The story is the most important thing. Whatever makes you think of anything but the story detracts from the experience. Directors have to become ever more technically accurate as the general audience becomes more and more savvy. With this in mind, I have been thinking of how I could create a rendering on a computer that would be nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing. It seems to me that for the average rendering system out there, the obvious answer is space sequences.
Space ships are fairly easy to model, paint and render.
Their movements are absolutely smooth and the backdrop of stars and planets are about as simple as you could possibly get. I have spent hundreds of hours rendering space sequences showing ships flying around against a backdrop of millions of stars and a slice of the earth complete with 3D clouds. Every animator has done the Universal logo with the sun setting behind the earth in space and the letters orbiting around. What I wanted was a real challenge. Here we have large mysterious vessels looming through obscure underwater caverns.