The genius of Kasdan

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2019)

When Disney bought Star Wars and announced that they were going to make more movies, 30 years after ROTJ, with the over the hill gang coming back, the question being asked was "how"?
Movies have changed a lot since 1977. When the first Star Wars came out, Lucas screened it for his contemporaries. Guys like Brian dePalma and Francis Ford Coppolla thought it stunk. The camera was stationary and Lucas hadn't attempted anything remotely near what the other guys were doing with their cameras. That wasn't the point. The point was the visual effects breakthrough known as motion control. With motion control, you could film the model spaceships against the blue background with the same track over and over and over because the track was computer controlled. It meant that you could optically composite images together seamlessly because the camera had the same precise track and every single shot. The template for those scenes was a 1930 biplane dogfight movie, the stuff that the younger Lucas gorged himself on as a kid.
The following two movies improved and expanded: with Empire, you could now have those spaceships actually move around inside the shot and not be static. When Return of the Jedi, you could do more than 2 spaceships at once. Compare the final space battle in Jedi with the one in the 1977 Star Wars.

So to answer my own question: how?
How they did it was to evoke the emotion of the first Star Wars 1977 and overlay the new story on top of it. This is visually referenced in two ways. Way #1: When there is no action and we have our character moments, the camera eye exactly replicates the 1977 Star Wars look and feel. But Way #2, when we have our action scenes (especially space ship stuff) it looks like Pixar movie, the camera eye goes everywhere, bounced up and down, twists and turns, does a somersault and weaves in and out amongst objects.
It's an ingenious approach and it is simple: stand on the shoulders of 1977 Star Wars and pretend nothing else existed. The story is about the story, and the story about the story simultaneously. This gives everyone enough room to like it, the hard core Star Wars fans and the kiddies who hadn't even been born yet.
Interestingly enough, all this hard work was thrown out the window for Ruin Johnson to make his ridiculous sequel that was about spaceship fuel.
To no one's surprise ever, Abrams is being brought back for the third one to correct the course.