To quote myself:
The changes here are as insulting and horrible as if Rogue One had all the OT aesthetics removed and replaced with PT aesthetics. When filming something within a franchise set in a certain period of that franchise, you're expected to make a damn good-faith effort to attempt to at least replicate the general feel and intentions of the aesthetics of that time. It doesn't have to be one-to one exact duplications, but you're expected to be able to at least say 'well, it sort of looks like it'. The shit shown looks more like MASS EFFECT than it does Trek, let alone Trek set near 2260. If they can't even put in enough effort to make people go 'yeah, I guess that would be what it looked like if they had the budget and techniques at the time', then they can fuck off.
This is almost as absurd as insisting that because the Iliad had been first translated into English using 16th century English, all dialogue in any movie about the Trojan War needs to be done in 16th century english. I'm sorry, but art
style is just as much a language as any written or spoken one, and language changes over time. The entire point of Trek's aesthetics is to
tell you that this is the future of the present, and is set in the future of the present. This future is a fairly shiny future where technology
does solve problems (and sometimes create new ones) and has allowed humanity to come closer to achieving its potential. The point of updating the aesthetics, as they did here, is because the original aesthetics
have now become kitsch. You can either have the original look, or the
intent behind the original look, choose one, and the concept artists and set designers chose the latter, because that's more important than whether warp nacelles are round or square. People complain about how it looks kind of like Mass Effect but people forget the corollary. Mass Effect (1 at least) was designed specifically by its artists and concept designers to be basically a modern Star Trek. "A modern Star Trek looks similar to a modern Star trek" is not some kind of horrible thing.
Look. I was a fan of Deus Ex, and Deus Ex had a very 1990s aesthetic. When they made a prequel, set 25 years before, their aesthetic changed very significantly-weapons got more tactical, cybernetics became sleeker and more like modern prosthetics combined with Apple-style flair, you didn't have cyborgs who were giant uggos because they had brutal Terminator-style cybernetic enhancements violating their flesh (even Namir and Barrett look very well-put-together)-and
it worked, because had they made a game which had modern graphics but 1990s art styles, it would look fairly laughable. It would be hard to take a lot of this shit seriously. The visual language changes didn't suddenly make it not-Deus Ex.
And no, before you ask, your example of Star Wars is both incorrect and irrelevant. The aesthetics of combat in
Rogue One are in fact drastically changed from the OT or the PT for that matter-it's the dirty, visceral sort of killing that you see in
Black Hawk Down, not the heroic action of the trilogies. Just because the props haven't changed doesn't mean the aesthetic hasn't, and it is absolute blindness to suggest that props are the same thing as aesthetics. Furthermore, Star Wars is much more fantastical (it
even tells you straight up that it is set in the past, in a distant land). It isn't Star Trek, which has the conceit that it is the future of something similar to our present. In fact, your incorrect argument that Rogue One shares the OT's aesthetics (it does not) demonstrates the vapidness of this argument. It's literally considering "aesthetics" as nothing more than literal set dressing, something that can be evaluated as "do these much more expensive, high-quality props which people put far more work into look kind of like the ones they dug out 50 years ago?" It's vapid and facile.
