Star Wars has more advanced special effects

The argument

This argument holds that Star Wars is better than Star Trek because its special effects have always been more advanced — and in space fantasy, where worlds, battles and creatures must be conjured convincingly from nothing, effects are not decoration but the very fabric of the experience. Star Wars did not merely use the best effects of its day; it created them. The original 1977 film was so far beyond the state of the art that George Lucas founded Industrial Light & Magic to make it possible, pioneering computer-controlled motion photography that let cameras fly through dogfights no audience had ever seen. That pattern repeated for decades: the franchise drove innovation in models, creature work, digital characters and virtual production, with ILM becoming the effects house for the entire film industry. Star Trek, by contrast, was born on television budgets, and for long stretches its wobbling sets, painted backdrops and modest ship shots were part of its charm rather than its achievement; even its films rarely defined the visual cutting edge. The gap matters because of what these stories ask audiences to believe. Immersion in a galaxy far, far away depends on seeing it — the scale of a Star Destroyer, the speed of the Falcon, the physicality of alien worlds. Star Wars' effects made its universe tactile and overwhelming in a way that became the reference point for all cinematic spectacle, and each generation of its films renewed that standard. From this standpoint, the saga that repeatedly invented the future of visual storytelling delivers the more complete and convincing experience. Because Star Wars has more advanced special effects, this argument holds, Star Wars is better than Star Trek.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The factual claim is overstated. Star Trek was not confined to television budgets: the 1979 film had one of the largest effects budgets of its era, with work by Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra, and the 1982 sequel's Genesis sequence — produced by Industrial Light & Magic itself — is routinely cited as the first fully computer-generated sequence in a feature film, a landmark in exactly the discipline the argument uses as its yardstick. The effects house the argument credits to one franchise built a milestone for the other. The criterion is also chosen rather than established. Effects advancement is one dimension of quality, and the rival position values what the two franchises are actually contrasted on: episodic character development across hundreds of hours, and the use of speculative premises to work through ethical and political questions. An argument about rendering does not engage any of that. Criteria of this kind also age badly. Effects are the most perishable element of a film, and a standard that ranks by technical advancement rewards recency and budget — it would rate each new production above its predecessors and rank the 1977 film, the argument's own centrepiece, below work that has surpassed it. Finally, the comparison is uneven in form: a film series is being measured against a body of work that is primarily television, on the criterion where cinema budgets are structurally advantaged.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Star Trek was not confined to television budgets — the 1979 film was a major effects production, and ILM's Genesis sequence for its 1982 sequel is widely cited as the first fully computer-generated sequence in a feature film. [Rejecting P3] Effects are one dimension of quality and the most perishable one; a standard that ranks by technical advancement rewards budget and recency, and would rank the 1977 film below everything that later surpassed it.