Recently nominated for Best Visual Effects at this year’s Oscars, Star Wars: The Force Awakens did a wonderful job transporting us back to a galaxy far, far away. For all the pre-release talk about a return to tangible, practical effects from J.J. Abrams, anyone who sat through the credits could still see the vast amount of visual effects work that went into the feature. However, unlike the prequels, the seamlessness in which they were executed made for a much more believable experience, and today we have a great visual-effects reel that proves just that. Highlighting a great deal of the film’s action sequences, it shows off the mix of green screen and on-location shooting, as well as fully digital shots, the creation of Lupita Nyong’o‘s character of Maz Kanata, and much, much more.
We also have a 50-minute chat with Abrams about the reception of the film. He tells THR, “It was obviously a wildly intentional thing that we go backwards, in some ways, to go forwards in the important ways, given that this is a genre — that Star Wars is a kind of specific gorgeous concoction of George [Lucas]’s — that combines all sorts of things. Ultimately the structure of Star Wars itself is as classic and tried and true as you can get. It was itself derivative of all of these things that George loved so much, from the most obvious, Flash Gordon and Joseph Campbell, to the [Akira] Kurosawa references, to Westerns — I mean, all of these elements were part of what made Star Wars.”
He adds, “I can understand that someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s a complete rip-off!’ We inherited Star Wars. The story of history repeating itself was, I believe, an obvious and intentional thing, and the structure of meeting a character who comes from a nowhere desert and discovers that she has a power within her, where the bad guys have a weapon that is destructive but that ends up being destroyed — those simple tenets are by far the least important aspects of this movie, and they provide bones that were well-proven long before they were used in Star Wars.”
Check out the visual effects reel and talk below.
Are you surprised by any of the visual effects?