[Industrialblog,
June 2, 2005]
Take another crack at it, George
Nathan has an outstanding review of SwillRots. The entire first three episodes of Star Wars needs a complete re-write. If I were Lucas, I'd scrap the last three movies and start over. Lucas got everything wrong. He dramatized what should have been summarized, and left out what should have been dramatized.
The Clone Wars could have, and should have been the highlight of the prequels.
Except that they weren't. They only begin at the end of the second episode. I agree with Nathan. Lucas should take another crack at it.
The Clone Wars could have, and should have been the highlight of the prequels.
Except that they weren't. They only begin at the end of the second episode. I agree with Nathan. Lucas should take another crack at it.
I'll second that.
I did a report on 2001: A Space Odyssey for my Deconstruction class in college. I did a lot of digging into old papers to find contemporary reviews of the movie - and most critics at the time hated it. Some critics went so far as to explain how the movie SHOULD have been made - less of this monolith crap, none of that light show/old guy/space baby stuff at the end, more spaceship shots, maybe get rid of that damn talking computer. (None of these critics, as far as I could tell, ever went on to make any movies themselves. Pity, they had so many great ideas.)
Ultimately this isn't our movie, it's Lucas's, and it has to be viewed in that context. You want more Clone Wars? The Clone Wars were a shuck, a proxy war fought by clones vs. droids where the same force was pulling the strings on both sides. The goals were to create a military/industrial infrastructure that would support a revised social structure that functions under martial law, to get the populace used to the idea that their security depended upon continued unquestioned martial law, to flush out and eliminate any "true believers" who might dare to throw in their lot with the Separatists, and to spread out and whittle down the Jedi to the point that they could be taken out fairly easily. And the Jedi fell for it.
When I saw the first movie 28 years ago, the Jedi seemed like paragons of virtue. Now they stand revealed as arrogant, shortsighted, and deeply flawed, afraid of revealing their weaknesses (as discussed by Yoda and Mace in episode II) and suckered into being the pawns of ultimate evil. I'm seeing the first movie ("Episode IV") in a whole new light now. Heck, I'm even seeing the crappy Phantom Menace in a new light.
If you want more Clone Wars, the cartoon is available on DVD. It supplies a lot of background stuff for the movie, like why General Grievous kept coughing.
I agee that the Jedi are surely arrogant and deeply flawed. There existence is apparently to provide fair trade agreements and preserve "democracy." Yet, they don't seem too interested in stomping out slavery or any other number of problem.
2001 has laughably bad moments. Watch it again. The cave man scene? ROLFMAO.
Otherwise, Harry, I thought you made some good points :)
You should re-write the trilogy.
... Fast forwarding through any SCENE where Anakin and Padme ...
THEIR existence ... problemS.
Where's a good editor?
But, seriously Harry, do you really think that anything justifies the pod race and, more importantly, Jar Jar?
I also could never justify the Amidala-in-formal-bondageware scene in Episode II (at the lakehouse on Naboo.) It seems like the things Lucas was most proud of in the series (he designed that dress) also tend to be the most cringeworthy.
The "toilet instructions" scene in 2001 was pretty cool.
Can we do that without infringing on Lucas's copyright and having him sue us? I thought that his team of lawyers was pretty pro-active about pursuing unauthorized derrivative works.
Incidentally, as documented in my arguments with Bill, I actually thought that RotS was a decent movie, and if generally the craftsmanship was a bit shoddy in places (e.g. all of the dialog, the fact that Leia remembered her real mother, etc.), it was worthy of Episodes IV-VI.
But frankly, 2 hours of a light saber battle with no lines at all would have been an improvement over TPM (thus omitting Jar Jar, the-force-is-mitochondria, the virgin birth of anakin skywalker, resolving the conflict through a slapstick accident, and "now this is podracing!", to name a few). How's that for an outline?
:)
That being said, looking back in retrospect, TPM was largely a dissapointment, I think, because everyone wanted the Jedi to be cool and instead they were kind of pathetic. Parts of that were justified and parts weren't; certainly it made sense to have the jedi not be nearly as clear-cut virtuous as we all assumed that they were, however dissapointing that was to watch. On the other hand, they should have been a lot more competent with the force than they turned out to be; it's pretty sad that Jedi trained from birth were only marginally more skilled than luke at things like picking things up with the force (which is of course the coolest Jedi power).
Just giving something really quick and off-the-cuff, I think that it would have worked had the prequels not been all about the same people. So, roughly:
#1: Takes place 1,000 years ago, or whenever the Sith were just about to be slaughtered by the Jedi. Shows what life was like then, and what led to the Jedi slaughtering the Sith except for one. (As I understand it, the Sith used to be many, but the Jedi exterminated them; this is what the Sith seek "revenge" for, plus the continued attempts at extermination.)
#2: takes place maybe 500 years ago, showing what life had been like under the Jedi's guardianship. Yes, there was peace, but clearly the Jedi kept up their lightsaber skills because peace had to be maintained, so there's a story that could be done here.
#3: the fall of anakin skywalker. This would have had to have been a somewhat longer movie, but essentially all that took place in the real episodes 1 and 2 could have been sufficiently summarized. Moreover, by exploring the Sith in episode #1, it would have been doing the groundwork for anakin's fall, and thus would have been making #3 a fuller movie without having to add scenes to #3.
Ok, so that's the 10,000 foot overview, but I have to pack and get driving to Ithaca after answering some support emails, so I don't have time for more. What do you think?
Thanks.
I don't know, I've kind of imagined that the Sith and the Jedi co-evolved over time, both being numerous. Presumably people learned about the force slowly, and the cult of the Jedi only sprang up as a formalization over time. Basically, I would imagine that the Sith were actually first, simply because people who learned about the force would be Sith by default, and then some Sith developed the Jedi order, explicitly rejecting the dark side.
However exactly that would go, I think that it's the sort of thing that could be reasonably effectively summarized in a movie about the rise of the Jedi and the fall of the Sith. Granted, it would have to be done not in a ham-handed way, but it's the sort of backstory that I think would be better summarized than shown — long evolutions usually are.