Hey, look: It's the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first hot piece of steamy content from the new trilogy.And I know it's early going, and trailers are specifically designed to be so enticing that the dollars literally fly out of your wallet and into some place where you buy movie tickets, but as a secretly opinionated Star Wars fan (I can hear your eyes rolling, and mine are too) I'm starting to think the sequel trilogy might actually be not bad. Rad, even!
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While it helps to have the original cast taken out of cryo-freeze and back on the screen, a whole lot of this is due to JJ Abrams taking the helm as director.
I actually don't hate the prequel trilogy, but like the rest of the internet, I did find George Lucas's heavy reliance on CGI to wear a bit thin. Compared to the originals, which mixed a campy, lo-fi charm with some truly spectacular modeling and special effects work, the prequel trilogy just felt all a bit much at all the wrong times. (Lucas going back and CGI-ing up the original trilogy, to the point that finding a non-tinkered-with release to watch at home is impossible, is another collar-steaming problem altogether).Abrams has said he's dedicated to bring practical effects back to the franchise—as evidence by early set photos of full-size X-Wings and so on—and Rian Johnson, who's set to direct Episode VIII, is also on board with making the movie actually feel real.
We've seen a taste of that in this first trailer, and I'm guardedly stoked. The thing about the OG trilogy that felt so great wasn't the psychedelic crystal funk in the cantina—okay, that shit is ill—but the way the world was presented: Not as some larger-than-life CGI fever dream designed to show off how powerful the rendering studio's hot-shit hardware is, but as a real world, with sets that your eyeballs could feel.It's that tactile nature that took a weird trio of sci-fi movies and spun off a massive universe. Do you think an entire genre of schematics books dedicated to completely imaginary vehicles would pop up if they didn't feel so visceral in the original movies? If they felt like some computer-generated bullshit? Hell no.
Anyway, I'm glad to see Abrams taking Star Wars back in the direction that feels true to life. The Force Awakens is expected to open December 18, 2015, so we've all got a year to anticipate whether that comes true or not.
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We've seen a taste of that in this first trailer, and I'm guardedly stoked. The thing about the OG trilogy that felt so great wasn't the psychedelic crystal funk in the cantina—okay, that shit is ill—but the way the world was presented: Not as some larger-than-life CGI fever dream designed to show off how powerful the rendering studio's hot-shit hardware is, but as a real world, with sets that your eyeballs could feel.It's that tactile nature that took a weird trio of sci-fi movies and spun off a massive universe. Do you think an entire genre of schematics books dedicated to completely imaginary vehicles would pop up if they didn't feel so visceral in the original movies? If they felt like some computer-generated bullshit? Hell no.
Anyway, I'm glad to see Abrams taking Star Wars back in the direction that feels true to life. The Force Awakens is expected to open December 18, 2015, so we've all got a year to anticipate whether that comes true or not.
