ST George Lucas' visual creativity was noticeably absent - and not in a good way

The problem with this is the OT already established Star Wars as being synonmous with "real" looking places. Tatooine feels like a real place ... you can feel the sun. Hoth feels like a real place. Even the bridge of a Death Star/Star Destroyer feels "real".

Going way too wacky with the design of a planet IMO doesn't work that great with Star Wars. It makes the environment feel ... well fake. Half the prequel planets just felt like a cartoon to me.

To me what makes Star Wars work is not the fantasy element per se. Any one can make a bunch of fantastic looking "alien-ey" planets. Look at that recent Jupiter Ascending film from the Wachowskis, it basically takes the CGI planet concept from the prequels and dials it up to 10. It looks better visually than any of the prequels.

But it's dull. Lifeless. The great thing about Star Wars is it always grounded the fantastic with real. The characters in the OT didn't talk some space mumbo-jumbo, they argued and bickered like normal people. That made the fantastical stuff work. The ships in the OT weren't just form over function, they look practical and had so much little detail that you could believe that was a real place.

 

I can see how some are saying they didn't think it looked like Star Wars. We spent a lot of time on First Order spaceships and bases and I think the blue/black color scheme (the lighting on these places is much darker than in the OT and it looks like there's a blue tinge) for The First Order bases and ships might have benefited being closer to the grey color scheme of the Empire in OT. The movie does look and feel like Star Wars plus a new chapter in the franchise. Which is fine and good, but even after years of being out of his classic trilogy element and in his prequel trilogy element, this shot by George Lucas in Revenge of the Sith,



on the deck of a Star Destroyer (?) looks STRAIGHT out of the Classic trilogy, and I would say it looks more like Star Wars than how a lot of the First Order stuff looked.


When Episode 1 first released, Naboo wasn't necessarily something people felt looked like Star Wars. Now that time has gone on, many would say Naboo looks and feels like Star Wars. I'm sure the same thing will happen with TFA and its locations

I hope none of this sounds like trilogy arguing. I understand this board doesn't want that in this forum. I like The Force Awakens, I love the OT and PT. I've had years to digest them and compare them to things and I've just learned to love them for what they are

 

This is one of the things I miss with TFA, they went more realistic style rather try and create a new world. All of them were made from real Earth Locations, and they didn't even try to make it different. ROTS really topped planet designs, then we get this.

 

I didn't miss George here AT ALL!! More power to you for starting everything (with a lot of help from other really talented people btw) George. But, this was the best looking SW film since ESB, easily imo.

And I just flat-out find JJ to be a better all-around director than Lucas.

 

I'm sorry but I can't buy this as being remotely a real place:




Your movie goes into cartoon territory when you go here.

There's nothing *that* inventive about this either, it's a generic look for most fantasy/sci-fi these days and looks like a million different video games.

The barren/Western landscape the OT made famous is much more distinctive and unique relative to other films IMO.

Jupiter Ascending, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Fifth Element, etc. etc. all have wacky looking planets, the Star Wars prequels hardly have a monopoly on that style.

 

I thought that the ideas behind some of the worlds in the PT were interesting. And some of them really worked (I liked the look of Naboo and Mustafar for example). But Lucas went a bit overboard with some of the others I thought. And then some of them (Geonosis for example) were just bland.

 

I think Uncle George succeed, and here's why: for people saying "well he created big fake CGI worlds that don't look anything like the boring EARTH we live on, he totally failed", he actually didn't. Why? Because they are MEMORABLE!

It's hilarious to watch people that hate his worlds describe them by name and with great detail! Besides Jakku and the help from the internet can you name one other planet from TFA? What kind of details can you give?

Don't post here, but from memory name 10 planets from the OT&PT and their descriptions. Even if you hate the PT you can do it. Case closed. Whether you like it or not, they are memorble and they stand out.

This is a fantasy series. Not a non-fiction account here on earth. Seriously are you cool with all the future films being filmed in only 100% real earth locations? If so you are just helping to keep Star Wars boring. I can't wait to be flying over the fields of Nebraska on the next Star Tours ride...

 

I think the lack of cool sound effect was far more disappointing than the visuals. I felt the visual symbolism in this film blew away anything in the OT or the PT.

 

That whole concept is boring because every movie does it. Like I said go watch Jupiter Ascending ... it's more prequel than the prequels even, it looks like a million bucks. Too bad the movie sucks.

Guardians of the Galaxy has the same look. So does basically every space movie these days. CGI out the wazoo. What's so special about that today?

You talk about naming planets, but which scene in the prequels is even 1/10000th as iconic as Luke looking out to the twin suns of Tatooine? Nothing, all that CGI and there isn't really one or two images from the prequels that have become iconic in the general pop culture.

Star Wars actually was more of a SPACE WESTERN.

IMO this video sums it up very well ... Star Wars is at its best when it's on the frontier, when the environment is hostile and dangerous.



Going back to the more iconic "frontier" look of the originals is actually more risky today, because TPM/AOTC ... these types of effects are common place and even done better in other films today. It's no big deal. No one is making a "space Western" though that I can think of anyway.

 

Aside from occasionally reporting to people like Alan Horn and Bob Iger, the Disney corporate umbrella doesn't intrude on Kathleen Kennedy's ability to operate Lucasfilm as she wants and handle its associated properties as she wants. Any and all decisions regarding the hiring of J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and the overall approach to Episode VII were made by her, and she then apprised Iger and Horn of what she was doing, as are all decisions regarding the handling of the Star Wars brand overall.

 

Unicron 5
Felucia looked great much better then the cheap backyard look of the Tokadona ground battle. It was like something out of the Stargate TV series.

 

Lets not pretend that the worlds in the OT were all that distinct either. It was basically a case of "take a recognizable geographic/climatologically feature from Earth, and apply it to a whole planet."

-Tatooine is a desert.
-Hoth is an arctic tundra.
-Endor is a Redwood Forest.
-Yavin IV is a rainforest.
-Dagobah is a swamp.
-Etc.

And if we go to the PT:

-Naboo is space-Venice (it even has gondolas for goodness sake).
-Coruscant is a big city.
-Geonosis is a desert again.
-Etc.

And you know what, I don't mind that actually. But the double standard being applied here is the problem.

 

I guess it is a matter of opinion. I for one would be disappointed if all future star wars films only used real earth locations in fear of taking people out of the reality of earth.

Again this has nothing to do with PT vs OT. If Lucas had the ability in the OT to make more wondrous places he would have. He used technology to create a city in the coulds. He used real life sets to create Dagobah. Im sorry I doubt there is a place on earth exactly lime Dagobah. Hoth may have just been an earth location but there were wompas and tauntauns.

 

The planets all felt too familiar, but thankfully so many of the aliens and creatures were blissfully weird.

 

We don't know for sure. Disney is about as corporate as it gets. They meet and scrutinize every aspect of their operations constantly.

Even if it's Kathleen Kennedy acting on her own ... if that's the case, then I'm guessing maybe she doesn't like the prequels too much. Why axe the prequel 3D re-releases and axe the Clone Wars TV series pretty much as your first moves with the IP? Why throw out what apparently was a perfectly good treatment from George Lucas that Michael Arndt had already spent months on?

Obviously there was something there she did not like. Surely she also must have grilled Abrams on how he would handle/approach the franchise ... he must have told her something that made her feel that was the right direction and upon seeing this film it's obvious his approach was to be 110% reverential to the original movies.

She was so on board with that that she was willing to delay the movie to get that approach. That says a lot.

 

Yes, most of the planets we had previously seen in Episodes I-VI were based on real-life environments; however, the point being made by the OP is that George Lucas made a conscious effort to visually imbue them with qualities that made them distinct from any similar environments you might be able to find here on Earth, which is something that can't be said of any of the environments we saw in The Force Awakens (heck, Hosnian Prime looked like any one of several major metropolitan cities in the U.S.).

 

Completely agree. As my sister who works for Kellogg's told me (in the interest of full disclosure, Kellogg's lost the tie-in to General Mills), "Walmart is to consumer goods as Disney is to entertainment." To think that the Mouse was not intimately involved in managing their new IP would be incredibly naïve.

 

Not really. I've seen the desert, and the Redwood forests, and pictures of the Amazon, etc. And no, the OT location DON'T look all that different. Nor should they because they were shot there. Heck Coruscant is the most generic-looking "big city planet" you could possibly get.

And I'm not even complaining about that. But lets not act like this movie is the first to do that, it's been there from Day One.

 

^^^ this

Felucia. It's pretty narow minded that even in our universe where there are trillions of observable stars and countless planets out there that in a SCIENCE FICTION movie there couldn't be a place like Felucia in existence! Bwahh ha ha ha!!! But "we're all xenophobs", afraid of something "not real"

 

Avatar, Jupiter Ascending, The Fifth Element, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. have done the whole "lets shove 100309393 things into the frame because it's sci-fi and put more colors into the frame than a Smurfs episode" thing to death anyway.

What is so unique about that look? Every third video game also has that look too. It's not unique at all.

Like I said, the icongraphy of the OT of being barren landscapes ("what a desolate place this is") is far more distinctly "Star Wars" and unique. Not very many fantasy films are made like that anymore. It feel more "atmospheric" to me too.

 

For me, the absence of George Lucas was felt beyond just the visual alements. After watching TFA, I have more appreciation for the PT because they "feel" more like a Star Wars movie in the vein of the OT than TFA does. I dunno, maybe it's because I have been saturated in Star Wars for the better part of 35 years, so I kind of live and breath the OT and PT and this new film "feels" foreign in a certain respect. Like a really well made Fan Flick. Now, I am not saying it was a bad film. Far from it. I loved it and I truly believe that Star Wars can be more than just George Lucas (my love of the EU proves this for me). Maybe after repeat viewings I will learn to see TFA in the same mindset as I view the OT and PT films. But it's going to take time for that to set in. Maybe by the time Rouge One comes out and we have the first true Non-Star Wars Star Wars movie I will see how TFA fits into the soul of the OT and PT films.

 

Lucasfilm is operated exactly the same way that Marvel is, which is to say that they're both independently operated subsidiaries of the larger Disney corporate umbrella, and are allowed pretty much free autonomy as it concerns the development of the properties with which they are associated (Marvel's comics, television, and filmic properties, and Lucasfilm's intellectual properties such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.).

 

I enjoyed the movie and my childen loved it. Great family movie.

 

Yavin looked that much to Earth that it even had Mayan ruins in the landscape.

 

What exactly did George add to Tatooine, Yavin 4, Hoth, Dagobah, and Endor that Abrams didn't add to the planets in TFA?