have run into Spock... Hell, maybe Spock had already decided to head to the Starfleet outpost himself and Kirk runs into him at the door.
The one place where the special effects made me think 'aw, yeah!' was the scene where the Enterprise warps into the upper atmosphere of Titan and then slowly emerges out of the clouds.
That was pretty cool, true.
The biggest "aw yeah!" moment for me was in the opening battle scene when the ship takes a hit, and they show inside a corridor where the hull is breached and an officer(I think she was a blue shirt) runs from the big fireball -- which then retracts as the air (and the officer) are sucked out. Cut to outside, where we see the poor woman flying off into space, against a background of phaser banks firing like mad, all in complete silence.
Very potent imagery. Loved the dramatic use of the silence of space, which I think is a first for Trek? At the very least uncommon in pop sci-fi films in general. Sadly I didn't think they topped that moment in any of the other space battle scenes.
The enemies of Democracy are
1-Relationship building between Kirk and Spock by having Spock save Kirk.
2-Dramatic Introduction of Nemoy
3-The scene wasn't that long anyway
4-The other alternative (and still keeping the "eject him from the ship" premise) would have been to have him stumble around and be found unconsious by Spock, slowing the movie down, or getting into the Base and finding spock already inside. However, finding Spock inside makes for tricky writing with the dialogue between kirk and spock with outsiders watching. It's a better scene if they are alone.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
The funny thing is that the only part of the ST canon which was NOT erased by the time jump thingy was mister Quantum Leap's contribution.
I enjoyed the new film as well, but it wasn't Star Trek and Abrams is still a lame jackass who thinks and writes exclusively using mechanical base emotions rather than the higher thought patterns some members of our race still try to embrace. The man and his vision is a link or two backwards on the chain of cultural evolution. That's why his characters all seem like shop-window dummies.
I sometimes enjoy Disney films, but that doesn't make Disney's vision of the world a good thing. Heck, I can also enjoy a bag of Doritoes from time to time.
There was a period when ST was not just empty calories. But hey, that's alright. As our culture has demonstrated, thinking is too much work. And now with the calming effect of the Vulcan empire gone, we humans can now focus on that stuff we all love so much; Endless War!
Sigh. Picard's Enterprise was my favorite and I knew it too good to last. People don't deserve happiness and sanity if they actively reject it in favor of pain, misery and small-mindedness.
The attitude and energy of this new film, particularly the scenes in and around Starfleet Academy, strongly reminded me of another film: "Starship Troopers".
-FL
The ice planet scene was an homage to Star Wars:
Always a bigger fish (Episode 1)
Ice Planet Hoth (Empire)
Magical old dude saves young protagonist from certain death, reveals his destiny and lies to him (Star Wars)
There were lots of little things like that in the movie. Heck, the choice of "Sabotage" as the soundtrack for the car scene was a poke at Shatner's not being able to say the word correctly, and I counted several other little in-joke-ish kind of things.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I think the point of the drilling was to get to the hot magma under the crust. Only the intense pressure and heat would set off the red matter.