Star Trek – 2009
So here we are with the J.J. Abrams directed movie that revitalized the Star Trek franchise and gave it a new look. Not only were all the iconic characters brilliantly recast, but the costumes and sets were redesigned with flare, or should I say… lens-flare! But we’ll get to that in a bit.
Although this hasn’t been the first Star Trek movie to be nominated for Best Visual Effects, it has been 30 years since the only other one was recognized for those achievements. Since then, filmmaking technology has obviously had many significant advances. Photo-realistic CGI alone allowed this film to far surpass 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But that being said, this movie was created to be more of an action film than a science fiction/drama. It had a much faster pace, which is a severe understatement.
There were three really awesome space ships in the film. The design of the Enterprise was much more modern, though familiar enough to be recognizable as the ship we all know and love. The Narada, the monstrous and imposing Romulan mining ship was like some dark and demonic creature in space. And Spock Prime’s little ship containing the red matter, which was named the Jellyfish, was fast and very futuristic.
The redesigned bridge of the Enterprise looked all white and sterile, like a brightly lit surgical room in a hospital. One of the problems with so many lights on the set was that there were constant lens-flares surrounding the action. But rather than fixing these, Abrams liked how they looked and embraced them. In fact, he liked them so much that he went out of his way to incorporate them into other parts of the film. This was the first Star Trek film to create all their ship exterior shots in space digitally with no miniature models. In shots where the Enterprise was being displayed dramatically, digital lens-flares were actually added, to match the ones being filmed inside the vessel.
Another effect that was updated for this film was the transporter. According to Wikipedia, “Unlike other Star Trek films and series, the transporter beam effects swirl rather than speckle. Abrams conceived the redesign to emphasize the notion of transporters as beams that can pick up and move people, rather than a signal composed of scrambled atoms.”
There were also a few creature effects that were pretty impressive, like the giant red monster on Delta Vega. On the DVD documentary, Abrams described this creature as being covered with hundreds of eyes, which may have been true, but since we never got that close a look at him, they just looked like natural skin colorations, kind-of like leopard spots. And lest I forget to mention one of my favorite effects in the film, the lightning storm in space that showed up, when the Narada arrived and was finally destroyed, was very cool. I could say that Abrams really has a… FLARE for making things look impressive on the big screen!