SPECULATION JJ's overuse of close ups & tracking shots

I have finally figured out what bugs me about TFA when compared to Lucas' movies. There is way too much focus on close ups and tracking shots - it's nauseating at times.

Star Wars has always been about mid-shots and establishing shots. I always felt that with Lucas' films, the audience could interact with the film and focus on what they wanted in a scene. The characters, the set, background characters.. and this was largely done with static establishing shots which gave us time to absorb the sets, and get absorbed into the world:





These sorts of shots are rarely in TFA, or they're over so quickly that we don't feel part of the world. Instead we get loads of shots like this:





Yeah these are cool shots, but they (along with the hyper editing) overshadow the world itself for me.

It feels like we could have seen more of the puppeteers' work in the cantina scene, got more sense for the layout of "spaceport" on Jakku, and seen the surrounding areas around the rebel base more.

I still really like TFA, it's a solid 8/10 for me and it's good enough - but I feel JJ made a mistake by going against the Lucas formula here.

What do you think?

 

Did you even read my post? Or are you just trolling?

Every movie has close up shots. Go watch the originals and look at how much time we spend looking at the environment around the characters..

TFA is directed/edited to skim over that, and focus intently on story and characters.. that's a big reason why it has less rewatch value than A New Hope, Empire or even The Phantom Menace.

I do love JJ's choices of shots in places, but we need more focus on the Star Wars galaxy when episode 8 comes out.

 

LOL you say that, but I feel TFA needed more of that stuff.. we never actually got a nice establishing shot of where Rey worked.



Obviously what we saw in the original film was different.. but we never got a proper aerial shot of the place.. only when Finn was overlooking it (it looked pretty vague and blurry)

That brings me onto another point.. they seemed way too obsessed with practical effects and doing things in-camera, to the point where no location seemed very detailed when compared to the prequels. Every location was desolate, and the only location which was full of life was Maz Kanata's castle - and even then we skimmed over it in two seconds

One thing that the prequels do better than the originals.. they feel full of life. From Mos Eisley to Coruscant, we felt part of a bigger universe. TFA carbon-copied the originals all the way down to the desolation of Empire Strikes Back, so the universe feels tiny and almost alien in this movie when it really shouldn't. What was so bad about having a big town like Mos Eisley on Jakku? Or a town surrounding Maz Kanata's castle? Or a much bigger base surrounding the landing strip at the rebel base? That could have been fixed in post-production if they weren't so terrified of using CGI.

TFA should have just had more... stuff. Maybe they shouldn't have pushed so much away from the prequels after all, because The Phantom Menace feels like it has a lot more heart.

Again, TFA is excellent.. but merely excellent. Not great.