Star Wars: 10 Things Rogue One Did Best

For better or worse, all three Star Wars trilogies have their own visual identity. Which makes sense since they were made years apart with massive technological leaps in-between. But by being about as immediate a prequel as you can get, Rogue One shot for trying to capture the look of A New Hope. And unlike a Stormtrooper, it was pretty damn accurate.

Rogue One has absolutely magnificent attention to detail; with Industrial Light & Magic scanning the models from the Original Trilogy to build the digital versions, and the new Darth Vader costume including all the imperfections of the original. And it’s not just the accurate prop and model recreations, but the actual aesthetic of the films themselves.

Obviously the compositing is much cleaner than the Original Trilogy and a lot of sequences are achieved with digital effects work, but it pulls off mimicking not just the idea of a dirty and used universe but also the specific look of those films.

The Star Destroyers look they’ve been taken straight from the Lucasfilm Archives and shot against blue screen. And managing to successfully capture the look of a forty-year-old movie without compromising the new film’s visual quality is quite an achievement.