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.)

Comments

summarizing the article for you...

[Yold]

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.

Re:summarizing the article for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

The beauty of the movie was despite the changes the basic relationships of the group are intact. Remember this story is about the people before we originally met them in the Original Series. I think it was great because it make Star Trek available to a new and larger audience. I am a Trekkie and always have and will be. I was surprised at the destruction of Vulcan but if only the fact of how kirk got into StarFleet was changed by the Spock /Nero events the story would have seemed more crazy. In a way this will make Spock more interesting because he can go to the new Vulcan planet in future movies and deal with his race more in flux. Spock and Uhura (instead of Spock and Nurse Chapel sort of), make things more interesting. I appreciated all of the tributes to other Treks :the "Ceti" Eel and Captain Pike, the enterprise rising out of the gas giant ala Wrath of Khan. Bones was great. Gives people another reason as to why he is Bones McCoy, not just that he is a doctor. John Cho was great as Sulu.
Simon Peggy as Scotty (Jimmy Doohan would be proud). Th effects were not the big thing for me because with Star Trek the effects were never the big thing. It was about stories and relationships and Space and the unknown. Space Battles were fun but it that is what you really want watch Star Wars and be happy.

Underwhelmed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Lens flare and screen whiteouts /= good effects

[lordsegan]

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.

Science errors (spoilers)

[Digital_Quartz]

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.

Re:Science errors (spoilers)

[ceejayoz]

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.

The Bad Astronomer covered this.

First off, something they got right once I thought about it some. The shuttle left Enterprise to go to the Romulan ship. At first I thought both ships were in orbit, but thatâ(TM)s not true! The Romulan ship had lowered the mining drill from above the atmosphere, but it had to be hovering above the ground to do that, not orbiting the planet, or else they wouldnâ(TM)t be stationary over one spot (true, there is a geosynchronous orbit that keeps you over one spot, but itâ(TM)s tens of thousands of kilometers over the surface, and the ships were clearly just above Vulcanâ(TM)s atmosphere).

So when the trio jump from the shuttle, my first thought was that theyâ(TM)d still be in orbit; to deorbit means theyâ(TM)d need to change their velocity by several km/sec, which is clearly not possible. But they werenâ(TM)t in orbit, so they just fell. OK, +1 internets for the movie.

They would fall fast. And they did! Their speed was a little less than a kilometer per second, which sounds about right. At their altitude there wouldnâ(TM)t be much if any air to slow them, so theyâ(TM)d free fall; as they plunged deeper air resistance would slow them down. At first I thought theyâ(TM)d actually burn like meteors, but in reality (ha! Reality!) they werenâ(TM)t going that fast.

Another lesson...

[afabbro]

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...

Effects have gotten worse

[Kokuyo]

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...

Re:What I learned

[PMuse]

What I learned:

• After an artificial black hole is created, things nearby fall into it very, very slowly.
• A warp core will get you further faster if you detonate it outside the ship rather than run it inside the ship.
• Vulcans are very bad at calculating the velocities caused by supernovae.

Re:Connection?

[Chris Burke]

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.