There’s a strong argument to say I should just carry on. Storm the first draft as if it’s the Normandy landings and rely on the medics to patch up the damage later. Trouble is, I set down on the wrong beach. Better to make a tactical retreat and come in again, this time when the tide’s right and there’s a favourable wind. In layman’s terms, that means a few weeks from now.

In the meantime, I’ve picked up a manuscript I wrote a couple of years ago called String City. It’s a fantasy novel about a private investigator who’s good with dimensions (some of you may have read the short fiction I’ve written about him). This time it’s the ending that’s broken. Serendipitously, at the same moment I stalled on Talus and the S_____ S____ (no, I’m not giving the title away yet), I finally worked out what was wrong with String City.

I’ve given myself the next few weeks to reshape it. First I need to write around 20,000 words of new material for a brand new finale. Then I need to track all the continuity bombs this will inevitably launch backwards through the narrative. By the time I’ve done that, I might actually have something worth reading.

And I’ll be ready to invade the stone age again.

I discovered Iain Banks when I picked up a copy of his first science fiction novel Consider Phlebas back in 1988. I’d spent my teenage years devouring classic SF by writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Larry Niven, stuffing myself so full of gaudy spaceships and deadly robots that by the time I left home for college I’d had enough. Deciding that science fiction was something you grew out of, I turned instead to the comic novels of John Mortimer and Tom Sharpe (who also passed away this week at the age of 85), the thrills of Stephen King and the modern mythology of John Irving.

Consider Phlebas brought me back into the fold.

I won’t attempt a synopsis here. If you need one you can find it in a thousand places online. The future culture portrayed in the novel – known simply as The Culture – is without doubt one of science fiction literature’s greatest creations. I read Consider Phlebas quickly, appreciating Banks’s boundless imagination, his warmth and wit, his black and sometimes grotesque humour and, above all, his ferocious intelligence.

Then, just when I’d pegged Banks as an Important Writer (which he undoubtedly is) I reached the scene in which the mercenary ship Clear Air Turbulence breaks out of its docking bay inside the GSV The End of Invention, a truly enormous vessel ‘built on three almost totally separate levels, each over three kilometres deep.’ As our renegade heroes pilot their ship through the GSV, they break through into progressively bigger and bigger interior bays, constantly upping the ante until finally they cut their way through the hull and into space.

It’s a gloriously goofy, celebratory set-piece, with each page of action more audacious than the last. I’m sure Banks had a huge grin on his face when he wrote it, matched only by the one I wore as I read. At last I’d found an author smart enough to satisfy my adult cravings for stories with genuine substance, yet honest enough to admit that sometimes you just have to fire a colourful spaceship through a tunnel lined with lasers.

Reading Iain Banks’s science fiction novels led me on to read his mainstream fiction, notably The Bridge, which led me in turn to read the monumental Lanark by Alasdair Gray (Banks has acknowledged that the latter inspired the former). And, while his later Culture novels may be richer and more rewarding than Consider Phlebas, the truth is you always remember your first time.

So thank you, Iain Banks, for dazzling us. Thank you for the Culture. Thank you for writing a book that begins with the sentence: ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ And thank you for teaching me that, even after you’ve stopped being a child, your sense of wonder can continue to thrive.

• Iain Banks Official Website

According to the original video pitch, Harbinger Down will be packed to the rafters with monsters designed to “celebrate animatronics and makeup FX”. Sounds like fun, especially when you remember Gillis and Woodruff were behind the creatures in such classic movies as Aliens, Predator and Starship Troopers. Plus it’s going to star the legendary Lance Henrikson. What’s not to like?

But there’s a sub-text here. This isn’t just a Kickstart – it’s a kick out against the steady erosion of traditional special effects techniques by computer-generated imagery. Take the 2011 prequel to The Thing. “All of our work [on the movie] was either replaced or augmented by CGI,’ says Gillis in the Harbinger Down introductory video. “We were heartbroken.”

I don’t personally buy the whole “old-school effects are better than CG” argument. Visual effects is a constantly-evolving discipline. Those 1980s movies we look back on with such fondness were a product of the state-of-the-art of their time. Today’s visual effects industry is just as full of equally talented people using the very latest toolsets to create amazing imagery. Nothing’s changed and, really, we’ve never had it so good.

But …

It would be a crime for the traditional skills to be lost. That’s why I’m delighted to have thrown a few of my British pounds at this production. As I watched the investment total slowly inch its way up, then stall, then finally skyrocket with incredible speed past the target at the eleventh hour, I found myself marvelling at the overwhelming passion and optimism presented by Gillis via his regular investor updates. The ADI guys aren’t just trying to secure their livelihood here (and should we knock them if they are?) – they’re doing something they truly love.

Here’s a final plea to everyone who’s passionate about traditional special effects techniques (and there are plenty of you, I know). Let’s stop thinking of them as “old-school” effects. Projects like Harbinger Down don’t have to be throwbacks or nostalgia trips. Approached properly, they can stand on their own two feet as viable 21st century propositions. Animatronics and makeup effects aren’t stuck in the 1980s – they’ve evolved along with everything else. I have no doubt those highly-evolved folk at ADI will be taking advantage of all the latest developments in materials technology as they craft their creatures for Harbinger Down. “State-of-the-art” is an inclusive concept, after all.

And, yes, I’ll admit it. They had me at “rubber monsters”.

• Official Harbinger Down Website
• Harbinger Down on Kickstarter

(At the time of posting, there are still 4 hours left before the Kickstarter deadlines expires for Harbinger Down. The guys might have reached their target but every little extra helps. Go on, make a monster smile.)

Reblogged from Digital Dirt Virtual Pasts:

“Why do you write science fiction?”

It’s a fair question, only slightly complicated by the fact that personally I tend to write more fantasy than SF, but if I go down that road I run the risk of getting sidetracked into the endless debate about what the difference actually is between science fiction and fantasy, which is only marginally less tedious than all the other equally pointless discussions in the world including whether computer generated monsters are better than animatronic ones, whether boiled eggs should be cracked at the blunt end or the pointy one, how many roads a man must walk down and whether Han really did shoot first.

All of which is a largely pointless preamble to the main reason I’d like you to read this list, which is because I don’t think ten reasons to write science fiction are nearly enough and I’d really like someone to add some more. So here we go:

I write science fiction because …

• Special Effects – The Next Generation (article by Glenn Campbell and Donna Trotter)
• On The Fly – The Making of a Sequel (article by Robin Brunet)
• From Science to Showbiz (article by Pamela Duncan Looft)

Star Trek – The Next Generation

Looking for a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in broadcast television circa 1989? Look no further than Glenn Campbell and Donna Trotter’s article on the visual effects of Star Trek – The Next Generation. After sketching in a little background (including notes on how Gene Roddenberry got the original 1960s Star Trek series off the ground in an era when all the major studios were shutting down their in-house effects facilities) the authors go on to describe the technical and financial challenges of rebooting the concept for, ahem, a new generation.

What follows is a terrific breakdown of video production techniques both old and new (well, they were new then). Joe Matza of Composite Image Systems enthuses about his Abekas digital disk recorder, which ‘employs two high-speed computer disk drives to store up to fifty seconds of film per disk.’ There’s more arcane hardware on display in the form of the ADO, Quantel’s Paintbox and Mirage (which allowed the retouching and spatial manipulation of video images) and the Quantel Harry, the rotoscope-friendly big brother to the Paintbox.

Remember the Quantel days? All that fancy equipment grabbing frames of video, folding them up and flying them all over the screen in every pop video and news bulletin you watched through the 1980s? I don’t know about you, but I got pretty sick of those effects. But in the hands of the TNG artists, they came into their own.

The new technology was all very well, but it took skill to make it not only to perform, but also integrate with both traditional effects techniques and film footage borrowed from the Star Trek feature films. Rob Legato was the man combining Quantel technology with ILM elements of the USS Enterprise shot, stage footage and practical effects. In the first season alone, Legato delivered ‘about eighteen hundred effects shots in less than eight months’ – a staggering achievement even at 525-line NTSC resolution.

Legato’s ingenuity is evident in the many shot breakdowns presented in the article. He devised bluescreen comps that pushed the Ultimatte system to the limit, and combined motion control with pan-and-scan to put bluescreened actors in front of painted backgrounds while moving the camera … all the time fighting to keep up with the extraordinarily tight network deadlines (once he resorted to shooting some Enterprise streak elements on Kodacolor print film and using a one-hour photo shop to get it processed in time).

This is a well-balanced article, with heaps of technical detail balanced neatly with historical context. There are also interesting comparisons between the opposing worlds of television and cinema. It’s clear that, in 1989, the two were still very much separate entities, a divide characterised by the stark difference between videotape and film. Nowadays, in the digital age, is there really any difference at all?

(Since his early days on Star Trek – The Next Generation, Rob Legato has become one of the most respected VFX supervisors in the business. If you’ve never heard him speaking on the subject of visual effects, take fifteen minutes out of your day to watch his superb TED talk from 2012: The Art of Creating Awe. In this short lecture, Legato regales his audience with stories about his work on Apollo 13, Titanic and Hugo.)

The Fly II

Moving on to Robin Brunet’s article on The Fly II, we switch our attention from opticals to animatronics. Behind the scenes of this horror sequel is a story of big ambitions (producer Steven-Charles Jaffe declares his intent to make a film ‘in the class of Aliens‘) and harsh realities (effects supervisor Jon Berg, referring to endless script rewrites, remarks that, ‘We did not know exactly what would be required until the very last minute’).

Despite uncertainties about the storyline, the effects crew kept rolling, producing puppets and rigs adaptable enough to accommodate everything director Chris Walas would demand on set. It can’t have hurt that Walas – sitting for the first time in the director’s chair – was by then a veteran of this kind of movie, having masterminded the creature effects for the original The Fly, Gremlins and others.

The text, as you’d expect, is packed with instructions for creating mechanical armatures, manufacturing fake flesh and all manner of gore, and painting a puppet to give it a gorgeous insectile iridescence. There’s also plenty of cinematic sleight-of-hand on show, from a clever sliding plexiglass gag devised to simulate ‘fly vomit’ dissolving a car window to the simple trick of wrangling live flies by letting them thaw slowly.

While the hero of the piece is undoubtedly the full-scale Martinfly animatronic on its roving boom arm, what’s impressive is the sheer range of creatures and creature parts created for the film. Nowhere is this more evident than in Walas’s showcase four-minute Steadicam shot that not only pressed three different creature rigs into service but also included ‘one of the most complicated live-action animatronics gags ever devised.’

At the end of the article, Jon Berg asserts, ‘We did five times the effects with the same schedule and budget as the original. It was under-the-gun work – and it looks good.’ He’s right, although when I watched the movie again recently I concluded that, good as the creatures look, there’s a level of performance that’s lacking. I guess that’s inevitable given the extraordinary pressure the crew was under.

(That raises a question: what’s really more important – how something looks, or how it performs? Would you rather see a monster that looks slick but just lumbers about? Or one that’s lashed up from spare parts but acts the pants off the rest of the cast? Discuss.)

Oxford Scientific Films

The third and final article in Cinefex #37 prompts me to pose another question: how many visual effects companies can you think of that were established in the 1960s and are still thriving today? Well, Oxford Scientific Films was founded in the UK in 1968 and is still going strong, having evolved into an award-winning producer of award-winning natural history films for broadcasters including the BBC and National Geographic.

In her retrospective article, Pamela Duncan Looft charts the company’s progress from its genesis in the zoology department of Oxford University to a commercial outfit ‘specializing in high magnification, controlled motion, snorkel, aerial image and high-speed cinematography.’

Thanks to commissions from the BBC and Ealing Corporation, the students who founded the company soon left their academic roots behind and started making actual money. What followed was a remarkable journey characterised by constant technical innovation. Faced with such challenges as filming, for example, butterfly eggs at ultra-high magnification, co-founder Peter Parks and his team developed the dark field optical bench. This remarkable piece of equipment shaped their intense light source into a cone that left the brightly lit eggs floating against black (that’s a poor description of an incredibly clever optical device it takes Looft a whole page of text to dissect, by the way).

OSF gradually made inroads into feature films, contributing the kind of trippy effects sequences that characterised the 1970s and early 1980s. Their snorkel camera let them get up close and personal with teeny-tiny things, and they were constantly experimenting with different fluids and chemical compounds to create unique visual experiences, such as the yeast cells they pumped past the camera to create ‘cosmic explosions’ for Altered States (1980).

Looft’s article steers us through OSF’s low-budget recreation of Saturn’s rings for Saturn 3 (1980), Kara’s innerspace odyssey for Supergirl (1984) and extensive miniature work for Deepstar Six (1989). But it’s her descriptions of those innovative camera rigs that really stick in the mind, in particular the aerial image relay system with which OSF created a real-time composite of a giant dragonfly swooping through a prehistoric forest, using an impossibly unwieldy IMAX camera, a specialised snorkel lens and a whole bunch of mirrors.

Oxford Scientific Films have now gone back to their zoology roots – and remained tremendously successful to boot. That the natural world is their first love is evident in Parks’s closing remark: ‘When I look at the strange and beautiful creatures that live underwater, I am still convinced that the very best special effects are found right there.’

The pictures

The Star Trek article features lots of stills from the show but, from a historical point of view, the winning shots are those of gigantic videotape storage machines and banks of CRT monitors. This is electronic production in the dawning digital age and boy does it look clunky.

The Fly II yields up some superb behind-the-scenes shots of the movie’s mechanical monsters, many in colour. My favourite shows stunt doubles Yves Cameron and David Mylrea suspended on wires from a boom crane. Mylrea’s head is poking from the top of the full-body Martinfly suit as he ‘carries’ a nervous-looking Cameron towards the teleporter, while a pair of technicians heft equipment around them.

I’m not going to pick out an individual shot from the Oxford Scientific Films article. Rather, what strikes me about the pictures here is the amazing contrast between the behind-the-scenes photos of heavy, industrial camera rigs and the extraordinarily delicate microscopic images they produce. There are pages and pages of them both, proof that science can deliver not only truth, but beauty too.

• Cinefex
• Rob Legato at IMDb
• Chris Walas at IMDb
• Oxford Scientific Films

Did you enjoy this Cinefex retrospective? If so, click here to read the others in the series.

Currently the second draft of Talus is with Solaris. Contracts are signed and a press release has been issued. The next step is editing the manuscript. I’m convinced editing is a quantum process since it permits you to hold two opposing views simultaneously, namely: ‘Holy cow, I can’t wait to see this work of dazzling genius hit the bestseller lists!’ and: ‘Holy crap, this stinks worse than week-old farts.’ Editing is a sweaty business that requires faith, fortitude and the enthusiastic downing of strong coffee and red wine (rarely at the same time) and I can’t wait to get stuck in.

By the way, the image shown here isn’t the book cover, just a quick sketch I did to accompany this post. The actual cover is still some way off. Given the general awesomeness of the recent Solaris cover designs, that’s something else I can’t wait see.

As for the novel itself … well, I guess the elevator pitch would be: a murder mystery set in ancient times. Emphasis on ancient. I’m reluctant to use the word ‘prehistoric’ because, believe me, The Flintstones this ain’t. But we are talking about the dawn of man, a time before metal was first forged and long before our distant ancestors started scribing the first written words into sandstone. We’re talking about a time when man and myth were intimately connected, when the spirit world was considered to be as real as this physical realm and when, if you wanted a detective, you couldn’t just look one up on the internet.

Hell, back then there were no detectives.

Until Talus came.

I’ve already mentioned Talus a few times on this blog, under its original working title of The Frozen King. If you want to unpick the early progress I made on the manuscript, here’s a list of all the posts where it gets a passing mention:

• Early drafts

• A Planetful of Aliens (article by Ron Magid)
• Exaggerated Reality (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• Double Vision (article by Don Shay)
• The Right Blob for the Right Job (article by Robert G Pielke)

Alien Nation

‘Be careful what you wish for.’ So the saying goes, and it pretty much sums up the trials of the prosthetics crew on mammoth makeup movie Alien Nation. The task of creating not just one or two alien creatures but an entire race fell on Alec Gillis, Shane Mahan, John Rosengrant and Tom Woodruff, working as a team under the Stan Winston Studios banner.

Magid’s article tracks the development of the alien designs from day one to final wrap. ‘The earlier designs tended to be more outrageous,’ says Gillis, with Mahan explaining that in the end director Graham Baker opted for a more subtle approach ‘in order to allow the character of the actor to be read through the rubber pieces.’

This decision caused headaches for Zoltan Elek, the man responsible for applying the makeups to the actors. Originally a champion of the ‘less is more’ approach, Elek found it hard to apply prosthetics so thin and smooth that ‘I could not afford to make any mistakes along the blending edge … It was a tough job.’

Makeup fans will rejoice as Gillis and the Winston team bring us step-by-step descriptions of their various life-casting and mould-making techniques. As well as revealing the magic ingredient they used to create a stubble effect on the aliens’ heads, they also bewail the difficulty of designing a body suit for an alien striptease scene and the challenge of securing the cooperation of an actor who ‘almost broke his contract because he insisted no on had informed him that his entire head would be covered by the makeup.’

But what comes through time and again is the sheer volume of work demanded by the show: some ninety sets of appliances were required for lead actor Mandy Patinkin alone, with each appliance requiring ‘at least seventy individual molds.’ Add to that the hundreds of background masks created for the film’s crowd scenes and you start to appreciate the slightly stunned tone of the team’s closing comments.

‘We figured that going from … the alien queen in Aliens to these straight prosthetic makeups would be simple,’ says Mahan, ‘but it was really a lot of work.’ And while the crew clearly got great satisfaction from working on a show comparable – in makeup terms at least – with the groundbreaking Planet of the Apes, Gillis has to admit it ‘was a huge logistical challenge.’

Die Hard

In Adam Eisenberg’s short-but-sweet article on Die Hard, visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund describes the ways in which he and his team at Boss Film Corporation helped achieve director John McTiernan’s vision of ‘exaggerated reality’, which dictated that in this film ‘the effects could not look like effects at all.’

Many of Edlund’s challenges involved blowing things up. For an iconic fireball-in-a-lift-shaft shot, that meant a forced-perspective miniature packed with pyrotechnic charges so toxic the cameras had to be operated remotely. ‘We did not know what we had for sure until we saw dailies the following morning,’ says Boss director of photography Bill Neil. Even more seat-of-the-pants was a night shoot of a miniature helicopter exploding on a small-scale replica of the Nakatomi building.

It wasn’t all black powder and brute force. In order to control the apparent speed of the elevator fireball rising towards the camera, Neil and his crew developed a nifty rheostat device to alter the speed of the camera dynamically through the shot. And Richard Vye contributed a clever computerised system that followed focus on actor Alan Rickman as he fell away from the camera during his death plunge. ‘If we had not had that computer focus system,’ says Neil, ‘we would probably still be doing [the shot].’

There are plenty more goodies, including a breakdown of the flawless match-moved tilt-down that blends from a miniature of the Nakatomi building to the live-action street, and the revelation that for most of the movie Bruce Willis used ‘latex “barefoot” boots that he could wear over his real feet.’ Best of all is Richard Edlund’s obvious pride in his achievements on the movie. I’ve noted before how critical Edlund can be of his own work, so it’s nice to hear him respond to producer Joel Silver’s mandate that ‘[the effects have] got to look great’ by concluding, ‘I think we did a pretty good job of fulfilling that demand.’

Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers is another movie that’s light on visual effects. This plays to Don Shay’s advantage, as it gives him time to dig deep into the challenging process of turning one actor into two.

Shay describes Dead Ringers as ‘a dark and disturbing account of twin gynecologists bedeviled by drugs and shackled by a lifelong psychic bond.’ Director David Cronenberg and actor Jeremy Irons – playing the twin parts of Elliot and Beverly Mantle – offer insights into the thought processes behind both storytelling and performance. Meanwhile, optical effects supervisor Lee Wilson outlines the revolutionary ways in which motion control and moving split-screens allowed Irons to appear as two characters in the same frame, without limiting Cronenberg to using a locked-off camera.

The specialised motion control camera dolly (operated by ‘your basic IBM-AT clone – a Compaq 286 – and some Tondreau software’) enabled Cronenberg to shoot Irons performing one character while using a camera move, then to repeat that move perfectly when Irons switched roles. Crucial to the whole process was a video playback system that provided instant replay along with a quick-and-dirty approximation of the split-screen effect. The playback also enabled Irons to hear the first half of his performance via a concealed earpiece, and react accordingly.

Shay deconstructs this process in considerable detail, making it clear that the quality of the work was as much down to the care and craft of the operators as it was to the equipment. The devil really was in the detail, and detail is what we get, from discussions of the noise issue raised by the servos on the camera to the excitement felt by the crew as they succeeded in their ambitious attempts to rack focus across the split line.

Most impressive is Cronenberg’s refusal to get carried away: ‘If a twinning shot should suggest itself,’ he says, ‘then I would take advantage of it – but I would not force it.’ Cronenberg’s admirable restraint prompts Wilson to remark, ‘I would have loved to have seen a lot more twinning shots in the film – but that was not what this story was about.’

Dead Ringers also features a few of the icky makeup effects many people associate with Cronenberg. Here they’re confined to a dream sequence that shows the twins joined by fleshy connective tissue. It’s a juicy account of methylcellulose slime and condoms filled with liquid urethane, not to mention seven puppeteers working nearly one hundred cables to animate a withered parasitic twin emerging from Beverly’s stomach, in a second dream sequence that was ultimately deleted because Cronenberg judged it ‘too far removed from the rest of the movie.’

There’s also a sting to the tail. The Dead Ringers crew had hoped theirs would be the first film to feature motion-controlled twinning effects, but they were beaten to the box office by the comedy Big Business. Moreover, as Shay points out, while Dead Ringers was received well by critics, they took ‘little or no notice of its flawless optical effects.’ For Lee Wilson, however, that counts as a triumph. ‘In essence, Jeremy [Irons] provided the effects,’ he says, ‘all we did was connect them.’

The Blob

If the first three articles in Cinefex #36 are examples of restraint, Robert G Pielke’s closing piece on the 1988 remake of The Blob is all-out mayhem. It’s also a good example of something we’ve seen time and again during this journey through the Cinefex archives: however skilled the team, if they don’t get the development time they need the visual effects are going to suffer.

In this case, the creature effects crew was led by Lyle Conway, creator of the stunning puppetry seen in The Dark Crystal and Little Shop of Horrors. The puppets they manufactured for The Blob were essentially gigantic silk mattresses filled with methocel. Pielke’s article outlines the many different techniques used to inject some semblance of life into these impossibly unwieldy creations, but nothing can hide the truth that, in order to create the Blob, Conway’s crew effectively had to create, uh, the Blob:

‘Once methocel was mixed with water,’ explains visual effects production supervisor Michael Fink, ‘and made to kick into a gel with a small amount of ammonia, it was nearly impervious to cleanup … It ate away at the asphalt parking lot, stripped paint from miniatures, gagged puppeteers … If anything was close to [director] Chuck Russell’s intent for the Blob, it was the material from which it was made.’

When it came to miniatures and opticals, Dream Quest Images fared rather better. Hoyt Yeatman’s breakdown of a wide range of miniature environments – augmented by the occasional matte painting – gives good insight into the kind of solid, reliable effects work that was Dream Quest’s bread-and-butter through the 1980s. Meanwhile, Tony Gardner’s gruesome makeup effects – including collapsing heads, snapping spines and general bodily meltdown – demonstrate both imagination and stoic resolve in the face of tight budgets and breakneck schedules. Overall this is a cheerful article about a joyfully goofy film.

The pictures

Phew! I reckon there’s just enough time for a whistlestop tour of my favourite pictures from this bumper issue of Cinefex. From Alien Nation, there’s a fine multi-photo set showing the step-by-step transformation of actor Kevyn Major Howard into alien drug czar William Harcourt. From Die Hard, there’s a behind-the-scenes shot of the truly enormous ‘miniature’ Nakatomi building standing tall in what looks like the Boss parking lot. The Dead Ringers article features another step-by-step breakdown, this one showing the various split-screen elements used to construct the shot of the twins lying draped together in death, alongside the final composite.

And The Blob? It’s just packed with gore from start to finish. What else did you expect?

Incidentally, if you’re hungry to actually see a few of the pictures from these early editions of Cinefex, head over to their Facebook page and take a look at the ongoing Remember When series of posts, in which one image is being published from each issue along with its original caption.

• Cinefex
• Stan Winston School
• Amalgamated Dynamics
• Richard Edlund Films
• Dead Ringers featurette from 1988

Did you enjoy this Cinefex retrospective? If so, click here to read the others in the series.

Sense of wonder. That’s what these big, daft summer movies are supposed to be about. In recent years, it’s been sadly lacking. Movies have been getting too frantic, directors too afraid to let their cameras linger on something beautiful, for fear the audience will get bored.

In 2009, JJ Abrams did a great job of reversing that trend with the meticulously crafted Star Trek. Now he’s delivered a sequel. So is the sense of wonder still there? Let’s find out.

First the good news. Under Abrams’s confident direction, Star Trek Into Darkness is a rousing movie that contains pretty much everything you could want from a summer blockbuster: strong story, solid cast, spectacular action. The familiar characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy – played by Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban respectively – bounce off each other to great effect. Watching the movie, there’s a real sense that this is the Star Trek you enjoyed when you were a kid.

Nowhere was this feeling stronger than in the film’s opening sequence, in which our heroes are trying simultaneously to escape from a tribe of bloodthirsty alien primitives, extinguish an active volcano and lift off the Enterprise from its underwater hiding place. It’s such a joyful, audacious sequence that it’s no surprise the movie takes a little while to find its feet once it’s over.

Once it gets going, Star Trek Into Darkness romps along at a decent lick. Abrams is a great storyteller, equally comfortable with intimate character moments and action set-pieces. His direction is so effective that it mostly makes up for the weaknesses in the narrative – yes, I know I said the story was strong, but sadly the script creaks in too many places for it to be truly satisfying.

Take the ease with which Kirk is despatched to the Klingon homeworld with his payload of super-torpedoes (super-torpedoes – really?). I know the set-up’s meant to be hokey, but the trouble is it feels hokey, so when the big revelation comes later it’s neither a real surprise nor – if you think it through – terribly plausible.

Then there are the big action scenes. Great as they are, strip away Abrams’s assured direction and some of the best visuals you’ll see this side of the Neutral Zone, on paper they’re just a little ho-hum. The high-speed transfer between the Enterprise and the Vengeance is a rehash of the space dive from the last Star Trek outing and the final showdown between Zachary Quinto and villain Benedict Cumberbatch, while flawlessly executed, is still just a fist-fight on a moving vehicle.

Cumberbatch, by the way, is one of the three outstanding things about this movie. Good as the rest of the cast are, he acts the pants off them all. As a Brit, I’ve been enjoying his TV performances for a good few years now so it’s great to see him up on the big screen. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough of him. When you’ve got an actor as capable as this playing a villain as interesting as … as the one he plays in this movie … it’s a crime not to give him all the screen-time he deserves.

The second outstanding thing about Star Trek Into Darkness is the visual effects, delivered primarily by Industrial Light & Magic. ILM have got really very, very good at throwing enormous starships around with weight, grandeur and sheer chutzpah. They’re also very good at water. In this movie they put the two together to stunning effect. In partnership with the third outstanding thing (director Abrams) they’ve delivered what I’ve been craving for a good many years now: a whole bunch of beauty shots.

Star Trek Into Darkness is fundamentally a thing of beauty. Whether it’s the USS Enterprise rising majestically from an alien ocean or the USS Vengeance on a collision course with San Francisco bay, there are dozens of shots that genuinely take your breath away. That’s why I’m prepared to forgive the movie its fundamental silliness and casual sexism. It’s why I’m happy to forget its undeveloped villain and remember the moments of genuine emotion between its heroes.

It’s why I’m pleased to say that the cinematic sense of wonder is well and truly back.