14 DAY TRIAL // There’s a connection between the upcoming “Star Wars” reboot, aka the most anticipated release of 2015, and Apple, one that few people knew about until The New Yorker ran a profile on Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Design at the company.
Ive, it turns out, is good friends with J.J. Abrams, who directed and co-wrote the reboot “The Force Awakens,” which will be out in theaters in December this year and will feature, as we’ve seen from the first trailer, a modified Lightsaber.
If you’re a fan, this modified Lightsaber, with its similarity to a burning cross, was probably one of the first things that got your attention with the trailer, which you can also see below. Maybe you even joined all those other, more or less outraged fans saying that Disney had already started to “ruin” one of the oldest and most successful film franchises by reinventing the Lightsaber, aka a fixture in the “Star Wars” universe.
Ive’s 2 cents changed everything
So what happened? What made studio bosses and Abrams himself change the Lightsaber and thus risk angering millions of loyal fans? According to the aforementioned profile, Ive happened.
Abrams tells the mag that, during one “boozy dinner” with Ive, during which they discussed about what it was like to be “working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous,” the latter offered “very specific” indications about the direction Abrams should go with the famous weapon.
Apparently, all that will be visible in the upcoming film, in the sense that Ive’s ideas have been implemented, one way or another.
Of course, Abrams doesn’t say what they consist of, but if you know anything about this director’s work, you know that he’s probably thinking he said too much already: Abrams is famously secretive about his work in progress, to the point where he rarely agrees to do an interview with so many months to go until release.
Still, if he says Ive’s ideas have been used, it’s safe to conclude that this new Lightsaber is designed at his suggestion or even precise indication.
The energy behind the concept is Ive’s, but not the actual design
Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions, though: the reporter asks Ive if the resemblance to a burning cross (i.e. the actual design) was his idea, and he denies it.
“It was just a conversation,” he says. “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty. [A redesigned weapon could be] more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”
So no, this isn’t Ive’s design, but the energy behind the concept, the feel of it is his.
We’ll probably see more of the weapon in upcoming promo materials, that is, assuming Disney is feeling “generous” to include a better look at it in the second trailer, which is believed to come attached to Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”
For the time being, we don’t even know if all Lightsabers look like this or just this one in the trailer.
