Everything Old (School) Is New Again

The Search for Spock shows us a futuristic world of starships, phasers, and teleporters, but today, it's hard to shake the feeling that the future feels…old. As in: dated to the point that your average modern household sports way more advanced technology than the whole of the Enterprise.

This old-school vibe stems from the fact that the film was shot in the 1980s, well before the CGI revolution of the mid-90s. The film also suffered from a budget of $18 million, a paltry sum of scratch to make a movie with…even back then.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Studio Lot

The first thing you'll notice is that the various locations feel like life-sized dioramas. Obvious this is the case with the starships—they couldn't pop down to Cape Canaveral and ask NASA to borrow one. But even natural settings like Genesis have a distinct artificiality to them.

That's because almost the entire film was shot on location at the Paramount Studios, the same huge studios Cecil B. DeMille used for his 1958 epic The Ten Commandments. (Source)

Obviously the film crew couldn't afford to find an Earth-like exoplanet, build a spaceship, and fly to it—you know, for that truly authentic look.

But budgetary restrictions were so tight that they couldn't even afford to fly to Hawaii for on-location shooting as cinematographer Charles Correll had hoped. Nimoy and his people did an admirable job hiding the sound stages with close-up framing and the use of matte paintings for shots needing distance. (Source)

Yet the limitations can really be felt in the destruction of Genesis, which looks too controlled to be a full rager. Again, they didn't quite have the budget to blow up an actual planet, thanks to the Paramount bean counters.

Keen-eyed viewers will also notice the production team saving beans by recycling and reusing sets. For example, the bridge of the USS Grissom and the USS Enterprise are the same set, shot from various angles and redressed slightly. Also the lounge where McCoy visits to book his illegal space vacation is the Enterprise's sick bay with a few extra arcade games and a liquor license. (Source)

The single day of on-location filming took place at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which served as the planet Vulcan. (Source) Got to admire what they can do with some large steps and bright orange lights.

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

So where did all that budget go? Mostly to Industrial Light and Magic, who provided the film's special effects. ILM has been at the forefront of movie magic since George Lucas developed the VFX studio to create the visual effects for the original Star Wars film in 1977. If you can think of a film that impressed you with its effects, chances are they had a hand in making it. (Source)

The Search for Spock required more extensive special effects than The Wrath of Khan. After all, it contains the spacedock scene, a starship chase, a starship battle, the destruction of Genesis, and that wire-framed arcade game in the bar. (If they only knew what the future of video games truly held.)

To make these scenes, ILM used the go-to method for visual effects of the day: models. Every model was hand crafted and shot with a camera before being added to composite shots with the other models and sometimes in the backgrounds of shots with the actors. The visual effects are exceptionally well done, although our era of HD home viewing makes the "strings" easier to find.

Even so, you can see some of the limitations of this model work if you compare them to more modern Star Trek films. Consider Star Trek: Beyond, which also contains a destruction of the Enterprise scene. In Beyond, the camera swoops and flies over and through the Enterprise, showing the destruction at several different angles all between cuts. This flexibility is granted because the entire shot is animated in a computer, where the camera can do and go where it likes.

In comparison, The Search for Spock's treatment, while exhilarating, lacks such flexible camera work. The shots show the Enterprise panning up and down or left and right in the frame, but every time it goes to show the action from another angle, we get a cut so the real life camera can be adjusted for the next shot. The result is less frantic, but it also allows you to really feel the weight of the ship's destruction…since they had to destroy an actual model for the shot.

Despite these limitations, director Leonard Nimoy and his team did an admirable job crafting the world of tomorrow yesterday, and the movie still holds up today—even if it feels more like a really expensive TV episode more than a theatrical film.