I thought the blocking on the fight scenes was well done. When the armies/fleets are standing off, the imperials are positioned left of the center of the screen, rebels right of center. Imperials advancing move and face right. Rebels advancing move left, rebels retreating move right. You can see this even in scenes that are tangential to the actual armies; for example, when Leia and Kylo are sensing each other with the force, Leia is facing left and Kylo is facing right. When Poe is taking out the Dreadnought's defensive canons, he's moving left; even in the head on cockpit scenes and the BB8 repair scenes, Poe and BB8 are still slightly right of the camera and facing slightly left. Likewise when Kylo speeds through the cruiser's hanger bays he moves left to right across the screen. All the same rules apply during the land battle with the ski speeders. Even near the end of the movie, Finn drags Rose back into the hangar moving right, and the Rebels move through the mines left to right. This isn't to prove any thematic point of course, its to maintain comprehensibility. Most modern action movies have awful blocking and it makes it almost impossible to tell what's going on. The worst examples would be some of the early MCU movies, Michael Bay's Transformers and anything that came out at around the same time (MCU has had to step up their game recently because of all the characters).
When main characters are in a personal fight on the other hand, you can see that they're placed center while the camera orbits around them to show the many enemies surrounding them. It allows them to keep up that Michael Bay/prequels sense of dynamic camera movement and different foreground/background movement speeds to create a sense of motion. While at the same time, main character becomes an anchor to orient the rest of the fight around. Thus you get that over-edited sense of modern cgi action without getting that shakey-cam incomprehensibility that usually comes with that. You can most easily see this in the throne battle and the Finn + Rose blaster fight in the flagship hanger bay. But it also applies to other fight scenes. In the Luke + Kylo flashback for example, the camera begins facing Kylo, then rotates to show Kylo's lightsaber, then flips to show the house collapsing and in the final flashback the Luke gets out of the rubble, the camera moves with him as he walks then turns to reveal the burning temple. Throughout the whole thing Luke is a fixed point, always center of the camera; even when Kylo is the point of focus, the back of Luke's head is visible in the foreground.
Moving away from comprehensibility and into theme, you can also see very effective use of high and low angles. During the ski speeder fight scene when we see things from the rebel's POV the camera is basically "craning its neck" to look up in the sky at the AT-ATs and the tie fighters. When Finn is charging the battering ram cannon, the cannon is shown with a slightly low angle while Finn is shown with a neutral/slightly high angle. This to aid with the visual implication that if Finn jumps down the cannon's throat when its already powered up, he might just be vaporized uselessly. Meanwhile, when the imperials look down at the rebels, we see from inside the AT AT cockpits that the little red plumes look practically like ants, and the AT AT operators are like giants looking down at them. The clearly falling apart and obsolete skid bikes add to this effect. When Luke emerges, he's portrayed in a low angle walking out of the base. When the AT ATs start firing suddenly we're looking at them from a neutral angle, and instead of looking at the console most of the interior shots of Kylo's command vehicle are looking inwards at him and Raeh, with again neutral angles. When Kylo does his final little "I cut you in half" anime dash, conventionally the camera would swipe along the movement of the cut to emphasize its power. But here we see the camera pan from Kylo's head down towards the line his feet cut in the salt. This serves as a final little fake out (as the skid lines resemble nothing if not streaks of blood, implying Luke is going to collapse Darth Maul style). But it also serves as a quiet visual indicator of Kylo's defeat, as the neutral to high camera angle shift strips his power away from him. The last shot we see of him is a high angle of him dropping Han's fuzzy dice while the camera draws back, making him look ever smaller.
That effect of defeat was so strong for me I honestly thought Raeh's men were going toss a dozen grenades through the hangar window; I think if Rian Johnson directed the next movie we'd see the First Order become more and more menacing and cruel, while Kylo himself would be defeated by Rey and then left alive. Cue whichever First Order commander has the most nazi imagery quoting a Darth Vader line about how he's outlived his usefulness and then shooting him in the back. Its the logical place for the new trilogy to end, with maybe an uneasy peace agreement ceding the Republic's old holdings back to an empowered resistance, leaving the Galaxy split between a prequels-esque teetering bureaucracy and an Empire-esque fascist (JJ Abrams knows what he did) military dictatorship. That would leave future Star Wars stories with the maximum amount of options as to where we can go, especially since the Disney has *finally* caught on that Star Wars is a brilliant setting for stories of non-force-sensitive characters and they seem to be priming audiences for that idea, especially with Rogue One. They also seem to be opening up what a force user can be, with the vague implication that Rey/Kylo/both might end up wielding both sides of the Force. Although Kylo seems pretty much done in regards to that.
In the open scenes we see the rebel base during their hurried retreat. This scene takes up very little time and was pretty optional to the overall plot, but it allowed one shot in particular, which is the base commander looking up from the planet at the star destroyers above. Again, low angle. We later the reverse of that shot where we look "over the shoulder" of the dreadnought's canon as its gazing down at the tiny rebel base from orbit. When Kylo makes his attack run on Leia we see the cruiser from a very high angle and we cut back to the three advancing Tie Fighters (if you correct me to Tie Interceptor I will smack you) from a low angle. Then when Kylo gives up (and I believe murders both of his wingmen in revenge for his mother, although that happened too quick for me to be sure), we switch back to neutral angles.
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Topic: Star Wars [Warning: Spoilers inside!] (Read 108225 times)