I liked hearing George Lucas say that he wanted all the craft to look beaten up and used instead of shiny and new (long time ago far, far away) so as to focus on the human experience instead of the tech itself.
Star Trek is science fiction. It is clean, high-minded and with a plot driven by futuristic technologies and what they might mean for us. Science fiction is at least somewhat predictive. Star Wars is space opera, a soap opera set in space. The plot is driven by family squabbles and surprise revelations (ie Luke's sister/father etc). The standards of morality are subverted by the reality of the family drama. If one removes the special effects and fight scenes, Star Wars is almost daytime TV. All it needs is a good coma fantasy.
Another clue from Lucas: "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away." That is code for "This isn't science fiction. It isn't about a possible future. It isn't about what our children's lives might be like. Magic is possible. Just enjoy the show."
For me Science Fiction is about exploring the consequences of technology on society, culture and the individual. It takes some scientific technological concepts and explores their implications.
Star Trek does this is spades. We see the dangers of automates war machines that lack a moral context for their operations, the consequences of ecological manipulation gone wrong, we are shown how absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the social and personal cost of subsuming violent passions within a rigorous rationality. That’s just the start, it’s hard to think of a single idea or trope of SF that Star Trek hasn’t explored many times over in its several generations-long run.
Meanwhile Star Wars is Kung fu wizards in an interplanetary Wild West. I don’t think there’s a single exploration of the impact of technology on society or the individual in the whole thing, although I know little of the extensive Clone Wars material. That’s not a criticism, They’re just different things.
Ahem. Sorry Trekkies, but NO! Star Trek is different how exactly? Domestic problems, old enemies longing for revenge, Tech the tech with the tech in order to tech the tech in the tech tech...
Ok, the very very simple version: Science fiction is set in the future. Star Trek is deliberately set in the future. Star Wars is deliberately set in the past ("A long time ago") and therefore is something other than science fiction.
Future technology. When they set foot on the nautilus they set foot into a possible future. 20,000 poses the question of what might happen should that sort of technology be developed. It was very predictive of the power that such technology would place on a single man. Nemo is latin for "no man", telling us that no man should have such power.
Lucas was telling a story, so he made the symbols look like things that his audience already knew: one and two-person fighter planes, small tramp freighters, giant naval warships. The good guys and the bad guys get distinct visual styles for their fighters so you can tell them apart. The bad guys have all the big warships, and they have bridges as command centers up high over the main body, batteries of guns that look like WWII battleship's guns, anti-fighter guns that recoil like an antiaircraft cannon, and send out swarms of fighters like aircraft carriers.
The rebels have hangars in jungle and snow bases that would have been perfectly reasonable in a WWII movie.
Star Trek developed a different aesthetic, starting with a flying saucer and then trying to justify it in various ways.
Yup. The evil empire had big carriers and giant battleships. The good guys had their fighters hidden in caves. It is a WWII metaphor. Abrams continues this subversion in the opening of Episode VII: The bad guys come at night in their helicopters to search a desert community for rebel terrorists. Credit where credit is due for sneaking that theme into an otherwise apolitical film. (And king bad guy carries a flaming cross.)
Whenever there is a flotilla of ships in Star Trek, they seem to always arrange themselves into a two-dimensional plane and orient themselves according to their artificial gravity. This evokes ships at sea.
Starfleet seems to use a naval ranking, and officers use words like "hail", "heave to", "away team", and "bearing". The navigation terminology in Star Trek sees to be related to the galactic plane, which again evokes the surface of the sea.
The drive section of the Enterprise looks like the keel of a boat to me, and her nacelles look like the hulls of a catamaran.
Roddenberry loved the Hornblower books and I'm sure he was influenced by naval aesthetics.
The honor Harrington by Weber series is also based on Hornblower and has some very nice, realistic depictions of physics and battle in space (minus the ftl, of course). I highly recommend it.
The one very notable exception to the two-dimensional flotilla is the depiction of the battle of wolf-359. As I recall the battle played out as a ball of Starfleet ships surrounding the Borg.
Wouldn't say it's an exception; the scenes from the battle and the aftermath still look pretty planar to me. Similarly, the battle with Borg over Earth, while not completely flat, had ships orbiting the Borg cube more-less along a plane.
The Dominion Wars in DS9 had been both the best and the worst, sometimes in the same battles. I remember the confrontation when the Federation fleet tried to punch through a Dominion blockade to DS9. Yes, they were saved by the Klingons arriving off-plane (and with the local star behind them, reminiscent of a WWI/WWII fighter tactic), but other than that, the battle was terribly planar and terribly crowded.
Star Trek has IMO nailed most narrative, but I wish they'd remake combat scenes with a little better, and more 3D, choreography. Leave the FX the same, though; IMO the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT style of weapons was the best in the whole series, and the best in "soft sci-fi".
I wonder if the hangars in the jungle came from the script or from the memories of someone who experienced the view from Temple IV at Tikal. I had the surreal experience of standing atop Temple IV and suddenly recognizing this was the camera location of Star Wars rebel base landing scene while being enveloped by the smells and sounds above the rain forest canopy, especially the cacophony from the howler monkeys.
That’s one of my favorite aspects of seeing Falcon 9 boosters coming back to port. Dirty as hell, maybe canted a wee bit. Looks like they went through something.
It will be interesting to see what the methane-fueled rockets look like when they come back. I’m guessing a lot less sooty. If SpaceX’s Starship keeps some exposed stainless i hope it gets a little of that exhaust pipe purple patina going. That would be awesome.
As a kid, I was disappointed in how dirty the space shuttle was on visit to Cape Canaveral.
In young mind I expected this beautiful, gleaming massiv white shuttle. Instead, the real shuttle was dirty, dingy, all the tiles and body panels looked like they were randomly replaced, which makes sense as it had years and years of use.
I doubt that they could or would dare to reuse one onscrubbed, but it could still be fun to put one one the ramp painted in that used look. Perhaps one side gleaming white, the other "this is not my first rodeo"?
The entire Alien movie is basically an extended (and, ahem, perhaps slightly darker?) remake of the Pinback vs the beach ball creature scene. My favorite piece of movie trivia. I wonder if anyone stumbled into the theatrical release of Alien knowing about that connection?
Regarding "used space", I'd say that the trend was already present in Silent Running (1972) which happens to link both the clinically clean 2001 and dirty Star Wars in terms of FX crew.
