Special Effects Lessons From JJ Abrams' Star Trek 461
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.)
summarizing the article for you... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This movie is empty (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Should have told those who made the trailers then (Score:4, Interesting)
Underwhelmed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What I learned (Score:3, Interesting)
Amen - the shaky camera ruined it for me, and makes it unwatchable on IMAX.
Lens flare and screen whiteouts /= good effects (Score:5, Interesting)
Science errors (spoilers) (Score:5, Interesting)
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:summarizing the article for you... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Another lesson... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Underwhelmed (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree with you about the kobayashi maru test, but in a sense I disagree with you.
The way that the test was exploited seems almost like a modern exploit. Look at exploits to run code on modern gaming platforms:
- The PSP: Uses a tiff exploit. You get it to show a bad picture, it reboots and runs a custom firmware (if I understand that right)
- The Wii: Exploits a save game. You save an exploited save game, you play the game, you walk up to a character and the system reboots loading a custom firmware.
And Kirk isn't very subtle. At least not in the Star Trek I have watched. He's a tactician, he takes risks, and at times he is very brazen. But subtle? No. Not Kirk.
I liked it (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re:Science errors (spoilers) (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [discovermagazine.com].
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.
Re:What I learned (Score:5, Interesting)
What I learned:
Re:What I learned (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
i hate stupid bad guys (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Connection? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Connection? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Connection? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Another lesson... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure whether Fight Club is to be taken as an authoritative source for movie-making trivia, but according to Tyler Durden, those are marks that are supposed to indicate an upcoming scene change.
Can anyone who knows about movie editing confirm this? I was always curious about this.
You're confusing the end-of-reel markers (which are in the upper right), with Coded Anti-Piracy [wikipedia.org] dots, which appear in the middle of the picture, or wherever they decide to put them.
The end-of-reel markers are apparently a technological necessity and not very distracting. Having a pattern of dots suddenly appear over an actor's face, on the other hand...
Re:summarizing the article for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Point taken, but it's kind of hard to disguise planets exploding, or giant spaceships exploding as we have no historical footage of them.
It's a bit of a stretch to compare Gump to Trek.
Re:summarizing the article for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Warship bridges in real life are deadly serious places without a dozen extras milling about without a purpose just to fill space.
The Enterprise isn't a warship. Starfleet's primary mission is exploration, and they double as peacekeeping/defence. I believe the analogy that's been made before is "NASA combined with the Coast Guard".
This is something that was *very* important to Gene Roddenberry. IIRC, he was very upset at some background voiceover chatter in the first film about a Starfleet dreadnought.
Yeah, me too. But it wasn't Star Trek. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Connection? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Physics problems (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:summarizing the article for you... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is something that was *very* important to Gene Roddenberry. IIRC, he was very upset at some background voiceover chatter in the first film about a Starfleet dreadnought.
Mod parent up! :) To me, this has always been one of the coolest (and most unique) things about Star Trek. It's cheesy I know, but the conception of a (relatively) peaceful, hopeful future where the heroes were more so explorers and ambassadors and less so warriors - that's really cool. Especially keeping in mind that this was made in the thick of the cold war, where a lot of people thought there might not be any humans left in two decades. That whole concept has kind of been lost in more recent Star Trek ("Enterprise", mostly) and maybe SF in general, which partly makes sense since it doesn't make for really exciting television, that's for sure.
But still. The thought of an optimistic, bright future universe is really something. Props to Gene Roddenberry for being ahead of the curve on that one.