Star Wars: The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams and New England Theaters
On screens across New England and in theaters around the country, December 18, 2015 will bring the release of the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. With digital cinema gaining footing more and more often the big screens are projecting the films in high definition 4K digital. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that the newest movie was actually not shot in a digital format.
Director and creator George Lucas made sure from the start that his Star Wars films were at the cutting edge of technological advances. Lucas went so far as to found his own special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to ensure that his vision would be met. ILM has been able, from that time, to keep at the forefront of video and audio special effects.
In 2002, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones became the first major movie in history to be shot entirely on digital film. While Lucas was able to foresee that digital cinema was the way of the future, this early film suffered from being so experimental at the time. Much to Star Wars fans' lament, the new film would highlight Lucas's creativity but come up short when it came to overall picture quality. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith would maintain the course for digital filmmaking and the end result was another film with 1920x1080 resolution--well below the resolution found in 35mm films. This meant, as time went on, that the theaters were able to display pictures with a higher quality than the original recording was capable of showing.
Taking this into consideration, director of The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams made the decision early on that the new film would return to the 35mm format. Sure to be appreciated by fans, the decision for the newest film helps maintain the look and feel of the original Star Ward trilogy.
Abrams has not kept it a secret that his preference is against digital and neither has fellow director Christopher Nolan. Nolan's Interstellar was shot completely on 35mm except for one brief scene done for the IMAX cameras. Other directors to recently side with a return to the traditional include Sam Mendes (Spectre), Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) and Quentin Tarantino. Opening the week after The Force Awakens, Tarantino's The Hateful Eight was shot entirely on 65mm cameras and will be shown in select theaters in 70mm Ultra Panavision, a format unused since the 1960s.
The decision to stray from digital while audiences are embracing the format is not as contradictory as it may seem with the image quality often being projected in 4K digital. Tarantino's new film is only being shown in 70mm in 100 theaters, largely because most modern theaters, including theaters in New Hampshire, have converted to projecting solely digital films. So, as it turns out, most of us will be seeing these films in digital even if they were not intended to be presented that way.
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