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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 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)
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.
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