Now ask me how I really feel.

Excellent post Jayhawk but I do have one question to ask. Do you think that your older age now has somewhat changed your perception of the Star Wars universe? In other words, that visceral feeling most of us got when we watched the original trilogy as kids or teenagers was never the same when we watched the prequels and TFA as adults.

My own idea is that we're no longer the target audience, and our percoption is based on an unfeasible position. That is, SW is marketed squarely at 12 year old boys. I saw the original Star Wars when I was 12, so I was right in the middle of it. The 2 sequels were similarly on-target

Fast forward a generation, and the new SW films come out. Only now, there's an established market of 30-something adults who want the same "feeling", but who are unable to get past obvious childishnesses. Witness the fury over Jar-Jar Binks. Is he any worse than Ewoks? Cute furry little teddy-bears who, despite living in a dusty forest environment cannot blink? luckily I have a good amount of self-awareness so I was kind of expecting to be underwhelmed, and decided to just enjoy it for the design and the spectacle. I allowed the wow factor to be the domain of MY kids

So IMO the "problem" of the SW feeling is that the adults who felt it as children are expecting to feel it as adults, without any understanding of what SW really is.

Good question, and I'm not sure if I have an answer. It's quite possible. That "surging" score by John Williams in ANH when Luke looks into that double sunset still gives me goosebumps.

OTOH, I also got a similar visceral feeling watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I was considerably older when I watched those (I saw "Fellowship" around my 30th birthday when it was released in theaters - can't remember if I saw it shortly before or shortly after my birthday).

But the Hobbit trilogy gave me no such reaction. Either my heart has turned into an icicle within the last 15 years, or many movies makers lost the art of evoking emotion?

Maybe I should undergo a Voight-Kampff test, or try to find the Maze?

No Voight-Kampff test required, it's well understood that where the LOTR excelled, The Hobbit failed. It's a matter of not enough butter spread across too much toast

Yup. I guess it would be like expecting for sex with the same person you've been with for years to feel just the same as it did when you first met that person.

The thing is, some of the new novels manage to transport much more emotion and manage to evoke empathy with characters than the film did.

I have been gifted Richard Dean Anderson's novelization of TFA, and reading that (which is pretty much his retelling of the film's script - incidentally, it contains all those deleted scenes that are now released in piecemeal fashion by Disney on every new Blu-ray special edition release), I increasingly get the impression that the script was just hastily written. Lazy, sloppy work. Now both Abrams and Kasdan are accomplished screenwriters, who I am sure are capable of doing a much better job...if given time and enough creative freedom. My gut says Disney execs did not given them enough of both.

BTW, Lost Stars by Claudia Grey needs to be made into a spin-off "filler" film. Compared to TFA, it's Shakespeare-esque.

I would argue against that theory: a large chunk - I even dare to guess the majority - of the audience back then were adults - at least in their mid-twens.

I myself managed to persuade my father (I simply wore him down ) to take me to watch it when it was released in Germany in 1978 (I was six years old), and I did not notice many other children. Mostly "grown-ups".

By all accounts, many of those adults also had an emotional response to the films.

I also think the films were geared not so much towards 12-year olds, but to those who grew up with the Flash-Gordon serials and 1950's sci-fi flicks...the same age group as George Lucas was in back in the mid-70's. Even back then it would be hard to believe that a film specifically geared towards children would have an evil guy in a mask visibly choking someone to death. Or annihilate a whole planet. Or cut off a hand (Empire), or torture, or freezing someone in carbonite (still not sure how or what exactly carbonite has to do with cryogenic freezing, but what do I know).

Did not happen in E.T. which was really geared towards kids.

Only with ROTJ did it all take on a much lighter tone.

The successful merchandising campaign was a more-than-welcome bonus for him. I believe only after Lucas noticed just how much more toys he could sell did he change the script in ROTJ to a lighter, more child-friendly tone.

Oh, and BTW, I was 12 when ROTJ was released, and this 12 year old thought it was stupid that cute walking teddy bears could defeat Imperial Stormtroopers.

Yeah, Lucas should have just had giant gummibarchen fighting the stormtroopers.

I'm fairly certain MacGyver didn't write that novelization, even though his Stargate SG-1 days are long over.



The Jedi Master

LOL I think Jayhawk meant Kevin J. Anderson?

Actually it was long time film novelist Alan Dean Foster.

He also did the original SW in 1976.



The Jedi Master

Ok so Jayhawk got the wrong Dean, not the wrong Anderson.

Good post Bib but my previous comment was really centered on the statement made by so many fans who are in our age group. Essentially "I didn't get that same visceral feeling when I watched TFA as an adult that I did get when I saw ANH as a kid".


And you also touched on a point about TFA having access to much better effects and cinematography but not being "groundbreaking" at the same time.


At this point in 2016 film-making has already reached over-maturity and over-saturation. Seriously, just how groundbreaking can sci-fi films still be at this stage? It's definitely a case of "been there, done that" a million times.

At least I didn't write Dean Koontz.

And yes, I meant Alan Dean Foster

That's what happens when you are home with a cold and reruns of Stargate SG1 are being shown on TV.

I've been thinking about that "visceral feeling" a bit more, and I think one of the "culprits" is visuals:

I wonder how much HDR, HFR and high definition cameras are responsible for a certain artificial look in recent A+++ productions. And I specifically don't mean CGI (and possible overuse) - that's a different topic altogether.

Examples are the Hobbit trilogy, TFA, or the trailers for Rogue One.

I noticed - especially with the Hobbit films - that costumes, props and movie sets are clearly recognizable as such, which does not exactly help with suspending disbelief. It does takes me out of the experience somewhat, enough to be slightly irritating. It's like watching a play on a stage; incidentally, some scenes looked eerily similar to the a video recording of a BBC play, like I, Claudius. For example, the scene where Gandalf meets Thorin at the "Prancing Pony". Or the whole sequence in Bilbo's house. Or Mirkwood. I suspect it's the high resolution: you can clearly see that the actors are wearing costumes. I never got that with LOTR, and I am pretty sure Jackson used the same costume designers, maybe even some of the same costumes.

I recently made the same observation when I saw TFA and ANH back to back on TV last week: in the OT, everything looks like it belongs (to that universe, in that scene...); Stormtroopers on Tatooine do not look out of place, the Rebel base on Yavin 4 fit neatly with the Mayan(?) temple ruins, all that tech fit neatly even into the Endor forests.

Not so in TFA. Other than the scenes on Jakku - which incidentally also captured that "visceral feeling" we've been talking about in this thread rather well - the "Star-Warsy" stuff, at least to me, felt out-of-place/ artificial. The X-Wings on the tarmac of that RAF base just did not fit in. Neither did the Stormtroopers when they attacked Maz' Cantina. Stormtroopers visually worked on Endor, somehow they did not work on Takodana (or however the planet is called).

IMO this also applies to the Rogue One trailers. Some scenes just look "icky", like the sequences on that tropical beach. And I don't think it is related to the location itself, nor to old-fart-audience expectations: I increasingly get the impression that high resolution and HFR (and HDR?) make costumes and props stick out so much from the "natural" background as to be recognizable as such.

So filmmakers may have to adapt their shooting/recording style somewhat. Or add some filters in post? Or, overly critical people like me need to suck it up and learn to live with that.

BTW, Marvel movies like Iron Man or Captain America somehow do it better. Stark's suit or Cap's outfit look "realistic" (in the context of the film).

I have left out the prequels completely because IMO they are basically animated movies with some live-action scenes tacked on. Maybe Lucas should have taken the plunge and go all-out "Final Fantasy", and have his actors just do the voice-overs. I wouldn't have made the movies any worse, but at least there would have been visual consistency.

I think it might be more likely (at least in The Hobbit's case) that the higher frame rate changes your perception. If you watched it at 48 fps then, like me, your brain will have tagged a "video" feel to it rather than a "movie" feel.

Yes, the 48 fps (HFR) explain the very "video" like impression, but even with the normal 24 fps, the artificial look is still there.

This is an interesting topic that Jayhawk brought up. When I was a kid I always wondered why day time soap operas and some sitcoms on TV looked so "fake". Then later when I was a bit older I found out about the differences between shooting something on film and shooting something on video tape.


I agree with DM on what he said about the visual style of "The Hobbit". The frame rate makes a huge difference in how our eyes perceive the scene.

TFA was shot on film (35mm and 65mm IMAX), though, not digital, so it must be the lenses (or the probably better quality of the film they used - there must have been some technical advances during the last 40 years).