George Lucas hates cities. At least that’s what I gather from decades of watching and rewatching the original Star Wars movies.
The Star Wars movies are famous for hewing to archetypal stories—hero sets out to save galaxy from evil warlords, hero confronts his (familial) past, hero grapples with his role as a savior. And the movies’ portrayal of urban agglomerations is similarly archetypal, drawing on a long tradition of damning the city while praising the countryside.
Let’s start from the beginning…
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It perhaps is worth pointing out that any readers who saw the first Star Wars movies (IV, V, and VI) in their original versions and had the good sense not to bother seeing the “Special Editions” might not grasp the extent to which the assertion in this blog post is spot on! All of George Lucas’ films can be separated as either pre-CGI or post-CGI: once Lucas gets his hands on CGI, all of his movies sport expansive, spectacular panorama views that he couldn’t engineer in the studio w/o computers. Panoramic city views–particularly of Coruscant–were injected into some if not all of the first movies and are always extremely dystopic. The ‘garden city’ views in SW I would be among the little evidence of a positive urban image in any of Lucas’ oeuvre–a pre-Lapsarian capital, perhaps…