Quote Originally Posted by Sapphire Guard View Post
TLJ, taken on its own, is an ok film with some ropey logic. It's not the crime against cinema it's taken to be, but when you examine the themes you get things like 'battles between good and evil will continue as long as corporations find them profitable, how awful. Brought to you by Disney, make sure and get your tickets for our theme park on the way out'
While this is true, pretty much nothing with regard to a film that contains 'Episode VIII' in the title can be taken on its own. TLJ is not a crime against cinema, that's very true. It's a crime against Star Wars, both its fellow films and the larger franchise. TLJ makes choice after choice that, while artistically defensible in their own right, are downright insane when you consider that this is supposed to be the either part of a nine part story and the next movie is intended to be the climax. One of the central reasons the brief glimpses we've seen of Episode IX so far have felt so empty is that there are no hooks going back to the previous episodes. I mean, there is no principle villain for this new film so Palpatine is coming back from the dead is some fashion.

Quote Originally Posted by Aeson
I'd note that for Theed we seem to mostly see the public and ceremonial spaces of the Palace and Palace grounds - the throne room, the hangar where the Queen's yacht is kept (which presumably doubles as a receiving area for important guests, especially considering that it's a very fancy hangar), and someone's nonsensical high-tech fantasy dungeon (complete with at least two bottomless pits that lack guardrails or other safety barriers - though only one has the almost-requiste OSHA-noncompliant catwalks - and a hallway with laser gates that open and close on a timer for no apparent reason; presumably there's a bunch of other high-tech deathtrap gizmos scattered about the place a la the accessway to the Omega-13 device in Galaxy Quest that just didn't get shown in the film) - and as for Kamino everything we see is basically a combination factory showroom / high-tech medical facility, plus reception for extremely wealthy customers or their accredited representatives.
There are some 'used universe' spaces in the Prequels. I mean, Tatooine gets visited, and so do some fairly grimy places like Utapau. However, overall the Prequels do look kind of off. I'm actually a proponent of the theory (which I originally got from Michael Bay's description of how they put together the transformers films), that the lighting in the Prequels is off for a large number of the digital creations, including the backdrops to many sets and it doesn't look real as a result. That's really not surprising. Lucas really pushed the technical envelop with the Prequels and there were some things that didn't quite get there and as a result they look 'too clean' in the same way that early Pixar movies do. General Grievous is a good example - his digital model is like 1/10th as complex as that of any of the Transformers from the 2007 film, a difference of only two years of technical development.

I think you could digitally restore the Prequels and make them look much more Star Wars-y using modern digital tools, though I'm pretty sure the Disney purchase agreement doesn't allow that.