What's your favorite off the beaten path spaceship?
The Event Horizon is great. So are the others that immediately come to mind. What's your favorite forgotten/lesser known ship. Here's the Cygnus from The Black Hole.
The GunStar from The Last Starfighter blew me away as a kid. Pretty good CG for the era as well, but the design felt sleek and believable.
I've always loved the Vipers from BattleStar Galactica as well as the Veritech from Macross (well... robotech since that's what it was called here when I was a kid lol) but I feel like those are both pretty mainstream now?
The morphing ship from Flight of the Navigator was pretty cool. In that same era, the bubble ship from Explorers was pretty awesome concept.
Do personal vehicles count? I always wanted to have a Light Cycle from tron. I loved that they just turned it on and their disk became the steering and it just formed around them. Plus it was cool af. The Cylcone from Macross / Robotech was pretty cool in that same vein.
I'm honestly a little bit flabbergasted to learn that CG was in use on the Last Starfighter (1984). I was about to get pedantic, but as I usually do when that's my instinct - I googled it. I would never have guessed.
Maybe I'll see if my husband wants to watch it later. He hates early CGI
There was definitely some terrible weird looking CG from back in the day... but some of the examples were really well done and still hold up ok. There are some moments in Last Starfighter where you're like "ouch... flat shaded cg" but some other moments where it looks great. I think a chunk of the ship was also practical, but there were some detailed CG in it.
When movies used it for something that wasn't meant to look realistic, back before it was feasible, it still holds up ok. For a sci-fi spaceship or things like the vehicles in TRON, you don't get that weird uncanny valley feel as much IMO.