I’ll second (or third) Slumberland’s sentiment. The basic plot and ideas in the prequels are OK (lots of plot holes, of course - but the original trilogy has plenty of those too) - the big problem is that nothing in the prequels ever feels real.
Reading that story about Marcia Lucas, one can’t help wondering how the films might have turned out if she had still been around to influence the editing of the prequels and whether she could have made people care for any of the characters in the prequel.
I agree, but sadly after his ‘fall’ to the darkside George Lucas just didn’t allow the people around him to be truthful enough about the prequels. It is possible he just didn’t really care at this point, and wanted a quick cash-in thing before heading for the hills (and i can’t blame him if this was so, Star Wars pretty much ruined his life outside the huge bank balance). It really is all in the execution, as that old chestnut goes.
Start writing…it’s not as if the Star Wars franchise can ever really recover it’s former glory, so make a different one and let that ruin your life (hospital admissions due to stress, breaking your heart when the woman you love leaves you etc) while making you billions :)
When you read about the struggles he had to make Star Wars, it’s hard not to feel great respect for the guy, he went against the grain and tide of just about everything, and (with help from friends and associates) pulled it off. He was the main driver of a tremendous cultural phenomenon, and should be forever remembered warmly for that. His sin in phoning in what could have otherwise been (and what most of us hoped would be) his crowning artistic achievement is understandable, we all get tired as we get older, and it’s easy to conceive that he must have been sick to the back teeth of the whole thing by then.
It’s just a shame, is all. A bit sad.
But the franchise and mythos has enough legs to last for ages, and I’m sure we can look forward to more Star Wars fun with JJ (who by all accounts is more of a fan of SW than he was of Trek).
…yeah but will he insist on all the ‘name dropping’ and ‘tipping of the hat to the fans’ in the new films like he did in his new Star Trek films (and like George did in the prequels). That self-conscious desire to ‘prove’ yourself to the fans can really ruin immersion. Just tell the story, and tell it well. The film IS the story, not the fans (that takes care of itself).
Yeah that’s the thing, as the Red Letter guy said, what you want to see is new Star Wars things, new Star Wars things that will be their own thing, and not just re-hashes of old Star Wars things. A few nods to the beloved tropes here and there is fine, but mainly it has to be a new story with its own magic, new actors making their mark with new memorable characters, etc.
Over the last 50 years Bob Dylan has tried to get out from under the “legend”. mainly by pissing off fans as many ways as he could think of. I wonder if I-III was a deliberate attempt on Lucas’ part to do the same.
Well from my point of view it really does feel like that, all the prequels really do piss me off, heck even the re-imaged originals do. No i don’t have anger issues, i’m just sad that so much good can be made into so much bad.
I don’t think Lucas was trying to piss fans off at all. I think his ideas about what Star Wars “is” has fundamentally diverged from the fans at this point. Also, Lucas was using the cinematic “language” of Star Wars in an attempt to tell a different kind of story this time. The OT is at its core the Hero’s Journey. This time he was trying to tell the story of the fall Anakin and of the Republic, which has a tragedy has a very different underlying structure, as well as score topically political points. I really don’t know if he realized in how much in telling Anakin’s story, he was telling his own story as well.
Well there is a certain ‘it’s therapy’ aspect to the prequels ;) Going through the meat of the details in the awesome secret history site, probably the fact he had not written the whole thing in detail at the same time (with the same people around him as he had when doing the originals) was part of that disconnect? I have no problem with the prequels being about the fall of Anakin/creation of Darth Vader, infact that should be an incredibly cool story to tell…but…well not in the way it ended up. Those films were only tragic in their execution ultimately.
Agree 100%. I don’t think there is any reason to suspect Lucas of “malice” in the making of the prequels. Woolen Horde has already commented this more or less, but I think quite simply Lucas did not have the “competence” (and by competence I mean the right team) and energy to pull this off twice. The “making of” videos I’ve seen are as damning an indictment of this one can wish, IMO; Plinket’s reviews have a couple of cruel cuts, where you see a Lucas seemingly more interested in his cup of coffee and sitting down than actively directing the movies. Looks can be deceiving, of course, but there is a distinct lack of energy in the on-the-set segments from the movie one sees, and that lack of energy is also in the movies (Plinket nails it with his comment about how all the expository scenes are people walking and talking, sitting and talking, etc). The competence aspect is similarly apparent, because it is very obvious in the “making of” videos that Lucas was surrounded by “Yes Men” during the making of the prequels (there are some segments, where you have Lucas saying something stupid about the development of the films, and you see everyone laughing in a painfully fake manner… ). I found the Marcia Lucas story particularly interesting because it indicates that getting through to Lucas has always been a problem (as it usually is with strong personalities), but that in the first movies, she was one of the few people who could say No, and expect to get heard. As Lucas became the owner of an empire, and his friends from that time moved on to their own things, it stands to reason that this will happen. Without a doubt, there have been people on the prequel production who realized how the reviews would turn out, but probably none who could say it to Lucas and expect to get heard or were willing to risk getting fired.
That, or also simply that they thought, “hell, what do I know, he’s George Lucas, maybe he’s right and I’m wrong”. It’s probably a mixture of all of these.
When you have a strong personality, there’s a temptation to relax in a warm bath and let them take charge. It’s blissful not to feel any responsibility.
Yeah he is very obviously not the guy you want in his position (going on the ‘making off’ footage), 100% yes man and even he didn’t look convinced in most of what he was saying (he looked like he was there for the pay-cheque alone). BUT this was George Lucas’ thing, and he didn’t handle it as he should have known he should have (going on his experience of making the originals). It is possible he is a massive ego-maniac (but that is not what i have heard about him) and thinks the originals were such an amazing hit just because of himself? Then that could explain his use of yes-men for the prequels?
Anyway, poor George, poor Star Wars, poor original film (real) fans that expected so much more than we got. It’s ‘lose’ all the way to the bank (for Mr.Lucas).
I guess I should start by admitting that my favorite Star Wars movie is, and always has been, Return of the Jedi. As a kid with a passion for military history, my choice turned on the Battle of Endor. So many starships, so many colors, so many feel-good moments. Later in life, I came to appreciate that movie’s pacing. I thought that the extra-thick “action sandwich” created by bracketing the film with protracted action sequences was just a great formula.
I followed, but never really respected, the Extended Universe. The only book that I would rate on par with the Original Trilogy is actually one of the first, Shadows of the Empire, which I felt accurately captured the characters originally created by Lucas himself.
My chief complaint about Lucas is that his later work is so dominated by obvious and familiar tropes that the wonderment is dulled. Cad Bane is a very good example. Neat personality. Good voice acting. But why the decision to go with a Western gun-slinger trope? And did we really need an episode of the cartoon to pay homage to Das Boot? Was it necessary to retell Seven Samurai with bounty hunters? To retell a version of Gunga Din?
In defence of Desert Journeyman’s love of Return of the Jedi (and the film in general, especially compared to the prequels), i cried when i read the part where Luke was trying to take his dying father to the shuttle to escape the destruction of that second Death Star, i also cried at that part in the film.
So that perfect emotional closing of the loop in relation to Luke and Darth Vader in RotJ pretty much made up for the Ewoks. Also keep in mind that with both the Jawa’s and Ewok’s George Lucas financially helped out a generation of physically handicapped people by giving them work, and that is awesome.
So yeah, while the ‘least’ favourite of the original trilogy for me (just because Star Wars was so good, and Empire so brutal), Return of the Jedi is light years, and galaxies far away and above any of the prequels for me. Those first three films are almost a perfect trilogy of film making in the sci-fi genre, they all tell the story that well, with people you care about (good and bad). So in the context of hating on the prequels, that were almost the exact opposite, i’m not truly feeling the Return of the Jedi hate.
If i just accept that the Ewok battle vs those supposed to be crack storm-troopers was just a hard thing to film in a way that would be believable, and add in the good Karma associated for giving tiny people work, i think the most jarring thing for me in Return of the Jedi is that end celebration scene when you have that (lovely) shot on Endor looking up into the sky as the Death Star explodes. The music and singing at that point just does not feel like something the primitive Ewoks would make (it does blend into the typical Star Wars orchestral thing, so that is part of the issue maybe?). It sounds like a modern professional voice choir and orchestra ‘trying’ to sound like primitive music, and not doing it that well. And that is quite mild criticism compared to the near phone book’s worth i have for the prequels, just to get some context here while we are talking about any of the originals vs the prequels.
Star Wars has always been a mish-mash of genre tropes that Lucas swiped from other sources: everything from Buck Rogers to Westerns to WW2 dogfights to samurai films. But as kids, all this stuff was a holy revelation to us, because no one else had mixed those ingredients together in quite the same way in the movies. It’s only later in life do we realize what he’d been plagiarizing (in the best possible sense - imitation, flattery, etc.). All the examples you cite sound way more fun than the actual prequels.
