There are, as far as I know, four films from the ’80s that claim to be the first to use computer-generated imagery: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Tron (1982), The Last Starfighter (1984), and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). However, the use of computer animation goes as far back as 1973’s Westworld, in which the point of view of Yul Brynner’s robot gunslinger was achieved through computer graphics, and other films in the ’70s had scenes featuring computer-generated images displayed on video monitors, including the simulated Death Star trench run in Star Wars (1977) and the landing sequence in Alien (1979).
Star Trek II was the first true milestone. Dr. Carol Marcus’s (Bibi Besch) demo of the simulated formation of the Genesis planet is entirely computer generated. Again, the images are seen on a computer monitor, but for a good 40 seconds the monitor is featured in full close-up without an edit, then once again for another 20 seconds. (An edited version of the scene can be viewed below.) Since the demo was a computer simulation, it wasn’t required to be photorealistic, but it was the closest anyone had come to achieving photorealism with computers up to that point in a movie.
