Disney Buying Out Lucasfilm My Thoughts....
Given that I wrote an entry a few weeks back about an edition of the original Star Wars Trilogy that fans had been compiling which removes all the special edition changes with some caveats it makes sense that I write an entry about the latest news in the Star Wars universe and what I think about it.
Initial ReactionMy first reaction to it is basically this... it's not necessarily a good or bad thing. It's just yet another big corporation swallowing up another one. I'm pretty sure Disney can't make the special edition situation worse than it already is. After some thought I started thinking that well... Disney actually has had a major interest in Sci-Fi since the space age which is what inspired much of Sci-Fi in the first place. In fact Disneyland has tons of Space Age inspired stuff on it including tomorrowland, the monorail and of course... Star Wars Star Tours. Disney had that ride and gift shop in their theme parks for decades. So really, one could say that Disney has had their eyes on Star Wars for decades and jumped at the chance of acquiring it.
I had the thought that Disney has enough money to bankroll hiring nothing but the best people to work on the next Star Wars film.. Star Wars Episode VII. They also have owned the Muppets for a while now and many of Jim Henson's people have long had frienships with Lucas's people. I mean, Frank Oz for example has long worked on both characters for Star Wars as well as the muppets and they've been doing crossovers as well as having Jim Henson puppets in Star Wars for decades. They made films like Labyrinth together. So in a way, Disney acquiring Lucasfilm is keeping it all in the family. In a way all this didn't happen overnight. They where all already in bed together for ages and now are simply under the same Disney umbrella. Many people have pointed out that Disney also own Marvel Comics now and the Avengers turned out pretty good. That may or may not be accurate but it's a positive spin on it.
Star Wars Episode VIIAs for Star Wars Episode VII. I'm keenly interested in what they are going to do it with it. It's been rumored and hinted at for decades that Lucas planned on having three trilogies and this final one would presumably be about the offspring of the main characters from the original Trilogy and Luke rebuilding the Jedi order.. there are tons of expanded universe stuff exploring this but at this point it sounds like they plan on making more of an original story for episode VII meaning not lifting stuff from the expanded universe. George Lucas sat down to have lunch with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill to discuss this not too long ago which in my opinion lends creedence to the idea of it being a sequel trilogy. Harrison Ford expressed an interest too although once again like when they where making Empire Strikes Back he said he would like for Han Solo to die in it. In ESB it seems to me that negotations surrounding that wish lead to the iconic plot of him being frozen in carbonite... so that turned out for the best. But I kind of doubt this time around they'd simply rehash that or do something similar. I can almost imagine Han Solo sacrificing himself for good so his children can escape and go join Luke's new Jedi Academy or something like that.
We'll just have to see though either way what the new Star Wars is going to be about. On the other hand and this may be very hard to do but it's probably best not to have too much expectations at this point. Many people like myself where let down with Star Wars Episode I for example since we had such high expecations. It also didn't help that the groundbreaking film in the Sci-Fi Blockbuster Summer Film genre "The Matrix" came out that year which totally came out of left field and tied in with another fandom people like me where heavily getting into at the time which was anime. I was watching anime previous to that but it wasn't until the late 90's when they really started importing more and more anime into the US that it truly took off and shook things up and inspired such things as The Matrix. So I was steeped in that and having it combined with dark Sci-Fi such as in Ghost In The Shell was right up my alley.
So, people like me saw The Matrix and basically whether we realized it or not thought since Star Wars is one of the great grand daddies of Sci-Fi that they should be able to top any ground breaking stuff that was in The Matrix such as the bullet time. Instead what we got where CGI characters that didn't look more real than the practical puppet based characters in the original trilogy. Some of those characters may have looked hokey and had limited movement but they looked more photorealistic than many of the CGI characters that are in the prequel trilogy as well as the ones inserted into the special editions of the original trilogy.
CGI versus Practical Effects a DigressionAlthough I have to admit quite a bit of practical based character effects (animatronics, puppets, etc) such as the stuff Stan Winston used to make tended to look rubbery and was best for stuff like monsters and dinosaurs instead of real people. So it wasn't perfect and the best kind of special effects are a combination of that and CGI which is what they did in movies such as the Jurassic Park films. What they did there was use animatronic dinosaurs for up close scenes where they don't move so much and CGI dinos for scenes that are further away with more movement. Which of course is very expensive so I can see why companies would want to try to move towards all CGI to cut costs. However, to this day many if not most CGI based characters might have more animation and better movement than practical effects based characters they still don't look as real or visceral as the practical animatronic or puppet based special effects of years gone by.
A good example of the old effects looking better in my opinion is John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing versus the prequel that was released in 2011. I thought the creature effects in the 1982 version looked a lot more visceral and scary than the more CGI oriented ones in the prequel. I could tell which shots had CGI creatures becuase basically.. it seemed whenever it was alive it was CGI. It just wasn't as scary as the 1982 film and ruined my suspension of disbelief... by comparison the original movie was really creepy and watching it late at night creeped me out. I'm not exactly sure how they can improve CGI characters to make them look as visceral and real as practical effects other than combining the two in a convincing way which may partly also boil down to the artistic ability of the people working on it. I also still quite enjoy the computer graphics in many modern movies. However, there's still something to be said for having something that you can capture with an actual physical camera how it looks with natural lighting on it compared to a CGI character inserted in with faux lighting applied to make it match the scene.
They have been using computer graphics latley to de-age characters such as in the X-men films and more recently in Tron Legacy making a younger Jeff Bridges. But there's something called the uncanny valley and they still haven't completely crossed.. not even with animatronics and young Jeff Bridges didn't look nearly as real in the face as he did in the original Tron movie or films such as Starman. Even at this point it's probably better to get good young actors who resemble the older actor and apply special effects makeup to make up for the difference. A good example of this was Josh Brolin in Men In Black 3. He probably wasn't a pefect match for a young Tommy Lee Jones but he was close enough and a lot better than if they had use CGI like in Tron Legacy. I don't know if they are going to need to do something like that for the new Star Wars movies though if Leia, Luke, Han Solo, Lando, etc. return.... especially if it's a sequel trilogy where they are older characters such as old Obi Wan in the original trilogy. But they are probably going to have to do something like that for flashback scenes.
Getting back to CGI a bit.. in a way the best CGI graphics look too perfect and smooth and that's something that's hard to overcome... although there have been graphical techniques developed lately that have helped some which have been trickling down into video games. But still, even the best computer graphics resemble a painting more than a photo... another problem that CGI characters have is since they are added into the scene as a post process and don't physically exist the actors have to pretend they are there but sometimes one can tell they aren't really occupying that space because of the lack of reaction to them or wrong reaction the actors make such as looking in the wrong direction when a CGI characters is zipping around the screen.. or not truly reacting to the physics of the character. They can sort of adjust the CGI to compensate for this but sometimes they don't and sometimes even that's not enough.. sometimes having something actually on set makes a world of difference.
ConclusionI have a feeling that given their greater and greater focus on CGI that the Lucasfilm division of Disney is going to use mostly if not entirely CGI for the creature effects in Star Wars Episode VII.... who knows... they may even make it entirely CGI like the stuff Robert Zemeckis has been doing up until recent such as Beowulf. But again it's too early to have any expectations either way at this point. I remember at one time people thought that Lucasfilm was going to make it so actors are entirely replaced by CGI actors and put them all out a job.. what they failed to realize is even video games need actors for motion capture and at the very least to do voiceovers. Some of the best looking video game characters in my opinion where entirely based off of actors or models. So yeah, actors will have a job in entertainment for the foreseeable future as far as I'm concerned.
It seems at this point they are looking for a director and writer(s). There's been an article at first showing that says we can scratch Spieldburg, Tarantino and Zack Snyder off the shortlist of directors. I'm not all that suprised for Tarantino's lack of interest due to his interests in the type of stuff that he likes to make and I think he'd rather focus on stuff he has complete control over since he is such an auteur. Zack Snyder is also out of the running and I'm kind of glad because I find his films to have technical excellence but bad stories and are often sleazy and sometimes even mean spirited.
About Spieldburg I found this quote from the article I mentioned above interesting, "No! No! It’s not my genre. It’s my best friend George’s genre.”
Though fans of Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and various other classic sci-fi films from the director might beg to differ on that front, Spielberg just doesn't want it.By genre though I guess he is talking about space operas... although it does sound strange given he has made a ton of big name Sci-Fi films himself as well as directing Lucas' Indiana Jones films. I've always thought that his and George Lucas' vision went hand in hand especially considering that. So I think it's probably just that he just doesn't want to do it. Also in the running are Brad Bird and J.J. Abrams. Not bad choices especially since Brad Bird has made some really good pixar films and has branched out into live action and J.J. Abrams' own Star Trek film is quite a bit like Star Wars when I think about it. As with everything else we'll just have to see.
I think it's a good point that a high profile auteur such as Tarantino might not be a good fit for this type of project because it's an established universe and someone like him would force their own vision onto it. If anything the best director is probably one who is used to working in someone else's universe and making it true to what it's supposed to be. A good example of this is Alfonso Cuarron. He worked on Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban which is one of if not my favorite entry in the entire Harry Potter film adaptation saga. So I would put him on the shortlist of directors to direct Episode VII personally. As far as I know they picked similar directors for Return of the Jedi and fan favorite Empire Strikes Back and those are widely considered to be the best films out of the franchise especially the latter.