Selling the Soul of Star Wars

 

"what for Disney is profitable recycling is for Hollywood at large a challenge to the entirely-too-low standards of the blockbuster in the digital age.

Today the word “blockbuster” invokes visions of CGI-ridden films—Transformers, superhero movies, and the like—skating on brand recognition rather than on novel characters or storytelling. Which, in turn, makes Star Wars a particularly compelling touchstone. A big part of its appeal lay in how it created a scum-caked, tactile landscape of diverse planets and people. This was a franchise where the robots were humans encased in metallic costumes, not computer-generated death-machines that transform into Porsches. The speeders and snow-walkers and lightspeed-equipped ships all were models assembled by human hands, not digital rendering. It was a blockbuster with soul, in the sense that its most impressive effects had a direct line to an engineer, puppeteer, or actor."

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Selling the Soul of Star Wars - The Atlantic