I was thinking about blowing stuff up the other day, and it got me thinking - Trek RARELY blows up its regular sets. Mostly due to budgetary concerns, they at most make the set LOOK blown up, exploding consoles instead of walls, etc. But in your estimation, what is the BEST example of Trek blowing a regular set up, and then having it better later on?
I'll start us off with my thoughts on a better example, Azati Prime. In it, the Enterprise bridge (and NO other set, I might add) is seriously blown up. I think that they did a great job scorching up the set, replacing set pieces with destroyed equivalents, etc. Dramatically, when the big circular thing above Mayweather's head dropped down, it was a notable highlight. And the icing on the cake? The bridge STAYED blowed up for the rest of the season!
Runner up? For me, probably the Reliant. Lots of stuff thrown around there, wires spiling out, giant pieces of hull falling on people... Awesome. And of course, they patch it all up later to shoot as the Enterprise.
And as a BAD example of how to blow up a set, I'd have to say the loss of teh Enterprise-D. I just wasn't convinced that so strong a ship would just sort of spontaneously fall apart like that. Basically, all they did was toss all the chairs around, removed the wall between the ready room and the bridge, and add a whole bunch of debris. Meh.
You?
Mark
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
I'll disagree with you on the destruction of the E-D bridge. I will be the first to say that Generations isn't a strong movie and the first to be pissed that they blew up the E-D without just cause. But the actual sequence of the saucer entering the atmosphere and landing is phenomenal, with the tearing up of the set going notably beyond what we had ever seen before.
Otherwise, I'm forced to give a nod to another non-favorite and say Voyager in "Year of Hell." The work they do, not only to the bridge, but all over, is superb.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
With the destruction of the E-D, they pretty much had free reign on destroying the set as they weren't going to use it again.
As for a favourite set destruction, I'm not really sure. The times mentioned above are certainly up there. I found the Defiant bridge destruction was rather poignant, even though the whole destruction of the Defiant was rather pointless.
Posted by WizArtist II (Member # 1425) on :
I thought the whole loss of the E-D was a joke. A lousy BOP w/ some codes can knock out the flagship of the Federation? Even in UC, the BOP attacking both the Enterprise & Excelsior didn't have that much power.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Now, see, as far as set design goes, it wasn't much, but I thought the sabotage of Ops in "A Call to Arms" was very dramatic. That had more to do with the weird camera angles they filmed the aftermath in, though, I think.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
I also liked the "call to arms" sabotage- even the motors in the airlocks were offline.
Makes me wonder what modifications the Dominion made to the station and what technological impovments the Dominion might have made to stuff like the weapons array (Rom and Kira's taking the weapons offline would have preserved most of what was there).
The Death of the Enterprise D sucked so badly because we saw only a minimal shot of the secondary hull blowing up- compare that with the protracted destruction of the A nad you feel kinda jipped. Plus the whole "re-use" of the exact scene from STVI of the KBOP blowing up sucked ass. Everyone I saw the movie with caught it and was annoyed.
While not Trek (though Partick Stewart is in it), the best alltime set/model destruction scene is in Lifeforce. They constructed an exact model of London over a six month period and blew it to hell over four days of shooting. Did not make the movie good though.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
YoH was good - whish there wasn't a reset button - but oh well.
Generations was good too. It was rather poignient when they look up to the open dome above.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Plus the whole "re-use" of the exact scene from STVI of the KBOP blowing up sucked ass. Everyone I saw the movie with caught it and was annoyed.
Of course, if that's what they had to do in order to save enough money to show the Enterprise-D crashing, then it was worth it. I just don't get people who think they did it because it was "lazy".
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Mabye not "lazy" but definitely cheap. I mean fuck, it's TNG's first movie and has all this hype and they first blow any suprise by showing the ship crash in the fucking trailer and then dont even have sense to even reverse the film of the KBOP's explosion so its not identical to the climax of the last fucking movie!
The dark lighting all through the Enterprise is annoying as hell too- it's not like they had to save on lightbulbs.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
I hate watching any movie trailers now just for that reason - they practically give away the whole movie plot before you even see it!
I can't decide on the best one, but I can think of the worst (from memory, at least). That would be the Enterprise in STII. Kirk says "the bridge is smashed", but from what I can remember, all that they did was dim the lights, pump in some smoke, and singe one panel near the turbolift. Didn't look very smashed to me.
B.J.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Well, Kirk WAS bluffing. He was doing it to insult Khan's intelligence, etc.
Hmm... Blowing up the Valiant bridge was a fair attempt, knocking Watters AND his chair off their perch. Much of the aft of that bridge was pretty well destroyed, actually - so well that they even reused that shot amongst the droves of stock footage in the DS9 series finale. Too bad the forward end wasn't as impressive, being all exploding consoles and cadets.
Mark
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Mabye not "lazy" but definitely cheap.
Well, duh. Trek films do not have the biggest budgets. This was the producers thinking "if we save money by reusing the nice explosion fromt the last film, we can put it elsewhere". Not "let's cut money and spend it on Jags for ourselves."
Posted by WizArtist II (Member # 1425) on :
Why would anyone spend the money on overpriced British cars that are half-n-half cars.
Half the time in your garage, half the time in your mechanic's garage.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Never realised it but the title to this thread is just RIPE for a spoonerism!
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
quote:Originally posted by PsyLiam:
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Mabye not "lazy" but definitely cheap.
Well, duh. Trek films do not have the biggest budgets. This was the producers thinking "if we save money by reusing the nice explosion fromt the last film, we can put it elsewhere". Not "let's cut money and spend it on Jags for ourselves."
Well, it could very well have led to Whoopi GOldberg buying herself a Jag...
Really, I'd have been happy with any other KBOP explosion- I know they shot that STVI scene from several angles to get it to look "right", you'd have thought one of those would have been useable enough to spare us the stock footage treatment.
Meh. I was far more annoyed that they showed the Enterprise crashing in the trailer- during the movie I kept saying to myself "it's okay: they'll do the whole "Nexus timetravel bit to save the ship".
But they didn't.
Posted by Johnny (Member # 878) on :
If they'd reversed the shot or used a different angle then you would've been all "they thought they could fool us by using a different angle, how dare they insult our KBoP related intelligence!" Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
(He makes a good point.)
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
At leat there would have been the effort of deception. I could respect that.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
Why, of course; I always respect people who make an effort to deceive me...
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Of course you do:it's all about the skill involved and the effort applied. All fiction (particularly sci-fi) is deception: the best of it makes you forget what you're seeing is not real. The only diffrence between a great movie and the MST3K stuff is the effort applied.
But thats' the same diffrence between a master magician and a cheap coin trick.
Besides, anything new beats nothing- and they gave us nothing new in that scene. I dont mind the 80% re-used footage in WYLB because there is new stuff sprinkled in and creative editing of the old stuff to spice things up.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Actually, if you look at the WYLB sequences, the old stuff was all clumped together at the top or bottom of a given scene - it seems they were simply short of footage at places and built up the missing time with extras. Not TOO much effort went into it, except for doing stuff like reversing the "Generations" footage of some Klingon getting blown over a console, to make it look instead that he was getting SUCKED out of the same Vor'cha that got rammed by a bunch of battlebugs in the previous year's finale.
Speaking of which, the blowing up of the BoP bridge in "Generations" was pretty good... Though we don't really see the results.
Mark
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
doo-ball post!
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
The Klingon getting sucked out is not reversed. That same shot is used in both "Undiscovered Country" and "Generations." The whole sequence of shots of Klingons in a ship going up in flames is exactly the same from instance to instance.
Granted, the Klingon getting sucked feet first is a great bit of effects work, since he moves laterally and isn't really falling or launching (or at least doesn't appear to be doing either) and I would certainly be tempted to use it again.
I can forgive DS9 for making use of such footage many years after its original use and on their type of budget. I cannot forgive "Generations" for using it one movie later and had a comparable budget.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
All the reuse of footage can be explained... it's due to the Wormhole Aliens/Prophets.
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