As the shot climbs the audience will understand that we are looking up from the lowest depths Coruscant, the city-planet explored in the Prequels.
While the huge scale and crystalline shape of that first Star Destroyer was mind-blowingly new, it was encrusted in white machine parts in the familiar style of a ' 2001-type spaceship.' Lucas had morphed the look of Stanley Kubrick's spindly NASA futurism into an 'overwhelming show of force.' Immediately following the Episode VII opening text crawl, what at first appears to be the traditional background of star flecked outer space, should be revealed to be the reflection in a filthy puddle. Although they had never seen anything like it, that was an image audiences were prepared to understand. The equivalent of an endlessly huge Star Destroyer passing directly overhead.
What could be more shocking that seeing Luke Skywalker don Vader's helmet? The opportunity of Episode IV, is to revisit the shock that the original opening shot delivered to audiences in 1977.
