Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 9 Episode VII Problems It Must Avoid
Lucasfilm, you must complete the training...
The journey to The Last Jedi is now on the home stretch, and about time too, since the mid-season break of Rebels means we have to go a whopping five weeks without any new Star Wars content. Well, content that you don't have to put hundreds of hours/dollars into to enjoy properly, anyway.
Currently, things are looking very positive for The Last Jedi, with it being the only Star Wars film on Lucasfilm's slate to not have a director given the boot, and director Rian Johnson being handed an entire new trilogy before his first Star Wars film has even been released. The Force is strong in this one, apparently.
But despite Johnson seemingly pulling things off so well that he'll be directing at least as many Star Wars films as George Lucas, that's not to say things can't go wrong. Because, to voice an opinion that will likely end in a Force Choke and the words "I find your lack of faith disturbing", Episode VII had some pretty noticeable issues that The Last Jedi really needs to steer clear of.
So as the days wind down to us hearing a proper line of dialogue from Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1983, let's fill the time by sharing some worries about how things could go wrong.
9. Real Sets, Impractical Effects
When the hype machine for The Force Awakens started revving up, the party line was “Real sets, practical effects”, subtly needling the Prequels for a supposed overuse of CGI. This eventually turned to be a cheque that Lucasfilm failed to cash, with the film boasting 200 more digitally altered shots than Episode I, and close to no models or miniatures.
That’s not to say the film doesn’t include practical effects, but it was mostly kept to in-camera work, with everything else being heavily skewed in favour of CGI. The Star Destroyer hanger for Finn and Poe Dameron’s escape could have easily been a model with extras shot on green screen and a CGI TIE Fighter composited in, rather than everything apart from principal actors and a small section of the set being digital
When it came to making the Prequels, producer Rick McCallum talked George Lucas into using more miniatures than he originally planned because it would be cheaper and the quality would be better, and while that could no longer be the case with advances in CGI in the past twenty years, models and miniatures are a big part of the Star Wars formula.
Star Wars has always been a mix of the actual and the intangible, whether that intangible is absurdly detailed CGI, or a dodgy matte painting, so if The Last Jedi really wants to capture the aesthetic of the main Star Wars saga, it’s going to need to some practical effects work.
What The Last Jedi Should Do: Use a balanced mix of practical and digital effects rather than leaning too heavily towards one or the other.