Star Wars

Last night I watched Episode IV for the umpteenth time.

I tend to think of Ep IV, V, and VI not in terms of plot, but in terms of the lasting nature of their special effects. In a lot of Sci-Fi movies, you can look at their special effects and you immediately know they are fake. They just look fake.

In Star Wars, quite of lot of the SFX still look real. The planets, the spaceships, even some of the aliens look like real planets, real spaceships, real aliens. I look at the Imperial Star Destroyer gliding past the top of the screen and it looks like a ship, not a model.

A lot of that reality, I think, comes from the design. The ships look like they were engineered, not slapped together purely from imagination with unobtainium materials and magic engines.

This comes out most clearly, I think, in the 'scramble' montage when the rebel fighters are about to launch their attack on the Death Star. The pilots are shuttled to their ships by little carts, and climb access ladders to get into their ships. Ground crews detach hoses, hand the pilots their helmets, and in general look like ground crews should. All too often in Sci-Fi the pilots just appear in their cockpits, and you often look at them and wonder how on earth (or Mars, or Barsoom) they got in there. In Star Wars, they show us.

I think ILM deserves a lot of credit, and my hat remains off to them for the original series.