ST JJ and George: Comparing and Contrasting Aesthetics

JJ's pacing leaves no room for introspection for the characters, and no time for the audience to breathe and take in the enormity of events that are transpiring. George Lucas gave us these moments, the most introspective of which was the moment showing Padame and Anakin deciding what they were going to do, before Anakin became Darth Vader

 

Honestly, I don't think there's a lot separating the two. Abrams is one of those directors that has always been stylistically indebted to Lucas and Spielberg. Like Lucas, he likes those big sweeping shots that show all the action before settling in on a character's face to show their reaction. Where he differs is that Abrams always follows his action set-pieces with cool down periods, where the characters will discuss and process what just occurred. This includes Finn and Poe during their escape, Finn and Rey complimenting each other after their escape, Han providing exposition after the cargo ship showdown, etc. Lucas in his recent films had a tendency to allow his characters to only react while they were in the midst of danger and then afterwards move on and never mention it again. If Abrams had directed TPM, Qui-gon and Obi-wan would have still been discussing the Giant lantern fish that almost ate their submersible, while rescuing Padme from the droids.

 

I would agree with mdtauk regarding pacing. I would have loved a few extra seconds here or there to breathe and just take it in. It'll take many viewings and pauses to really take it in.

 

Lucas could not have made TFA. The visual flair would certainly have been there, but the characters would have appeared as 'cutouts' in front of a shiny background, making us feel less for them. Lucas would have taken it more otherworldly than Abrams and included more details that belong in the EU only. It also would have felt less 'dangerous'. Lucas' idea of dark is to jump to extremities (e.g. hack off limbs, kill some Younglings etc) which sometimes don't feel earned. Also an over-use of 'evil' music, which Abrams wisely avoided.

 

That's an interesting observation. For me, it was the opposite. Lucas loved showing new things all the time, he just liked cramming as much as he could into each scene before jetting off to the next one to show the next cool thing.

 

The biggest difference I noticed was that the blasters had been modernized. They've gone from being bright and flashy to looking and sounding a lot more like contemporary warfare. Dialogue was more colloquial too. Am I the only one who thought the opening scroll seemed a bit off? The bit I noticed in particular was “With the support of the REPUBLIC, General Leia Organa leads a brave RESISTANCE. She is desperate to find her brother, Luke, and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.” I'm quite sure that if Lucas had been writing it he'd have never said "she", and would have instead combined the two sentences into one or used some overblown words to describe her like "This heroic veteran" or somesuch. It takes away from the bombast. I did get used to the style after a while, but it's definitely not how Star Wars used to sound.

The editing was obviously more fast paced and character focused. I mostly liked that, but it did impose limitations on how far we could experience the world. The Jakku worldbuilding was near perfect. It told us everything we needed to know about the world and Rey's place in it with a few shots of her salvaging crashed Star Destroyers and collecting payment in food. But once it went beyond that world we were given very little information about the state of affairs. Lucas loved including throwaway lines that expanded the scope of the universe (the last remnants of the Old Republic, bounty hunter on Ord Mantell, etc.) but J.J. prefers to keep close to his characters and avoid any distractions. That's a technique he uses in all his movies. It'll be interesting to see which style Rian Johnson adopts.

One interesting difference between the two styles is that J.J. seems to have little interest in spirituality or mysticism. His use of the Force was much more down to earth than Lucas'. You could easily forget that it's basically a religion so much as a superpower. The only part of the film that truly did seem mystical was the final scene with Luke. Which makes it odd when regular people start talking about the Light or the Dark Side when discussing regular affairs. I felt like the Force has been opened up a bit from just Jedi and Sith. The terminology also seemed to take over when it wasn't necessarily needed. Like when Ren talked about still feeling Lightness in him instead of saying goodness. I believe Leia phrased it that way too. I'm still pondering why he chose to do that. I remember Luke speaking of how there was still good in his father but I can't think of him ever actually saying Lightness in that way. In any event, I didn't feel like the spiritual aspect was handled as subtly as Lucas did. There wasn't much place for it in this film to be fair, but again it will be interesting to see how Johnson handles it in the next one. I think we can see pretty clearly that we're going to get more mysticism since we're getting two independent characters being trained.

 

The overwhelming action in TFA was a real sticking point for me. Everything just ran at such a breakneck speed that I felt like I never had time to breathe. For all that Lucas' "walking and talking" moments are derided, I like them because they give us time to get our bearings, develop the characters, and establish where we are.

Of course, my favorite film is Lawrence of Arabia and I think it moves at a perfect pace and is the perfect length so I recognize that other people may not have the same issues that I did.

 

For me it was the humor that stood out. Both directors have a very different way of handling humor.

 

Comparing visual styles, I would say this film and the originals have very similar shots. (The actual camerawork is much different). There are lots of sweeping shots, close-ups of a locale before our characters arrive, and similar color themes (Although TFA had a lot more red overtones)

 

Things probably wouldn't have been so fast paced under GL. However I'm not complaining at all because I think the new characters are about a thousand times better under the new regime than they would have been if Lucas was making these movies.

 

I posted a similar thread, which was closed because the title was deemed too inflammatory. I disagree totally, but accept the decision. The crux of my argument was that
George Lucas has always had is a magnificent imagination. When the technology became available for him to portray his "mind's eye" on screen he succeeded beyond everyone's wildest imagination. It's clear The Force Awakens needs his vision. Badly. The lack of inspiration of the new worlds we visit in TFA is very disappointing. Evey place could be "Earth"

For example, in Episodes, I, II and III, we see some new worlds we hadn't seen before:

Naboo - a world with beautiful old buildings on the surface, and a beautiful underwater city. The planet is inhabitied by two sentient lifeforms. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Coruscant - a awesome city world the likes of which we had never seen before. We see various aspects of it, including it's lower levels. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Geonosis - a planet with giant triangle bee-hive like columns made by the life forms that live there. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Mustafer - a volcanic planet that simply looks amazing. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Kamino - a world that is entirely an Ocean with huge structures coming out of the water made by the inhabitants. Huge flying whale like creatures fly out of the water occasionally. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Utapau - a planet with massive sinkholes everywhere extending miles deep. It's obvious this isn't "Earth"

In The Force Awakens we start with a Tatooine doppleganger, then go to Takodana, which from what we can see, has some trees and a lake. We see Maz's castle which is just a castle with nothing remarkable about it. This could be Earth.

The planet with the resistance base, from what we can see, has some rolling green hills and more trees. This could be Earth.

Luke's planet, from what we can see has a few islands protruding from an ocean that looks just like Earth (obvioulsy because it was filmed here on Earth.) It doesn't appear any special effects have been added to make the surface of the planet look different and amazing. It's just... meh.

Starkiller base has snow and mountains. They are not particularly big mountains, or something unique that we don't see on Earth. This could be "Earth"

Even when George Lucas went back to Tatooine for the prequels he altered the landscape (such as when Anakin is riding his speeder on his way to save his mother) so that we see amazing rock structures. It's obvious it isn't "Earth"

Every planet we go to in TFA could be "Earth." Where was the imaginative vision? Even so far as putting some moons in the background in the sky (such as on Utapau, where half the sky is taken up by what appears to be a huge moon of Utapau). The skylines, of all the planets look like.... well, like Earth. When we see the sky above the mountains on Starkiller base, why can't we see something in the sky (like a huge moon) to make it "different"

The lack of creativity in the showcasing of the various worlds was very conspicuous.

This is why I have hope with Episode VIII. Rian Johnson (the director) said, a few months ago, "There was something beautiful about the prequels". And he's right. They are beautiful visual movies. This makes me hope that his artistic vision is much more unique than JJ Abrams. Quite simply, the worlds and planets we saw in TFA were uninspired and boring. George Lucas would have never made something so uninspired.

 

And not just the locations either.

Think of the scene aboard Han's giant freighter, and the aesthetics of the two warring gangs who are both after Han Solo. All of the gang members from BOTH gangs are human.

WHY???

This is the Star Wars galaxy, in which there are millions of species. If George Lucas was in charge of that scene, both gangs would have been aliens. Hell, one of the gangs could have been a gang of Rodians (for example) and the other could have been a mixture of a few different species. Of all the scenes, it just annoys me for some reason, because it clearly didn't even occur to any of the writers/creators that something as obvious as alien diversity should be shown in the one scene where it should be obvious to show it.

 

There are no alien looking worlds in the OT and this didn't detract from the films, why does it detract from TFA? Worlds are only made alien by the people/creatures who inhabit them. Jakku is baron and cannot look like anything other than a desert world, same with starkiller, it's an ice world only inhabited by the FO.

Hosnian Prime looked very well detailed and more alien but that got blown up.

 

I would love to see some planets like that in the next movie, but they definitely have to look real, which was mostly not the case in the prequels. I hope they get it right, if they take that route.

 

totally agree, it was great opportunity to show case some aliens.

on the overall subject, way more POV shots and shaky cam, and while many shots were very similar, they certainly didn't feel that way with the breakneck pace. while Lucas was alway visually overwhelming and full of all this little tidbits, the pacing was quite deliberate.

 

GL is stronger on story and visual composition. JJ seems to construct each sequence separately and not as part of a whole and his visuals are less obsessively worked over.

 

Cloud City is an alien looking world. Dagobah looks like nothing on Earth, which is why they built a set for it.

The other worlds don't look all that alien, I agree, but how could they? It was the late 1970's/early 1980's and there was a limit to what could be shown on screen, via special effects. We now no longer have any limit, and the visual imagination of the Prequel Trilogy proved that, even though the first film came out 16 years ago.

And yet here we are in 2015, where a movie-maker can shown ANYTHING on screen. The only limit is their imagination. It's the Star Wars galaxy, which is the one movie franchise where the visual limits of a movie-makers imagination should be tested to the limit. What other type of movie do you have the opportunity to show alien worlds that look nothing like Earth?

It detracts from it massively. When the technology became available in the mid 1990's to showcase anything on-screen via CGI, that technology was used to great effect in the prequel trilogy. And so it should have been. A story set in a far away galaxy with millions of habitable worlds needs to show an imaginative mind from the film-makers otherwise you are not showcasing the potential of the Star Wars galaxy. Yet, here we are in 2015, where there is simply no excuse not to showcase diverse, imaginative worlds, aliens and environments, and they didn't do it. Very disappointing. Very.

Jakku didn't need to be a Tatooine doppleganger. The story of the movie could have been identical, but Jakku could have been more "other-worldly" and in a totally "non-Earth" environment. Rey could still be a scavenger, or homeless, or whatever, but instead of being on a desert planet, she could have been abandoned in the depths of Coruscant on the lower levels where all the scum hang out. Or she could have been on a water planet with massive floating structures above the water, or something like that. What about a planet with trees that are 15 miles tall with the trunk of the trees 100 meters across? And she might be living in one such tree in a huge hole that has been carved into one, and there are some amazing flying creatures (like Bats, but many times bigger) that are dangerous that we see flying around. Something like that.

And the three planets we visit after Jakku (Maz's planet, the Reistance Base planet, and Luke's planet) are all green with water and trees and rolling hills. They are all the bloody same and all exactly like Earth.

StarKiller was just a snapshot of the Hiamalyas. Once again, it was just Earth.

 

does anyone on here listen to the WE HATE MOVIES podcast? I imagine some do at least....

their episode on ep2 and 3 going in on all the unecessary lamps and giant urns as set decoration in those movies absolutely killed me lol. now that I notice it, there are way. too. many. like...what does Padme need 8 lamps in a 10 foot space...some lamps are literally in the middle of scenes.

 

I've posted in other areas of the boards, and my big statement for TFA is that it is no George Lucas film. Was it bad? No. But, because they didn't use GL's treatments and decided to go their own way, the film showed a stark contrast from the other films. I mean GL wasn't even a creative consultant on this. Yes, because of JJ/Disney going their separate way on the film, George walked away because he didn't want to "muck" it up, or get in the way (I think he said this in an interview). But still, they should have kept him in as a consultant. I mean he's the creator of all this. He didn't just direct some of the films, he created the whole thing.

Really JJ/Kennedy/Disney? Kasdan was the guy you were willing to work with because he wrote TESB/ROTJ? Great SW films no doubt, they are some of my favorites. But NO George? The guy that started/created it all?

My reason for bring this up is not to suggest that TFA shouldn't be a JJ film,or to wish GL had control again, but they should have found some way to include him, and keep him involved. But of course, this is the new Star Wars, and I for one will enjoy the ride

 

Abrams style is entirely, 100% fine but unremarkable. It all looks serviceable and nice but I can't for the life of me remember anything but two clever shots from all of TFA. None of the battles particularly stand out, none of the locations are half as memorable as Bespin, Utapaum, Kamino.... I recall barely seen planets like Felucia and Mygeeto quite a bit better than any of the new worlds presented to us. I think his choice of making everything look too real robbed the movie of any possible flare it could've had.

 

Exactly.

I gave three examples of what "Jakku" could have been instead of a sand planet in my above post. And that was off the top of my head.

And yet after leaving Jakku, where the possibility of REALLY exploring the imagination of the filmmaker, could be shown, we instead received three different "Earth's"

This is supposed be Star Wars. A galaxy far, far away.

 

The George Lucas style was to basically show approximately three different locations in each movie, and have the locations look as different from each other from movie to movie.

If you have sand in one movie, then go to the opposite in the next movie - snow. Then show a forest which is nothing like the others. Then an alien swamp, and a city in the clouds, and a city planet and another with an underwater city and another with structures coming out of oceans and another with giant sinkholes etc etc.

That should be Star Wars' modus operandi for any new filmmaker. Get your story right obviously, but as far as the visual go, you MUST have at least 3 different environments in each film and from film to film they must be as different as possible, otherwise you can't make the film.

That's what George would have wanted. One thing George hadn't had in his movies yet by the time Episode 6 came around was a gangster. So he invented one and made him a giant slug. JJ would have made Jabba a human, just like the boring human warring gangs fighting with Han aboard the giant freighter.

 

I dont understand why Abrams couldnt bring us to new worlds. StarTrek Genisys started on a new planet that looked pretty cool. Even the future earth looked pretty good.

For ships and vehicle, there are probably endless ones to choose from(EU)... but instead all we got were the vehicles from A New Hope.

 

From a pure technical stand point that doesn't really factor as Kamino and Utapau etc are done with lots of practical effects ie models and miniatures and motion control work digitally composited then added on to with hundreds of matte paintings and CGI characters and creatures.

So I would say the lack of "alien" is simply as per the title of the thread an aesthetic one which simply ends up tying into the look desired which was the "barren worlds" with the odd pocket of population.

Maz's world, the Resistance and the First Order seem to be on worlds with no one already there besides themselves then Jakku makes Tatooine look like a resort location.

TPM is very much like the basic OT aesthetic of Earth-like worlds like Naboo, Tatooine and Coruscant only this time we see actual full civilizations as opposed to largely barren sparsely populated ones (if anyone is there at all besides indigenous life)

Obviously we see a Tattooine from it's "grandest" city as it were which we did not see in ANH or ROTJ.

Once Lucas did that then he stretched each movie to go to more and more alien places be it Kamino, Geonosis, Utapau. Kashyyyk etc.

On another thread someone did a great write up on their styles but the easiest way to describe it is that JJ loves to move the camera while George has a very still image. George gets his motion from the cutting while JJ likes to create motion in the frame itself.