Star Trek Gets The Lucas Treatment: New, Crappy Digital Effects

This is old for most. It's new for me.

Paramount is adding CGI effects to classic orginal-series Trek episodes.

The new one to get this treatment is the Doomsday Machine episode.

Eh. It's just dumb. First of all, when will Hollywood get it through their skuls that models almost always look better than CGI?

The old shots of the Enterprise looked fine -- pretty decent, in fact. Now they're being replaced by CGI shots that look like obvious, TV-level-budget CGI.

If they want to make Star Trek look less cheesy, they shouldn't bother with the Enterprise-orbiting and transporter effects, which still look decent. They should first try adding some realistic backgrounds to their red-sky-and-plastic-rocks planetary-surface sets.

Actually, they really shouldn't bother with that, either, but if they're going to do anything, start with that.

(And don't add a bunch of Dewbacks in the background, either.)

Judge Yourself:

If there are improvements at all, it's a case of mixed results at best. CGI is better at creating busy shots with multiple moving objects, but the shots of the Enterprise lack detail and depth.

Pretty much they just throw a lot of space debris around because it's cheap to do so on a computer. It's the everything but the kitchen sink approach again, and yeah, I'm pretty darn sure I saw a Dewback floating around there somewhere.

And this is just a strange direction to take:

posted by Ace at 07:20 PM

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