As impressive as this looks (and is), the effort strikes me as monumentally oversized. This particular picture, with its straight lines and everything artificial, could have just as well come out of a renderer. For substantially less cost, the result would have been the same. Doesn't mean you don't need to have the creative vision first. But executing it with a camera and a light/laser/fog set and all the effort that…
But that's exactly what's interesting with this! Everything can't just be viewed through the lens of costs, the effort to make something unnatural like this in real life is part of the art itself.
If you're just looking at the end result, yeah, same result could've been achieved with VFX with a lot less costs, but it also wouldn't have as much value.