Did this movie utilize CGI for the mini space ships or where they just scaled models shot in stop-motion and then overlayed the principal photography scenes with live actors? Either way it looked pretty good for 1987 where SFX still looked kinda clunky like in RoboCop and Predator
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shareScaled models and a marionette rig
shareAlways thought modern CGI looks far worse than old school animatronics. There was a time when it was actually people's jobs to create robots for movies, but now that CGI is so cheap no one bothers to do that anymore :'(
shareI grew up watching Ray Harryhausen adventure flicks in the 70s and 80s and never once was I bothered by the scale modeling and stop-motion animation. While I knew exactly how it was made I still appreciated it and it still fed my imagination. I watched Sinbad with my nephew and he couldn't get into it because of the old school SFX so it seems that CGI has spoiled a lot of people into dismissing older film techniques. It's funny to me because when you watch those mindless TikTok videos featuring rapid cut effects showing for example women changing clothes with a snap of a finger or a guy chugging a pitcher of beer in a millisecond it's the same thing yet those type of videos get more views than a streaming Harryhausen movie.
shareI wonder though. Modern CGI is pure eye candy, it entices that ADD part of the brain rather than the engaging story telling part. With how popular superhero movies are, despite just how awful those things are, are we pretty much just training our youth to be entertained by flashing lights rather than a thought provoking movie?
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