For any newer members who may not be familiar with me, I haven’t seen the last two prequel films. With that in mind, this may have been addressed in-universe or on this board somewhere. In the few screen-grabs and pics I’ve seen from the prequels, it looks like his helmet is a significant redesign from the original films. To echo a few others on here, I never noticed the differences from film to film on the OT. However, even for someone like me who isn’t terribly interested in the character, I immediately noticed a difference in the prequel version.
In Star Wars his helmet seemed to have more mass. It had much more visual weight. It was the helmet of a military general and had a used universe look consistent with the film. That seemed a little less so in Empire and Return, but the helmet still had weight.
In the pictures from the prequels, it looks to have less substance and appears more polished. I don’t mean polished as in shiny (it’s that as well), but polished as in being more of a stylized take on Vader as opposed to the actual mask. Maybe it works in motion or on film, but it just looks off to me.
And again, maybe this has been addressed and I’m just missing it. If he does make an appearance in Rogue One, I hope he looks period-correct.
Well, obviously. The helmet in ROTS is like version 0.8.5 and it’s like 10 minutes old.