Ewan McGregor, who is as happy as a clam to be on board the Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Disney, and he's assured potential viewers that the spinoff won't be like the prequels.
Released in the late nineties and early noughties, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith suffered from a bout of uncontrollable CGI which was rife at the time. Though impressive, technology wasn't that sophisticated, so we saw new Star Wars characters that were pure CGI and so moved and spoke with unnatural smoothness which led us to not empathise with them at all.
We've got a teeny tiny explainer on the uncanny valley here, following Epic Games' announcement of the MetaHuman Creator tool through Unreal Engine. Moreover, the settings of the prequels were usually a blue or green screen background, which didn't give the world the depth that was created when the production team painted scenes for the original trilogy to use. Objectively speaking, the best approach to telling a Star Wars story is to build it in Lego, and that's just what Traveller's Tales have done. Check out the trailer for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga below because you will not regret it.
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Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, which is planned to air in 2022, takes place a decade after the events of Revenge of the Sith. If your skin is already crawling at the prospect of a hammy CGI character imparting wisdom against a sci-fi sunset that looks like it's been lifted from a dog-eared game you rented from Blockbuster, then chillax. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, actor Ewan McGregor said he was conscious of the missteps that the prequels took, and that director George Lucas couldn't get enough of using technology to bring Star Wars into the 21st century.
"After three or four months of that, it just gets really tedious-especially when the scenes are... I don't want to be rude, but it's not Shakespeare," continued McGregor. "There's not something to dig into in the dialogue that can satisfy you when there's no environment there. It was quite hard to do."
However, the leaps that technology has made between now and then means that fans won't be grimacing when Obi-Wan Kenobi graces the small screen. "They project [the virtual backgrounds] onto this massive LED screen," he explained, referring to the StageCraft technique developed on The Mandalorian. So if you're in a desert, you're standing in the middle of a desert. If you're in the snow, you're surrounded by snow. And if you're in a cockpit of a starfighter, you're in space. It's going to feel so much more real."
Featured Image Credit: LucasFilm/Disney