Dog

There’s a huge difference between these images and the images below!

It might seem unfair to compare some of these images based on who made them but the point is: Digital cinema can be beautiful when created by someone who gives a shit. The 2 images I used as the bad example are huge budget franchise projects but many television series and films have that same look. Gray, dark, muddy. Content sludge.

I watched Twin Peaks: The Return over a month ago and it just keeps growing in my mind. A series that probes the limits of the visual medium and prestige television/film. One of eve greatest artistic achievements of the decade.

A show that perceives itself. It doesn’t break the 4th wall, more like the 5th wall. Characters never wink at the audience but the characters can understand they are apart of something not real. Coopers face burnt into the frame, as if he’s reached an awareness of himself being apart of a TV show. Also, Aubrey’s dance.

Attack of the Clones and The Last Jedi both reuse the Battle of Hoth as the template for their big end battle. I want to highlight the approaches Lucas and Johnson took for this idea and show which one I thought was much better and far more interesting.

The Battle of Hoth is a set piece that takes place on a snow covered planet. It depicts an army in walking machines (along with the sith and stormtroopers) advancing from right to left on rebels trying to flee to space. The rebels are our main characters, including a Jedi. A general rule of screen direction is characters moving from left to right is typically positive and characters moving from right to left is typically negative. In the Battle of Hoth, the empire and the rebels are framed using this rule. The set piece is at the beginning of the movie as Lucas wanted to maintain the feeling of Star Wars as A New Hope ends with a giant set piece.

22 years later, Lucas is making the second film in his prequel trilogy. Lucas employs a technique of inversion. Inverting things from the original trilogy in the prequel trilogy. This creates a visual language of references which can bring new insights into the story and characters. For the ending of Attack of the Clones, Lucas has a battle sequence on Geonosis that features an army advancing from right to left in walking machines (along with stormtroopers) on rebels attempting to flee to space. But this time, the Jedi/main characters are with the walking machines and stormtroopers. While the sith are with the rebels.

Lucas takes the familiar and flips it. He’s mixing the iconography of the originals. Jedi, fighting alongside soldiers in white armor and walking tanks. Lucas is also playing with the rule of screen direction I mentioned, framing the heroes advancing from right to left like the Empire. And this sequence is the end of the film, while Hoth is the beginning but the inversions don’t end there. The Battle of Hoth has two opposing armies fighting for different causes. While the Battle of Geonosis has two armies fighting for the cause, advancing Palpatines agenda. Also, an obvious inversion is Geonosis being a desert planet while Hoth is a snow planet.

Heres a random visual similarity as well. I think this is intentional.

The Battle of Geonosis flips the Battle of Hoth. This invites you to reconsider so many things about both trilogies.

In the second film of the sequel trilogy. Director Rian Johnson often subverts audience expectations. This can be done with visual misdirection or having a character act in unexpected ways. The Last Jedi is well know for “subverting audience expectations”.

The Battle of Crait takes place at the ending of the film. It features an army, advancing left to right, in walking machines along with stormtroopers on rebels trying to flee to space. Johnson has broken the screen direction rule I mentioned earlier, seemingly just for the sake of flipping it. The surface is white and the rebels are hiding inside an abandoned rebel base, just like Hoth. The subversion here is that the white surface is a layer of salt concealing a red surface. This is explained to the audience with a scene of a rebel soldier tasting the surface and declaring, “it’s salt” so everyone knows it’s not snow.

The subversions essentially end there. This is what I consider the biggest difference between the Lucas prequels and Johnson’s episode 8. The depth of thought both directors put into each and every thing in their films. Geonosis is a desert planet but bares almost no visual similarities to Tatooine. It’s a planet with an insect like species, this species has its own culture and architecture that give the planet a unique feel. Geonosis is also more orange than Tatooine.

Crait is barren and empty the way Hoth is but… another barren and empty white planet? Johnson includes a scene just to let everyone know it’s not snow because it just looks like Hoth. The only fun surprise is the streaks of red forming under the vehicle’s and all the damage of blasters. Johnson copied almost every element of Hoth instead of creating something entirely new. While Geonosis only shares a superficial similarity to Tatooine while being vastly different in everyway.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese.

Apocalypse.

Crimewave (1985)