What I love about the Star Wars saga as a cinematic experience is the amount of care that is taken to communicate specific concepts and themes. The effect of this can be seen by slowing the footage down frame by frame and comparing the shots across the films. Little details like that, though they can be subtle, add extra layers of cohesiveness that visually tie the Star Wars movies into one big story arc.
Sometimes, though, the effect is less subtle and more profound. Even telling. Take a look at these comparison shots between Attack of the Clones, A New Hope, and the second teaser trailer for The Force Awakens (props to the team at the Far, Far Away Radio podcast team on Twitter for providing this).
The similarity is striking. In the top scene, you have Anakin on Tatooine carrying the dead body of his mother, face contorted with anger and sorrow. In the middle, there’s Luke, looking on in disbelief at the smoking bodies of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, also on Tatooine. In the final scene, we can only assume that Rey is on the desert planet of Jakku; but though the planet is different, the effect is still the same: blue sky in the background, the primary character looking at something or someone with a distressed expression on her face.
Is this simple shot comparison really indicative of a connection between the Skywalkers? On a purely cinematic plane, it seems to. Not only that, but consider this: Daisy Ridley’s Rey is similar in color and build to both Natalie Portman, who of course plays Padme Amidala, the wife of Anakin and the mother of Luke and Leia, and Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia herself.
There’s actually a tradition of purposely making shots like this look similar to one another that was carried through all of the first six Star Wars films. George Lucas likens it to poetry in the video below (excerpted from a The Phantom Menace documentary):
There are countless moments in Lucas’s Star Wars saga where the “poetry” technique is utilized. For example, compare these two scenes, the first from The Phantom Menace, the second from A New Hope, and notice the “rhyme scheme”: Anakin piloting a Naboo fighter into the heart of an enemy space station and destroying it, and Luke piloting an X-Wing into the trenches of the Death Star (an enemy space station) and destroying it, too.
Image from screencapped.net
Image from screencapped.net
Here’s another example of “rhyming” through careful framing: the end scenes from Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back, with the two couples (husband and wife, brother and sister) looking out onto a vista with their faithful droids.
Image from screencapped.net
Image from screencapped.net
And there are tons more of these parallels. A Star Wars fan named Mike Klimo has written an entire internet essay about them, calling the work The Star Wars Ring Theory. Be sure and check it out; it’s lengthy, and I’ll admit to not having read the whole thing yet, but you don’t have to to have your mind blown. Just looking at a few of the pages really brings home just how much of a genius George Lucas is as a filmmaker.
And it looks like JJ Abrams may be carrying on that genius in The Force Awakens. If these shots are anything to go by, we may yet find that Rey is a Skywalker.