Kinda surprised to see so many complaints about the directing and effects. I thought everything looked fine. I even found myself wishing the action in the prequels had been directed this well.
Well, just a few examples of some of the wonky CG in this episode;
- https://youtu.be/QOzbm6jvhWw The way the stormtrooper falls against the two rocks looks really weird. First off, it’s obviously a full CG body. Secondly there’s proper stop in his momentum as he hits the rock and then he practically bounces off it as if it was soft and then falls cartoonishly fast onto the ground. What I think they’ve done is simply rotate the CG figure on its axis to save time. It almost like his center of gravity is in his head.
- https://youtu.be/QOzbm6jvhWw?t=19 A bit nitpicky compared to the previous bit perhaps, but the impact is so strong that his armor practically explodes. Not really a bad thing overall, with alongside the rest of the scene, and how action has been treated previously on the show, this seemed really over the top to me.
- I couldn’t find a video of it, but when the stormtrooper retreat into the two shuttles it’s painfully obvious that they all become CG the moment they jump up on the ramp. The animation is odd and feels like something from TV shows ten years ago or more.
Now there have been previous moments in this show where characters were replaced with CG, one of the more obvious examples was when Bo-Katan open the cargo aby hatch on the Gozanti cruiser in Chapter 11 and everyone got sucked out. But they clearly knew that it would all happen so fast that you wouldn’t really notice it unless you were looking for it. But shots like the one in the first example just feel so egregious to me because its so right in your face and there’s been no attempt to hide it. And it’s a real shame to because the action in the show has generally been quite excellent, and I like the overall feel of the Boba Fett gaffi stick fight, but I don’t see why these unrealistic CG effects had to be added. It would have looked more brutal if the stormtooper simply smacked into the rock and slid off, there really was no reason for him to awkwardly bounce off it in such a sped up manner.
Maybe I’m just the kind of person that pays more attention to this kind of stuff, but to me at least, and clearly many others, these CG moments really stuck out like a sore thumb. The idea was good, but the execution felt off. I don’t know if the change in director was the main culprit here, but since its all so Rodriguez-esque anyway, it probably was. I think it simply was a case of the stuntmen not being given enough time to prepare and in the end they had to quickly solve much of it with CG. Fight choreography takes a lot of time, and if Rodriguez decided to improvise a lot of it then there’s only so much the stunt team can accomplish on a short notice. F.ex. the fight scene in Chapter 8 with the Armorer and the stormtroopers wasn’t even shot by Taika Waititi, but by Filoni who did second unit duty to make sure everything was done on time. And since Waititi could focus on the rest of the episode Filoni and the stunt team could focus on getting just the fight scene right. Stuntwoman Lauren Mary Kim even said that they shot the whole thing hundreds of times to get it right, which Waititi never would have had time to do shooting the whole episode during what I’d assume was only a few weeks (at least that’s what used to be normal for TV series).
Anyway, those are my observations and “theories” about the stunts/choreography in the latest episode and I’m curious to read what other people think.