hollywood blockbusters have many shots that are very labor intensive, and they can be pretty cavalier about throwing money at a problem. For example, films with a lot of mixed live action and CGI can take a lot of manual frame by frame work, and anything involving realistic character animation is a huge time sink. Not to mention huge server farms.
It looks like this film uses a limited number of shots (no cutting rapidly like action films), takes advantage of a lot of nasa and other imagery/data (no army of matte painters), limits characters to simple walking movements (no Pixar gesticulating), and probably keeps the particle effects and physics sims minimal (no computational fluids sims for glorious explosions).
It looks like this film uses a limited number of shots (no cutting rapidly like action films), takes advantage of a lot of nasa and other imagery/data (no army of matte painters), limits characters to simple walking movements (no Pixar gesticulating), and probably keeps the particle effects and physics sims minimal (no computational fluids sims for glorious explosions).