Maxwell Lord posted:

There's a clear design progression in the prequels. Ep. I is the peak of 50s Art Deco stuff and form-over-function. You have the Gungan city which is a bunch of terraces encased in bubbles like Christmas ornaments, you've got the submarine which is made to look like an underwater creature, the Naboo starfighters are like classic cars as is the Queen's ship, and all of Coruscant is straight out of an Amazing Stories cover.

In Clones, and this is something the filmmakers actually talk about in one of the DVD featurettes, they start bringing in more of the "classic" Star Wars look, but it's a blend. You still have the retro-styled ships Amidala flies in (and her apartment which has similar contours), but we see some of the dirtier, seedier side of Coruscant, industrial neighborhoods and gaudy nightclubs and so on. Kamino, like Cloud City, is the beautiful antiseptic locale where danger and evil lurk under the surface. But they introduce the wedge shape in the Jedi starships, you have the more detailed hives and droid foundries of Geonosis, and when the clone calvary arrives they do so in ships that are VERY reminiscient of the OT. They're flying in on Star Destroyers, they have AT-ATs, and the lasers on the hoverships they have resemble little Death Star weapons. That's the point, the joke, the heroes are "saved" by the arrival of the Empire. That's pure visual storytelling through design.

In Revenge of the Sith things are very rapidly moving towards the aesthetic of the OT as War! overtakes the galaxy. More stuff is worn and chunky and sort of functional (not entirely functional since Star Wars has never been about actual logic). There's even an attempt to make some of the computer displays and such look like the clunky blinkenlights of the OT, at least the ones in the background. We get a few flashes of the old Art Deco beauty but it's on its way out.

Tezzor posted:

Not everything in Cloud City is pristine and slick, though. It's got dirty junk rooms, dank interrogation rooms, dark smoky freezing chambers, dark and smoky corridors, a weird austere dull grey cylinder where Vader corners Luke, and the bottom which is studded with angular, sharp-looking antennae. Really, the only thing that's pristine and slick is its establishing shots of the outside, many of which were added in the special editions. The inner corridors aren't actually that smooth or clinical if you look at them without the unnecessary windows Lucas added:




I didn't say it wasn't. In fact, one of my main criticisms was that they took McQuarrie's designs and smoothed them over and the result looks like crap.


Well, that is from the The Phantom Menace, which was shot much less on green screen than the other two, and as a result does indeed have much less "it's so dense" bullet-hell diarrhea than the other two. Just stuff like this:







However, you said "the prequels" and not TPM specifically, soo:














To be fair most of those are action scenes so let's look at

Bongo Bill posted:

"Movie" means "motion picture."

SHISHKABOB posted:

Ok you're confusing me, all these look pretty good.

SHISHKABOB posted:

Ok you're confusing me, all these look pretty good.

piratepilates posted:

I wouldn't say all, that's pretty generous. Half are good, the other half (cloning planet, desert AotC planet, a billion lightsabres) are pretty bad. But half good half bad isn't too far off from what the prequels are.

SHISHKABOB posted:

I'd say most of them look good, as in "not bad". A sort of neutral good. There's some ugly ones though. The first one is a mess, the two with the clone troopship in the center of the frame are not pretty to look at.

Tezzor posted:

The addition of windows showing early-2000s video game cutscenes open up the sets, making them less catastrophic, thus undermining the "sense of dread" and "cleanness over grim reality" you correctly identify is supposed to be going on, especially in the scene. It also adds more "cleanness and smoothness" to the4 scene. The walls that were previously in the place of the pretend windows were actually textured and colorless

piratepilates posted:

By the first one do you mean the one involving a large space battle? I did enjoy the opening shot of RotS as a context setting shot to show this large war and I think several of those context shots of the battles work that way, but then the scenes kinda devolve in to frantic choreographed action without a good emotional/character underpinning.

SHISHKABOB posted:

Yeah that one. I just think that individual image is not much to look at. I like the intro space fight too. I recall it being a very chaotic scene and I think it was good. The anakin and obi wan and co space fighters were clearly the focus. It was cool.

Cnut the Great posted:

Of course the addition of window views opened up the sets. The sets weren't supposed to be claustrophobic. It's a City in the Goddamn Clouds. It's supposed to be expansive and dreamy and wonderful. Listen to the breezy, upbeat music that plays as they walk through the corridors. The sense of dread comes from how impossibly perfect and pleasant everything is. You're missing the entire point of what Cloud City is supposed to be because you're so hung up on a version of the film that was hampered by production limitations.


Kershner himself hated how claustrophobic the sets were. It wasn't supposed to be that way. It makes no sense. He tried to make Cloud City feel as expansive as he could by adding the occasional matte painting background and putting some chintzy-looking on-set background images behind some of the window portals, but there was only so much he could do with what he had.

Neo Rasa posted:

Though I guess my ideal Luke at this point wouldn't even use a lightsaber now though and just walk around calmly as whatever's laying around slams into anyone trying to hurt him like how Vader completely clowns him at the end of Empire, hold out his hand to stop blaster fire cold like Vader does, looks at someone as they're about to hit him and they just miss, that kind of stuff.

SHISHKABOB posted:

Yeah that one. I just think that individual image is not much to look at. I like the intro space fight too. I recall it being a very chaotic scene and I think it was good. The anakin and obi wan and co space fighters were clearly the focus. It was cool.

Tezzor posted:

Here you go. Stay away from cinema as an artform, this should serve your purposes for the rest of your natural life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzACGKNhSw

Cnut the Great posted:

War is chaotic. That's what I like so much about the ROTS battle. It intentionally puts so much stuff in the background that it's impossible to keep track of it all at once, and in order to keep the audience grounded in some way, the camera stays locked on to the two Jedi interceptors weaving their way in near-perfect synchrony through all the violent pandemonium. We're just along for the ride with Anakin and Obi-Wan, trying to figure out what the gently caress is going on while staying alive.

This moment right here (at about 0:30 to 0:50) is particularly ingenious in the way it first cleverly hides, and then abruptly reveals, the full, unbelievable scale of the spectacular battle going on between the two fleets of warships:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT7vD8uAGEQ&t=30s

Prolonged Priapism posted:

The reason this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0qH2IaSjEU works so well and is loved by the entire thread is that it retains its story even after having been mirrored and multiplied in to an abstract play of lights. The song is funny, the voiceovers are funny, but it also highlights how rich the visuals are - they're interesting and compelling even stripped of their context. The shots still work even when literally cut apart!

As a lesser example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utFRqsT61-k is another universally loved video. Again, the altered voiceovers and music make this great, but notice that they didn't change the story of the scenes: a tense and forced-polite verbal sparring session, then a space battle which Ewan loses. They didn't change the story because they couldn't have - the visuals wouldn't have supported anything else nearly as well.

Tezzor posted:

Oh my god

Tezzor posted:

But some of the scenes you quoted earlier, like Leia and Chewie running through corridors, are after the truth of cloud city is revealed,and thus opening those sets is, at best, confusing, if not counterproductive. While the author might have struggled against these limitations, they did not affect the quality of the end product, and in fact most everyone aside from five goons and severe Star Wars fanboys seems to agree that opening those sets made the film worse, not better. Are you really defending the Star Wars special editions? At long last, have you no sense of decency?

Elfgames posted:

yeah that dude who is all about being a jedi should totally be slaming people with the force, you know that whole thing jedi don't do and he should totally be like vader you know the bad guy. i mean i agree that he probably shouldn't be jumping everywhere but why the hell do people hate lightsabers so much? using the force to attack is dark it's evil it's perverting the power of life to cause harm.

Jerkface posted:

Neo Rasa posted:

Excellent, now explain why using the force to mind control a person is a noble and good guy thing to do while throwing a rock at someone with the force is an evil perversion of the power of life.

This is important, there's a reason that Luke enters Return of the Jedi by opening Jabba's big door like it's nothing (Yoda's big trick), choking out two guys with no effort (Vader's big trick) and then also using the force to force Jabba's emcee to obey (Obi-Wan's big trick).

Maxwell Lord posted:

For all the business in some of the prequel action sequences, there was never a point where I couldn't tell what was going on and where everyone was.

Jerkface posted:

Tezzor posted:

The biggest problem with the visual aesthetic of the prequels, and here we are not even talking about how poor a lot of the CGI and bluescreening looks, is that what happened is that Lucas went to several different artists and said "take this established Star Wars thing and re-interpret it, make it look smoother and more colorful and cleaner,"

Y Kant Ozma Diet posted:

If people find this annoying I'll stop but I totally dig stuff like this:

Attack of the Clones

Lawrence of Arabia


This aspect of Star Wars is dead and buried.

Elfgames posted:

luke is literally cloaked in the dark side all of return of the jedi he goes to the death star intending to kill or stall the emperor and vader until they are all killed at the end he lets go of his attachment to his anger and tosses away his lightsaber.