koldfront

Flight of the Navigator (1986) ★★☆☆☆ #movies #computers

I recently stumbled over a video on Youtube about the visual effects in one of the first movies that had a lot of computer generated images, Flight of the Navigator.

I hadn't heard about the movie before, but the video went into much detail about how many of the model shots were made. The channel was called Captain Depression or Captain something or the other...

Disillusion! There it was: Flight of the Navigator | VFXcool.

Anyway, I watched the movie last night. It was mediocre.

It was fun to see the effects after having seen them explained, but that was about it. The most jarring thing was that the space ship took on a goofy silly voice after sucking too much information out of the boy's head. It was much more fun when it was stern and distanced.

The film features Sarah Jessica Parker in one of her early, small roles - and a fun gag as seen on the screenshot above, tipping the hat to E.T. The NASA professor is called Louis Faraday(!)

The computer graphics were generated on a PDP-10 derived computer, the Foonly F1, which generated one image at a time, filling up a separate cabinet holding 3 MB of video buffer, which was then transfered to film, before the next image overwrote the buffer. Also used for the original Tron movie.