Man, the special FX for Star Trek 2009 hold up perfectly 12 years later!

That’s what I’m talking about

 

I like the bit of fake "lens grease/dust smudge" they did for the space scenes. It adds a bit of realism as if they are filming with real models. While it still looks like CGI to my eye, it's very good CGI.

Kor

 

That's just wrong on so many levels.

The model work was always a little questionable but that smashing doesn't look any better and makes me cringe even more.

 

But the Lego model has no flames, so why even mention it? The ship in the film is much farther away from the camera and apparently drilling into the surface of the Death Star, so it's not even the same thing as fragile plastic toy hitting impenetrable concrete.

 

Because it smashes. Unlike the movie shot, where the hero SSD model is composited over the Death Star and just fades out as the gout of flame passes over it, the Lego model actually interacts with the ground. The structure fails, the direction of travel changes in response to the collision, debris flies off. It's not just two photographs passing over each other, with the only physical interaction in the shot being the flames with the soundstage ceiling.

What do flames matter? Flames are easy, as evidenced by the shot we're talking about where they didn't destroy a model (any model, even a stand-in with the same basic shape, like in the Independence Day shot mentioned, or the Enterprise saucer in TSFS), but did composite some flames over it.

 

It smashes...?

Ok, that makes it way more unbelievable in my opinion.

 

Yes, you're right, it's far more realistic that a twelve-mile-long spaceship, colliding with essentially a metal wall, would instantly evaporate into a burst of flame traveling out from the point of collision at... 60 times the speed of sound, with no deformation of the ship, diversion from its course, or visible damage or destruction at all. I'm convinced. Good talk, subject closed, onlookers, please refrain from reopening the topic of bad VFX in Return of the Jedi nine days after it dies.

 

Sarcasm? That wins me over...*golf clap*

I'm not saying the sequence couldn't improve but use of Legos doesn't scream realistic to me either. It's not black or white.

 

What do flames matter? They don't. The issue is which collision looks more convincing. I don't understand why you brought the flames up in the first place, hence my commennt.

To my eye the Lego ship busting apart into gigantic stiff pieces and flopping to one side makes the ship look small. The thing even slows down as it hits because they didn't build a simple rig to drive in down at a constant speed. Big objects with a ton of mss don't change direction as much as small objects do. And, again, the Death Star is probably not the equivalent of a concrete floor to Lego. The Lego gets a FAIL from me because it looks like what it is: a small, lightweight object hitting effectively solid rock.

The only way for this to look good in the film would have been for the the ship to crumple as its inertia drives it like a wedge into and through the surface. As to why they didn't do it, I can think of a half dozen reasons, not least of which is model shop bandwidth for a shot that really wan't that important.

I'm not defending that shot in Jedi, which I think is piss poor, but I don't find the Lego toy drop any more convincing. YMMV.

 

I thought the LEGO drop was for just for fun... Why is there such scrutinization over this?

 

Ask David cgc who is the one who suggested the Lego version looks more convincing. We're just replying with contrary opinions.

 

I linked to the Lego video because it at least looked like a solid object hitting another solid object, unlike the shot in question. I mentioned the pyro because the pyro in the original shot was shit and had an obvious flaw. Both reinforce the point I was concurring with, the original shot was lousy and substandard compared to other work in the film.

Let me rephrase it in the form of a joke.

"The shot was bad."

"How bad was it?"

"It was so bad, some people screwing around with a toy and a high-speed camera for clicks addressed or avoided its two most obvious faults!"

Ha, ha, funny, we all laugh together at the absurd comment that holds a grain of truth.

 

Legos breaking is not funny. So, I failed to find the humor in the situation.

 

Sometimes jokes bomb. Can't do anything about it.

 

The pod racers came apart in chunks after all. CBR had an article about the CGI explosions in THE BOYS about getting the bricks right. Steven Fleet did the work.

Now, had Executor hit a huge hydrogen gas filled bladder over a crater, the original effects work. Scratch that…with no oxygen, no combustion.

Then too…it makes me sad that they destroyed the Cygnus model from THE BLACK HOLE. They did their damage too well. Should have made two of them.

 

Absolutely. After the genuinely mediocre "Into Darkness" came out, I sensed some revisionist history that saw the 2009 film unfairly lumped in with that one (and derided as also being "JJ Trek"). I think 2009 (I'd call it "Star Trek" because that's its title but I know that bristles some) is one of the best movies, and is my personal favorite. The actors TRULY embody the characters, amazingly. Love it.

 

Objection!

 

No, I don't think that is revisionist. Abrams was deried with 09 as well, especially when he dared to admit he didn't like Star Trek as a kid, which got immediately grabbed as him not being a fan and therefore unqualified as a director make Star Trek.

Into Darkness suffered from a couple of different things, but the chief one was the repeated statements around a survey of fans deriding the film. With that one small sample it became a rallying cry that ID was "panned" by Star Trek fans, and Abrams sucked. And so it continued on. I think ID suffered more from the mystery box around Khan and the 4 year wait between 09 and ID's release. But, it was deried long before, and still unfairly so.

 

They made two (source).

Page -11-
The first miniatures we worked on were of the Cygnus. We built two of them at 1/16” scale, going into the preliminaries in late ’77 and beginning actual construction around Christmas of that year. That’s when we actually started to go to work. At that time things were kind of slow in terms of production, so we jacked them around to w’here they realized that they’d better get started with this picture so we could at least hold some crew on it. They said OK, fine, and we went ahead. We then assembled and kept on some people who did nothing but work on models. It was really a precise job, and since some of these guys weren’t watchmakers, they weren’t all that happy with the work. Anyway, we had from 12 to 15 people that we called our select team, and we just kept them busy right on through the year with it. We worked the full year of 1978 on the Cygnus models, more or less. The cost for both of them ran to $ 100,000.
[...]
When you’re dealing with a miniature of this kind a year before the fact, the first thing they ask you after they’ve told you to build it is, “How much is it going to cost?” So you sit down at your desk and come up with figures that say, in this case, $ 100,000. Then you find out what they want to do with it. We found they wanted to fly the Cygnus model in the normal sense, they wanted to fly it upside down, and they wanted to destroy it. So this is why I went ahead and made two 1/16” scale Cygnus models at the same time. They kept asking me what I wanted to make two for. I told them that we had to have one that stayed together, one that you could photograph anyway you pleased. But I told them, “You want to destroy it too. What happens when you destroy the only one you’ve got and you have to get another shot of the Cygnus in its undamaged state: What are you gonna do?” So it’s lucky that we built the two, because that’s exactly what happened —we were constantly bouncing back and forth between the two of them. From my past years of experience I just knew that you didn’t go for only one break- away. For instance, my theory’s always been that if someone’s going to go through, say, a breakaway window, then you try to go for a minimum of three takes on it. Even if you get it right the first time.
[...]
We finally ended up with two Cygnus models which were approximately 170 pounds each. They were both 12 feet 3 ½ inches long. Except for the fact that there was more top and bottom detailing between them—we’d go to one for topside detail and the other for the bottom shots—they were identical.
​

It's been rumored the second model was eventually accidentally wrecked on the Disney lot, either by rain or an errant fork lift that smashed into its crate...or something.

 

Ohh! That almost makes me as sick as when I heard Buran was crushed…