When a LEGO product line is celebrating a milestone anniversary, the brand can be counted on to celebrate that with a wide release of new LEGO sets under that banner. And everyone who has been keeping up with LEGO-related news through us would know that LEGO Star Wars is now a couple of decades old.
But sometimes, some serious commemoration of a LEGO line seems only achievable with an MOC. Let’s consider David Hall, a LEGO builder specializing in the “Star Wars” tie-in products. Ignoring naysayers’ opinion on 2017’s “The Last Jedi,” Hall has recreated that film’s climactic action sequence, the battle on Planet Crait.
In a diorama that he says contains around 100,000 bricks and which took him a year and a half to put together, David Hall made the Resistance’s last stand against the First Order look awesome, with official LEGO Star Wars sets and minifigures fighting on a custom-built Crait’s “red-salt” surface.
Hey @starwars this is my Battle of Crait, 100,000 bricks.. over 13 months to build! #legostarwars pic.twitter.com/sb6ZHIFdsI
— David Hall (@Solid_Brix) February 21, 2019
Such was the intricate details and intensity of the vignette’s combat choreography that Hall’s work went viral not just with LEGO/Star Wars fans but with the showbiz industry, according to Entertainment Weekly where we get this news. It probably helps that Hall’s work caught the attention of the director of “The Last Jedi”: Rian Johnson.
Johnson may be under fire from fanatical “Star Wars” fans who felt he overdid the subverting of expectations and conventions from his movie, but he certainly appreciates any franchise follower who references his film work. In two Twitter posts the filmmaker expressed how awed he was by the Battle of Crait as interpreted by Hall.
The more I zoom the more my jaw drops
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) February 22, 2019
David Hall was just as appreciative, and intimated with Rian Johnson that he too dreams of becoming a film director, with the latter as inspiration. Those are brave words of support for the director of “The Last Jedi,” argued as the most divisive “Star Wars” film in the franchise’s history.
The Battle of Crait shown in Hall’s diorama was the final death knell of the anti-First Order Resistance, which over the course of the movie went from an army to just enough people to fit in the Millennium Falcon. We’ll get to see what happens to them when “Star Wars Episode IX” premieres December 20.
I would consider praise by THIS director an insult, LOL.
Better than the actual movie!