I remember reading somewhere Nicholas Meyer wanted a torpedo room and someone, one of the production designers I believe, had complained that if torpedoes took that long to load they wouldn't be much use, but Meyer won.
Yeah. I always thought Meyer was an odd fit for Trek, because he's so aggressively anti-futurist. He wanted to turn ST into 18th-century Royal Navy ships firing cannons at each other.
I've always preferred to assume that the torpedo room was just some sort of retrofit for the
Enterprise as a cadet ship -- teaching the crew how to load torpedoes manually in case they ever had to in an emergency, even though it was usually automatic.
But I think some of that was lost a bit in Star Trek (2009). I had seen that Church had picked John Eave's brain about a few things, since he was one of the only Berman era staffers to be retained
The one and only, as far as I know.
Abrams didn't invent lens flares, but boy did he revel in them in 2009.
Yes, of course, but my point is that they aren't a trademark of
all of Abrams's directorial work, as many people incorrectly assume they are. They're something he adopted specifically for Trek, not
Mission: Impossible or
Star Wars or his earlier TV work.
But why would you have a shaky camera in space (I don't even remember that happening in Star Wars). I don't get what the point of that was.
If you're talking about in exterior space shots, that's a technique that was pioneered by
Firefly and
Battlestar Galactica as a way of giving space shots a cinema verite feel, so that they didn't look so artificial and composited. Logically, if a hypothetical camera operator were trying to track the movements of spacecraft, weapons, and the like, they would be shooting from a considerable distance and zooming in heavily, so any slight camera motion to keep the subject in the shot would be pretty jerky. The goal is to evoke the feel of news footage from combat zones, disasters, and live events. We know what that looks like, we've all seen important, scary real events portrayed that way on the news, so evoking it in film can give FX scenes a greater immediacy and power. (The lack of sound in
Firefly's space scenes certainly made them feel more real to me, not just because I know there's no sound in space, but because so much of that real news footage is silent or has muted/delayed sound due to the camera operator's distance from the event. We've gotten used to fictional FX shots that are perfectly polished and composed and sound-mixed, and so they've come to feel produced and artificial. Something with the limits and imperfections of live news footage can feel more real and more potent.)
And there were a lot of scenes in space that looked like they would have been really cool but they were ruined by the unsteady camera and being almost completely washed out by lens flares. I thought, hmm, that probably looked like a great scene, too bad I couldn't make most of it out. In STID it was much, much better. The use of shaky camera and lens flares was much more judicious and enhanced the scenes they were used in as a result, instead of overwhelming them or distracting them.
Hmm, I never really noticed that. Perhaps because all the violence and noise and conflict didn't interest me -- I was engaged by the emotion of what the characters were going through in the battle scenes. That's what impressed me most about Abrams's direction in ST'09 -- he never forgot that the characters and emotions are more important than the action and spectacle. Many other directors would've turned those scenes into empty FX orgies, but Abrams remained powerfully focused on the personal drama and love and loss of the characters, with all the big frenzied expensive CGI action just being there to support the drama rather than overwhelming or substituting for it.
). I want it to feel like it's a movie. But again, that's just my own personal opinion.