The Final Word On George Lucas [the prequel trilogy finally makes sense] - Page 2

That's because some people dig Spider-Man 3. Nothing profound about it.

The first movie doesn't work as a piece of cinema?

EDIT: In other words, what Andre said.

You're misunderstanding the statement. Spider-Man 3 was hated around here. It wasn't hated generally. If it were, it wouldn't have seen repeat business, which making that kind of money requires. Nobody's saying that films that a particular segment of the population hates don't make money. The idea is that if a film is very successful, one has to conclude that the general audience liked it. And one very much has to conclude that the success of the Star Wars prequels means that the general public liked them. What a small group of crotchety film geeks thinks doesn't really matter.

What you like, what I like and what Joe Public likes is not always going to jibe.

People like different things for different reasons. Some good, some bad, it happens. Some people hate Bob Dylan, some love Barry Manilow, it's a cruel, ugly world.
Getting on the high horse and castigating people for liking something or for not liking something that you (or I) hate is not only a waste of time, but the worst kind of edifying snobby asshole.

Interesting point, but how is it dishonest when I personally get satisfaction from it? Why do I have to explain a like to someone else?

Hated films don't have legs, and The Phantom Menace did. Pretty spectacular ones.

You brought up the fact Star Wars played for a year -- it did, but in a very different business model. You know this, Andre. Star Wars opened small and expanded. The Phantom Menace went wide early, made a shitload of money up front, but it kept making money afterward. People went back. The film played into early 2000.

Yes.

Another problem, of course , is that you want to hate the films at this point, and refuse to look at any other viewpoint than your own. You can accuse us of justifying a like -- which I don't feel the need to do. I like it, I didn't convince myself to, it's as simple as that -- but we can do the same thing to you.

In short, we want to like a movie. You want to dislike it. Which is worse?

But Jedi isn't, and that's just as much Kasdan's film. Return of the Jedi's script isn't any better than Phantom Menace's.

Yes, it is. For all its faults, it wraps up the main storyline magnificently, and the final act juggles the different threads perfectly. Menace was somehow all set-up without actually setting up anything that would happen later. It was an aimless, often painful mess, bits of which are salvaged by Neeson and Ray Park.

I'd argue the same about Jedi -- just replace Neeson and Ray Park with Ian McDiarmid. And in what way did Phantom Menace not set up things that came later? I'm kind of amazed it set up as much as it did.

As do I, and I legitimately like the Prequels. I would like them if there was no A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

True, but they never performed as poorly as something like Pirates 3 or Spider-Man 3 did (granted, things have become much more frontloaded in just the three years since Ep. 3 came out). Revenge of the Sith had a 3.5x multiplier, considerably higher than other blockbusters that year. 'Family-friendly' Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire managed a 2.5x with Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

Clones is clearly hampered by Lucas trying to please everybody who was pissed about Episode I -- that's obvious. But I'd rather watch Revenge of the Sith, as its own fully told story, than A New Hope or Return of the Jedi.

Not as annoying. Much more annoying.

Out of curiosity, what parts of the TPM script strike you as on par with Jedi's high points?

I'm not using straight-up gross as proof, I'm using legs. They're the best indication we have of people liking the film, telling their friends, and going back. I don't find Spider-Man 3's gross all that impressive. It barely doubled its opening weekend.

Define 'good in a classical sense.' A New Hope hardly features fantastic acting. I'm not knocking it -- I truly love that film -- but it comes into play if you're going to make distinctions in terms of types of quality.

Jedi's script is every bit the generally tepid rehash the final film is.

I've been over this many times already, so I won't go into great detail about it, but I honestly feel that Return of the Jedi gets way too many points just for its association with the original trilogy. It completely coasts for two hours, and there's zero plot movement until Luke gets on the Death Star. Taken as its own entity, it's almost entirely a waste of time.
Let's not create artificial divisions here. It can be both, and it is.

I just want it to be noted that I'm not saying the Prequel Trilogy are particularly well made films, or that they're anything near good. It's just that I had equal amounts of disdain for the Original Trilogy now that I've seen them as a 'grown up'. I think mistakes are made in the OT which are continued on into the PT and that's why there is such a violent and visceral reaction to them. It made people who'd grown up with the myth of greatness start to question the general quality of their beholden franchise.

If by that you mean the OT is about equally as shitty as the PT: I have been saying this for a while now.

Thank god there are people who agree that the previous trilogy isn't all its cracked up to be. Its not perfect, but childhood bias really is playing heavy with a lot of people. Episode 4 and 5 are still good serial pieces of entertainment, but 6 really really dropped the ball.
The sad thing is Lucas thinks like an engineer and is very systematic, even borderline robotic in thinking. Its like he makes bullet points of what to accomplish in a movie and sticks those bullet points together to make the film. The terrible Return of the Jedi seems: Rescue Han, See Yoda, Have a battle, awesome Luke vs Vader, Battle of Endor, lets have some of those imperial captains show back up because they fought in the last movie. It felt like, okay lets just do what we gotta do to just finish the damn thing.

Onto the prequels, I actually feel The Phantom Menace is fairly complete. It has its own music, and self contained nature make it tell a slightly elegant story. Jar Jar really fucks things up, but it felt like Lucas doesn't know the difference anymore between childish and universal themes that all will understand. He had that in the originals except Jedi, which showed the beginning of the end.
Episode II he returns to his robotic system thinking, and just gets lazy with his editing and starts to reuse music. I'm sorry, but be done with your film, and let John Williams save your ass. Really though, only 2 scenes were memorable: The Anakin slaughter of the Tuskins and The entire ending with the wedding and the clones going to march off imperially (hah heh lame). The story didn't progress that much in Eps 1, EXCEPT for Palpatine's. So now we're playing catch up. We're finally at the Clone Wars, and then Lucas gips us and gives us the cartoon (hey it was decent). Just squeezing the money.

Episode III is in fact my favorite prequel, because it tries so many different things. It goes dark, or attempts to. I'm sorry, but younglings? It feels so immature to say "umm he's evil" "lets have him kill children, thats evil"
What Lucas missed here, was a great way to make Schindler's List with Jedi. Fuck even if he didn't kill off Qui-Gon okay okay wishful thinking. Still its the ending when shit hits the fan that this movie soars. Some of the most memorable images from the entire series are in this movie. When Darth Vader slowly arises, the formation of the Empire, Obi-Wan vs Anakin and the lava hits as the music hits.

I honestly think though Jedi barely beats out Phantom Menace just barely since it has the more memorable crew, but its robotic pacing sucks hard, especially coming off the amazing Empire.

Rank: Empire, ANH, ROTS, Jedi, TPM, AOTC

Some of you seem to be implying that ANH and ESB aren't and never were great films. And that some of us just weren't mature enough to realize this as children. Give me a fucking break. It's stuff like this that makes me long for the days before EVERYONE was a critic. Back when people allowed themselves to be swept up in the magic of great entertainment. I agree that blindly loving all things Star Wars is lame, but so is discrediting its strong points. Like everything that's wonderful about Episodes 4 and 5. If you truly don't enjoy them, that's one thing. But just in general, a lot of people seem to self-revise their old feelings about movies like they're on some divine quest for greater wisdom. I'm 35, so I'm part of the generation that grew up with the original movies, but my sentimental attachment to things doesn't cloud my judgement for eternity. Waiting for Gordon and Maria to finally learn that Snuffalufagus isn't just Big Bird's hallucinations stopped mattering to me in the early '70s. Watching Leia screw with Han's ego in ANH is still good stuff. I don't think this is because I refuse to grow up.

Lucas actually wrote the novelization of Star Wars himself. I'd say that goes a little beyond "Lucas approved".

It sounds to me like you're just being stubborn about this "they were twins all along" business. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary. Gary Kurtz had plenty to say on the subject once upon a time.

http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/index.html

The e-book you can download (for free) on this site is a bit repetitive, but incredibly thorough. Though the author belabors some of his points, the book is well-referenced and admirably logical where assumptions must be made. I consider it to be the closest thing we'll get to the final word on Lucas' thought process regarding the creation of the most important Star Wars story points, most notably the ideas of Vader being Luke's father and Leia his sister, and when those ideas came about.

It's a good companion piece to Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars, and it also has more information on the development of ESB and ROTJ than anything else I've read combined.

Furthermore, the author makes a good case for the validity of his argument that Lucas rewrote much of the core story to Revenge of the Sith prior to extensive reshoots, pertaining to Anakin's motivations for turning to the dark side.

All in all, I found it to be an absorbing read.

Wow, those similarities to Where Eagles Dare are pretty striking.

Maybe a little off-topic here, but there's something that sort of bothers me a little with the whole "Did he make it up all at once or did he make it up as he went along" debate...either way it's made up. So what's the difference?

I mean, it seems like Lucas seems to believe (or wants the public to believe) that "made up all at once" is somehow better. Like, Because he had the whole story in mind, he knew exactly what he was doing from start to finish. Except that, first of all, that obviously isn't true -- there are enough contradictions and/or confusing things in those movies to show that -- and second of all, isn't it theoretically better to spend years and years honing the story, so that everything in it will be that much more well-considered?

Either way, I keep coming back to that it's all fiction anyway, whether it happened over a few years or twenty. He's not telling the actual history of a galaxy long ago and far way. It's made up. Who cares how long it took him to figure out that Leia is Luke's sister? Does it really matter?

Just sayin'.

Perhaps so. It still bothers me, though: I mean, is I've wanted to tell this story for 30 years inarguably better than Each step of the way over the last 30 years, I've carefully considered what the next chapter should be? I guess you're saying, only to the naive. And in return, I'm saying: maybe they should think it over.

Yeah. Michael Kaminski, the guy that wrote The Secret History of Star Wars, makes the point that the fact that the story of SW evolved over time, rather than being masterminded from the beginning, makes the saga more interesting.

Whether you like the direction the story goes or not, it's interesting to note that the first film was made to stand alone. The film was constructed so that if there was never a sequel, the audience would assume the empire was defeated at the end. And that film is a simple mythological adventure story about the hero triumphing over evil.

ESB changes the nature of the overall story by somewhat internalizing the struggle and making it personal for Luke Skywalker. Kaminski even tries to pinpoint the time, down to the month, at which Lucas hits upon the idea that Vader is Luke's father, which was in his judgment when Lucas was reworking Leigh Brackett's first draft of Empire. His argument was that the idea was a logical outgrowth of Lucas' attempt to reduce redundant elements in the backstory (the characters of Skywalker's father and Darth Vader, who both have a relationship with Kenobi). In that light it doesn't even seem so much like a brilliant stroke of genius, although credit can only be given to Lucas for hitting upon it before anyone else. It's possible a friend or family member (maybe even his wife) actually suggested it, but there's no real evidence that it wasn't his idea.

But the point is that the brilliance of the idea is not diminished just because he hadn't had it that way from the beginning. On the other hand, the idea of Leia being the sister is admittedly clunky, and Kaminski explains that as Lucas' attempt to wrap up hanging story threads within one final film, as Lucas at the time was ready to get away from the SW films.

Kaminski then chronicles the thought process behind the prequels, and points out that Lucas again changed what the story was about by shifting the perspective to that of "Father Skywalker." He laments that Lucas is unwilling to admit to making these changes, as they're perfectly valid, the execution of the ideas notwithstanding.

And I agree. Apart from criticism of the quality of the end product, no one is blaming Lucas for shifting the perspective of the story and adding depth to the saga. Instead of claiming that he had it all figured out from the get-go, he should hold up the evolution of the entire story, with it's changes over time, as a historic example of the creative process of story-telling at work. For this, at least, Lucas should be proud. Kaminski's goal in writing the e-book was to preserve the chronicling of that creative evolution as a historically accurate testimony to the process of film-making. In this respect, Lucas' revisionist statements aren't doing anyone a favor.

But to return to the original point of the thread, I think the book proves fairly well that Lucas is not a hack when it comes to telling stories through film. A rusty director he may be, but one has to give him credit for giving all this stuff some serious thought over a long period of time.

Well said. Exactly!

Absolutely. The more I read of that book, the more I become convinced that Lucas consistently made brilliant choices with the saga, even through the prequels. I mean, shifting the focus of the prequels from Obi-Wan (as originally intended) to Anakin is much more interesting and dramatic, at least in theory (maybe not so much in execution), because he's the character with the biggest arc. And likewise, starting him off not as a "bad seed" but as a good kid, full of compassion and love, is a much more interesting concept. In theory.

It's sad when you think about how much potential the prequels had to be a really great story.

But who the sister was was a lot different.

According to producer Gary Kurtz and EMPIRE director Kershner, Luke's sister was not Leia: the "other" Yoda referred to was another woman on another planet light years away. She was going to be introduced in JEDI but Lucas got lazy and simply made Leia the sister.

And if you don't believe me, look in one of the prequel threads here on CHUD. Check out the publicity photo (posted by Litmus Configuration) of Luke and Leia embraced in a passionate kiss in the Hoth hangar bay.

I don't think that's anything to do with laziness perse'. I think Lucas had this idea of introducing a new character (Luke's Sister) in ROTJ but after ESB when he got to writing with Kasdan and the story was coming together he probably found out he wrote himself into a bloated last entry. The story-lines he thought was more important to get through and plus introducing a new sort of character into the mix could have overcomplicated and/or convoluted an already full script. So he dropped it and tried to insinuate Leia was his sister all along. It was a pretty easy get-away.

Actually, that story wouldn't have made Jedi bloated at all. Jedi has no plot to speak of. The search for Luke's sister would at least have given the film a story and an identity to call its own. As it is, literally nothing happens in the big story until Luke turns himself in.

Wait, wait, wait. If Leia wasn't intended to be his sister, how come she can use the force to sense him at the end of Empire?

Either way, I agree that ROTJ is too late to introduce a major character to wrap things up. So even if she wasn't meant to be Luke's sister before then, I think Lucas made the right choice.

It's no different than the fact that Luke can sense Hand and Leia being tortured from another planet. In fact, it's Vader's whole plan to get him there, so he fully expects Luke to be able to sense that. Han and Leia don't have to have force powers for that to work.

Well, that's not quite as good as her using force telepathy to sense her brother, is it?

I'm saying, if I remembered it wrong, which apparently I did, I'm disappointed. Because I liked it better when I thought Leia was using the force.

Amphibatron, you raped my childhood.

Well considering that Han's a block of ice and he's never met Lando, Luke doesn't have a lot of options. Who else would he call, Chewie?

It's true that Lucas most likely decided Leia was the sister after ESB came out, and all eveidence points to this, but I also believe that he had decided by the time he was developing the story for Empire that Han was going to get the girl.

BTW, Kaminski points out that Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars is misleading on this point, and, intentionally or not, follows Lucas' revisionist history, by inserting a Lucas quote about deciding Luke and Leia were siblings into the section discussing the earliest developments of the story, before the original film even went into production. Kaminski points out that although The Making of Star Wars sourced "the lost interviews from the Lucasfilm archives," that not all of the book's sources are from this early time period, circa 1976 and before, but that it also draws on a number of interviews from as late as 2005. Lucas' quotes in the book are not each specifically referenced as to which interview they come from.

"The Force is strong in your family." That alone shows that there are certainly people who are more in tune with it than others.

I'd argue it's hinted at, at least slightly, in A New Hope. "I don't know, kid. Do you think a Princess and a guy like me--" "No."

I don't see it that way. The scene strikes me more like Han actually considering it for a second, and Luke jumps in with "No" because he doesn't want the competition.

I feel bad for Han because of the carbonite incident. One second, Leia's this hot little thing who really wants him. The next, she's this coked out whore with a man's voice who still wants him.

I doubt Han was genuinely considering it. He's just fucking with Luke.

If he was fucking with Luke, why did he stop? I'm probably just too influenced by my original interpretation as a kid.

Who says he stopped? The scene cuts away after Luke blurts out "No!" Maybe the ribbing continued all the way to the ground.

I mean consider the context: Leia has just bitched him out for being a selfish mercenary and stormed off, and when Luke asks (feeling out the competition) "What do you think of her?" Han says "I'm trying not to." He can't stand her. Only after Luke comments "Good..." under his breath does Han pick up what's going on, and decides to have a little fun.

That was always my interpretation as well. That little expression that crosses Han's face after Luke says "Good" makes it pretty clear that he's about to fuck with him.

The way Leia's reaction to "Leia, hear me!" is shot, I think it's clearly meant to indicate that she's the "other" Yoda spoke of. Now, whether that means she had to be Luke's sister is an entirely different issue, but I remember Lucas saying something about lovers who turn out to be brother and sister was a common motif in Arabian fairy tales, and recent current events have shown that it's not outside the realm of possibility!!!

I don't think that's clear at all. And if that was the intention, it makes me dislike Empire a little bit. Suddenly revealing that a character who's been there all along has similar powers to The Last Great Hope For Salvation is a little cheesy.

Then again, as much as I love Empire, I think I'd have generally been happier if Star Wars had been left a single movie, and then left the hell alone. It would have more dignity now.

In the DVD commentary for ROTJ Lucas himself admits he only had enough story for 1/3 of the movie, and inserted the Jabba sequences and Luke's return to Dagoba to pad out the running time. He could easily have used that time to introduce a new major character. Ah what could have been...

Let's not get started on that again. I assume you remember what happened the last time...

Luke calls out "Leia, hear me." The Force theme swells, we cut to the interior of the Falcon and get this long slow pan to Leia's face as the Force builds. It practically beats you over the head with it.

The whole brother/sister thing would have worked a lot better had Lucas not decided they were twins. In fact, having their mother survive and Leia being his half-sister through Bail Organa would have been more satisfying than the whole "she's simply lost the will to live" nonsense.

Not to bring them up again - but notice how there are absolutley no little character scenes like that in the prequesls - you know, little incidentals of people acting human with each other - don't mean to derail the thread so now you've read this, move on...


And just think of the 16,000 action figures that could have been based on it - Lucas really screwed himself there! Could have made a fortune - bet he's kicking himself!

I gotta disagree. To me, Han is clearly attracted to Leia from the start. They get eachother all riled up from their first moments together in the detention block. He says something like, "Wonderful girl! Either she's gonna get us all killed or I'm begining to like her."

I thought their arguing from that point on was obvious sexual tension. When he says he's trying not to think of her he's being cynical, but he is thinking about her.

That's not true. The reason why Revenge of the Sith works as well as it does is because of those added human moments. Most of all with Obi-Wan (and Ewan McGregor's great acting).

Completely agree. Exactly. He even winks at her at the end.

You're leaving an important line out. It goes like this:

"What do you think of her?"

"I'm tryin not to, kid."

"Good."

"Still... she's gotta lotta spirit."

CUT TO Luke's worried look.

"I don't know, you think a princess and a guy like me...?"

Han clearly likes her, but wont let himself go there because she's a princess.

Everything you say here indicates that you're a kid. I would say something witty but there is nothing witty to say about your overwhelmingly nauseating sense of what constitutes good cinema, and I sincerely hope that if you ever get stuck in a cartoon, that Grape Ape eats you alive.

Well, there's also the fact that you've never said anything witty in your life.

This indicates I'm a kid? Really?

...is someone on this board that really doesn't know how to make friends...?