Like when they knocked down some walls in the Cloud City.
I feel very strongly about this.
Irvin Kershner chose to make it so the sets got more and more constricted and claustrophobic as the Empire closes in on the Rebels, to give the audience that same feeling of claustrophobia. Then George Lucas comes in and adds these CGI windows that don’t even look right, and mucks it all up.
For someone who moans about original visions so much, it’s pretty ironic that he disrespects Kershner’s original vision.
The discourse around this change can get so weird, too. It’s as if people think the lack of windows was an accident or something. Someone even told me once that there wasn’t any windows because of a technological limitation making ESB. They do realize there have been windows in movies since 1895, right? Hell, the unaltered cut of ESB had windows, just less of them.
Yes, there have been windows in movies from the very beginning, just no windows showing a sprawling city in the clouds that couldn’t possibly exist in real life. The original concept art shows windows everywhere on Cloud City, they just could only have very simple tiny windows with 1980 effects technology. It’s a matter of technical limitations, not any attempt to create a “claustrophobic feeling”. That’s the reason why the Cloud City windows are some of my favorite changes, even if they are applied inconsistently.