STAR WARS PORTRAITS ASK, “WHAT FORCES SHAPE YOU?”

In a series of portrait ads created for a Canadian museum exhibition, several iconic Star Wars characters’ personalities take shape.

While the Star Wars brand may have sustained some damage during the past 13 years, over which time three tepidly received prequels were released, the force of the franchise seems as strong as ever. The latest homage to Lucas’ creation is “Star Wars Identities: The Exhibition,” which the Montreal Science Centre is promoting with a series of dazzling posters.

Lucasfilm and X3 Productions, which previously collaborated on “Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology,” have teamed up for the exhibit, which explores the science of identity through the prism of Star Wars’ eccentric cast of characters. The focus here is on what makes these characters who they are, and this theme of identity is brought home, and turned on the audience with the tagline, “What forces shape you?”

Montreal agency Bleublancrouge developed the exhibition’s visually arresting posters, which feature collage-based portraits of several Star Wars characters, made of elements that reveal who they are. Stormtroopers, for instance, are portrayed in the movies as unthinking automatons whose strength is in numbers, and so the Stormtrooper poster shows a single helmet made from a multitudinous horde of the space soldiers.