Solo4114
Master Member
For better or worse, McQuarrie's designs basically are the Star Wars aesthetic. So, aping him is, in my opinion, the right choice. Deviate from that too much, and it stops looking instinctively like Star Wars to the audience. Take, for example, the designs by Doug Chiang in TPM. Most of that work looks...well, actually, pretty damn cool. But to me, the bulk of it doesn't really say "Star Wars." The only ship I can recall that said "Star Wars" to me was the cruiser Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon arrive on. Everything else in the film looks like it's from some other movie series. You see less of that as the series progresses and design starts to conform closer to what was seen in the OT, but even that stuff looked...I dunno...kinda off. The ARC-170s, the Jedi starfighters (Eta and Delta class), the Republic Cruisers, they all just look a little...hmm...not quite right to me. Like, their design doesn't naturally dovetail into what you see in the OT, to me. Even with some intervening years.
They're perfectly interesting designs, in my opinion. They just don't all say "Star Wars." I mean, they do NOW, because you have them IN Star Wars, but I think ships like, say, the ones seen in the X-wing Alliance game look way more "Star Warsy" than what you see in the PT.
The TFA stuff, I think, is meant to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. It's meant to be visually, and INSTANTLY recognizable as "Star Wars." And not in ways like "I guess if you squint, you could kinda see how that sorta looks like an X-wing..." I'm talking, the ship shows up and you just say "Yup. That's Star Wars!"
There are other films that showcase ships, but I think a lot of them are...hmm...too busy in their design, or where the role of the ship in the film just isn't that critical. The emotional connection isn't there the way it was in the OT. In the OT, we cared about the people who were in the ships trying to accomplish something, whether that's escape an Imperial blockade, blow up the Death Star, or trip up an Imperial walker. We cared that Solo had been taken away by Boba Fett's weirdly shaped ship. We cared that the Emperor was arriving on a shuttle with fold-up wings.
By comparison, consider the ships in Jupiter Rising. Do you remember them? I sure don't. When I look them up, tehy just look...I dunno...like generic sci-fi ships. But that's because the film itself, while visually stunning, was kinda...meh. And, more importantly, the ships don't play a huge role in the film. Like, there's no set-piece battle featuring XYZ ships.
You can look at other stuff like, say, the Gundam series or the various Macross series. Ship and vehicle design tends to be pretty believable within the universe, and also visually distinct. But what matters more is that (a) you care about the story that's happening and the characters to whom it's happening, and (b) the equipment/ships/vehicles/robots all play a really prominent role in that story.
Kylo Ren's ship is visually stunning, and I remember it clearly because it exudes a sense of evil, and that promise is made good upon by Kylo Ren's actions. In that sense, his ship is memorable to me because I have an emotional connection/response to it. Without that? It's just a ship design.
