ST Worldbuilding in the Sequel Trilogy

Looked a few pages back to see if there was a thread about this in particular, and while I see a couple that sorta indirectly touch on this subject, they don't really get to what I wanna discuss, which is the level of immersion these films create and IMO one of the most fascinating things about the series as a whole.

Overall, this is one of the main things that has disappointed me in both of the ST films so far. When Lucas was making his films, I always felt that he did an excellent job creating worlds that not only felt alien and distinct from one another, but worlds that also felt developed. For example, let's go with Tatooine. In the first film alone, we learn about the indigenous species (some scavengers, others violent, some basically animals), we learn that it's home to human farmers, and we learn there's also a seedy element to the planet, being home to smugglers and bounty. And as the films continued, we learned more about the planet every time we saw it, finally seeing Jabba's palace, more alien animals and learning of the podracing culture and slavery. The same is true of the rest of the Lucas films, with the exception of Revenge of the Sith, partially due to the sheer number of planets seen in that movie - while Utapau, Kashyyyk and Mustafar are all very visually distinctive, I don't feel we ever got much of a sense of their culture or an impression of what these planets would be like or what the natives would be doing if war/Jedi/Sith hadn't suddenly arrived.

Personally, I feel the quality of worldbuilding has lacked so far. Jakku, Starkiller Base and D'Qar are all pretty obvious analogues to Tatooine, the Death Star and Yavin 4, and what is there to say about Takodana? It's where Maz's castle is, but what else can you say about the planet outside of that singular location? It's a forest planet, not much else to say really. It's the same thing with Crait, you could briefly talk about what it looks like, but it really only serves to be the place where there's an old Rebel base, like the whole planet exists for one setpiece and was barely developed. Canto Bight is probably the worst of all to me, but for different reasons. This is supposed to be a galaxy far far away, but I'm constantly reminded of things from the real world, activities that I could basically partake in if I just went to a casino. It's not immersive or alien at all, it's just Las Vegas.

I think Rogue One and Solo did better with this (Scarif and Corellia especially were great), so I'm hoping that Episode IX will step up the worldbuilding a bit, but maybe others have enjoyed it more than I have in the sequel trilogy. What do you guys think?

 

And when I spoke of Tatooine getting more development every time we saw it (the same is true of Coruscant), this is another thing I miss. Other than possibly Jakku if they want to include Rey's parents somehow, I'm pretty sure we'll never see any of the ST planets again.

 

Well this'll be a short thread.

BA-DUM TISH

 

I actually thought Jakku was fairly well developed in TFA as having its own identity despite its similarities to Tatooine, but I agree with the overall premise. Sadly, because fans clearly bemoaned the cg environments in the PT, one of the lame marketing points was to pride itself on real sets, as opposed to cg. I loved the cg PT worlds, and IMO, this was part of what SW was by definition, always pushing the envelope of special effects, even if that meant it wasn't perfect. It was part of the spirit of the franchise.

Then again, maybe the lack of world-building comes hand in hand with the lack of character development and a well-thought out plot. SW was Lucas' heart and soul, and I don't think that kind of attention and care can be replicated by committee. I remind myself they are doing the best they can, and then I remember they tossed Lucas' treatment. And then I remind myself they are doing the best they can. And then I remember they tossed his treatment. And I go back and forth...

 

Jakku has the great shot of the downed Star Destroyer from the first TFA trailer, but outside of that it just reeks of Tatooine to me. If we're talking desert planets, Geonosis falls under that basic description too, but it's nothing like Tatooine at all.

 

Well seeing how Rey made a living was new, we actually saw how the scavenger business worked, her home life, how she passed the time, I'm not saying its great, but its there. If every other planet had as much as Jakku, I don't think this would be an issue.

 

Ahch-To (a tiny, wee little island) is probably the most interesting addition so far. I've read bits where some fans have retroactively come up with up with larger scaled, and better textured ideas for Jakku. Something along the lines of Jakku is littered with old war ships as far as the eye can see (of varying sizes.) The ships, and scrap are utilized by inhabitants as make-shift homes, and villages.

The two year turn-around on these films is nice for us, but probably a total creative obstruction for the artists/craftsman involved.

 

Jakku probably has the best world building of all the ST planets, but that's damning it with faint praises. The junkyard aesthetic of the settlements and the massive graveyard of Star Destroyers create an Ozymandias-kind of environment. It truly makes the OT feel like it was ancient history and that we are in an new era altogether. But the concept arts for Jakku is significantly better.

Jakku of the concept arts wasn't a Tatooine Planet 2.0 like the final version was. It was an Imperial graveyard first and foremost. Everywhere you look, there is an Imperial wreckage rusting. It wasn't just Star Destroyers. There Imperial Walkers standing up tall but reduced into skeletons. Castles made of Dickson junk and scavengers are everywhere. There is water on the planet, but it is polluted by the metal wastes.

When Lucas created Tatooine, he didn't make it into a desert planet because it was authentic with real life locations. He did it because it was the easiest environment to create an alien world. No real life plants to worry about, no distinct locations for sharp eye critics to identify, no need to populate the world with lots of aliens all the time. Saves a lot in the budget. But technology has moved on and Tatooine now no longer looks as impressive unless you were forced to make a Star Wars film on a shoestring budget.

Jakku should have been first and foremost a junkyard planet. And if JJ Abrams had watched Terminator and Terminator 2, he would know that making a junkyard planet is possible even without CGI. If James Cameron can do it with a relatively low budget, so can JJ Abrams with a high budget.

 

I can understand the criticism around aspects of the Canto Bight plot, or the age demographic focus that seems to take over Canto Bight, but it's hard for me to fault the world building. Like other visually interesting locales in Star Wars history... Canto Bight is a location that comes to life better the more one sees it on Blu-Ray, IMO, and I do know that some of you who hated the movie more have probably not done that (for obvious reasons since you don't want to) and might be thinking more so of just the interior Casino scenes. Have a look at some of these visuals again though and I think you'll see what some see. The world building here is probably better than you initially remember and much closer to the best of the prequel trilogy world-building:

 

One of my big disappointments as well. I liked the ship graveyard idea, but the fact that all the OT-style ships were still in regular use throughout the galaxy lessened the impact of seeing the "bones" of the past. Other than that way too much reliance on bland Earth-like settings, coupled with minimally interesting set dressing (the Finn vs. trooper back drop in TFA looks like something out of a modestly budgeted TV show).

Canto Bight at least was a return to the style of newfound SW exoticism, although given that they literally tore that place apart because it was inherently evil it was almost just a roundabout way of affirming that dusty, barren frontier worlds are inherently superior.

 

I do agree that the world-building in the ST, whilst okay for the most part, could have been much better. I agree that the most fleshed out world we've had so far is Jakku. I think the spin-offs, RO and Solo, have done a much better job of world-building and expanding the SW universe. It’s obviously all part of the minimalist approach they've been going for, to make it look and feel more like the OT. Whereas the standalone films, IMO, are more like the PT in that regard.

 

Even Utapau and Mustafar were pretty developed.

We get a good sense of the complex society which exists on Utapau. We're introduced to the planet as a massive, wind-swept rocky desert pocked with sinkholes inhabited by two races, one tall and vampiric-looking and one short and mole-like, the latter seeming to belong to a lower class which serves the former. The bones of massive beasts, which we can speculate roam the deserts above, are utilized in the architecture. We see that the inhabitants ride on giant lizards and pterodactyls as modes of transportation. We also see what the interior of the cities built into caverns in the rock-face look like. We even see that the very bottoms of the sinkholes access the planet's water table, explaining one major aspect of how their civilization sustains itself.

Mustafar is a simpler world, but we see that it too has inhabitants, who wear suits to protect them from the heat and ride around on giant fleas to get around on land, and hover around on energy-shielded platforms above the lava streams harvesting minerals which will presumably be refined in one of the massive industrial facilities like the one the Separatists are using as a temporary base. There's not a lot going on there, but there's enough to explain why there's a facility there for the Separatists to hide in.

Of course this itself is fairly derivative of Mos Eisley:



Nothing wrong with seizing on a concept seen in an earlier environment and expanding on it (like TPM, AOTC, and ROTJ did for various aspects of Tatooine), but I feel like a bit more could have been done with it to make it more worthwhile. Especially given the dearth of other interesting environments in TFA.

 

OK, I'm going to admit that Canto Bight, based on those screenshots, seems more interesting than what I remember. I'll watch the movie again one of these days now that it's on Netflix.

One thing that didn't impress me about the Canto Bight scene were the aliens; too few of them, no familiar species (no Muuns or Neimoidians?), and the ones that were new were too unimaginative in their design.

 

The lack of new aliens is a big part of the dearth of proper world building. The dearth of world building would definitely be my biggest disappointment so far. Ach to and jakku were interesting. I am hoping for something interesting thatuses the sparseness thematically in 9 to give better cohesiveness

 

Canto Bight's visual identity is possibly the most developed in both TFA and TLJ, as well as the one planet where the most background is provided in TLJ (in that respect, Jakku sees more development, but that's in TFA). Which kind-of irked me about TLJ, by the way, since Canto Bight is the site of a very long side-plot that doesn't lead to actual story progression, but you still know what the place is used for, that slavery and animal exploitation are present, and that its law enforcement looks rather inefficient. That's a lot more than you can say about any other planet in TLJ.

A very good point has been brought up about the lack of interesting aliens. Those which are brought up are visually of high quality, but they are given less identity than the Porgs or Crait's crystal foxes - which doesn't come as a surprise considering they're given a lot less attention.

That lack of attention is found again about planets themselves. Whatever the name of the planet the Resistance were hiding on is (I'm not even sure it has even been said or written once across the two movies), it isn't given any definition or identity - there's nothing remarkable about its environment or fauna. Takodana, at least, had antique-looking buildings pointing to the existence of at least one long-standing civilization (the existence of a wide forest, considering we never have further definition of what the world is, is anecdotal and not defining the planet), but there's no telling what the planet is for or who is sovereign over it - a trait shared by almost every planet introduced across TFA and TLJ.

TLJ-side again, Ahch-to did hold some interest. It's defined as the planet of origin of the Jedi, holds one site radiating dark power, has its own autochtonous, primitive population and a somewhat defined fauna. Unfortunately, it's also subjected to the trend which largely defines TLJ - "let the past die, kill it if you have to". The dark site turns out to be pretty inoccuous. The Jedi legacies there are either removed or destroyed. The local animal species that gets the most focus is effectively exported (the Porgs are no longer unique to Ahch-to by the time credits are rolling). Nobody and nothing of importance is left there by the time the movie ends, and there's no reason to want to return there.

See in contrast Jedha in Rogue One. We get space-side shots of the planet, showing what type of world it is. The planet is clearly under occupation of the Empire. One of the economic activities is its exploitation for kyber crystals. We're told it held significance in the past for the Jedi Order. We learn that the Whills lived there and are now essentially extinct, whether they are a civilization or a species. Jedha hosts a local resistance movement, shown to be loosely aligned with the Alliance. Civilization there is clearly centered around the city of Jedha itself, and no specific emphasis is given to an alien species as being native (the local outlook is human-dominated but cosmopolitan). It is frequented by criminals (the cameo of the criminals encountered in Mos Eisley's cantina in ANH). And once said city is destroyed, the planet is kept relevant by alluding to the Senate questioning what happened there and being fed "fake news" about the Death Star's "test shot".

That's the kind of world building we don't see at any point in TFA or TLJ. Neither movie really provides the combination of pictures, visuals, lines and plot elements that allow the viewer the impression they actually know a lot about a place that doesn't get that much more screentime than the planets which get significant scenes located on them in TFA and TLJ. And Rogue One, like Lucas' Star Wars movies, never lost the track of its plots despite fleshing out its locales.

 

I love Jakku, Canto Bight, and Crait. Canto has a PT-feel to it. JJ when making Trek said Lucas really raised the bar for world building with the PT. True.

Naboo and Couscant were incredible in TPM. In AOTC we get Kamino and Geonosis. And ROTS just takes first prize for world building.

I can see why one poster after TFA complained that it never felt like we left Earth. But I still like the worlds of the ST.

Rogue One is the best of the Disney era movies for world building, but I haven’t seen Solo in Japan yet.

 

Imagine if they just tweaked the color of the sand on Jakku. Blue sand or purple sand? Maybe different color sky too.

 

Id wish ST had something like Coruscant. Playing a side role, that planet-city has its own character and even emotions - from bright blue sky of serenity, to the red sunset of despair, to the colorful neon palette of the joy, to the gloomy rainy day of the grief.
Its so rich that you can set the trilogy around that city.

 

Loved seeing Coruscant in R1, Disney SW, but not the ST.

Of course, TCW has the greatest world building in SW, but it’s easier as there were 6 seasons of 22-minute digital animation. Live action, ROTS is champ overall, but AOTC has the best Coruscant scenes.

My favorite Coruscant scenes, going off memory, are in (1) TPM of traffic seen from the Jedi Council Chamber; (2) I think an exterior shot of the Senate with no action and dialogue, maybe the sun is setting?; (3) the setting sun during Anakin’s ruminations and then it’s night as he goes to confront Palpatine.

 

Canto Bight is probably the only planet in the ST that feels like an actual world but it just feels so out of place in the galaxy. In movie 8 we're introduced to a super fancy planet where all of the richest people in the galaxy live? What happened Coruscant?

 

Coruscant was in R1? When?