The Force Awakens vs. The Prequels, or: So this is how personal expression dies, to thunderous applause
January 7th, 2016 |Spoilers for all seven Star Wars films
1- The Auteur Theory
“The auteur theory of film actually is very true if you know directors, because they are very much like their movies. And in the case of somebody who writes and directs, you know, it is my life. I mean, everything I write is my life, I’m not writing some sort of hypothetical thesis on something, I’m writing a story that I have to get extremely emotionally involved in because it’s going to take two or three years of my life to do it. So I can’t just sort of say, ‘Oh this will be fun,’ and knock it off in a week. This is like a marriage … you have to be in love with this thing for at least four or five years, and probably for the rest of your life” –George Lucas 1
In the run up to The Force Awakens, I couldn’t even begin to count how many times I’ve seen people saying, Oh thank God that George Lucas won’t be involved.
It’s been a popular notion for some time now that Star Wars needed to be saved from George Lucas. It took me a long time to work out how people could seriously think something so nonsensical.
There is no Star Wars without George Lucas. Where do these people think that Star Wars came from?
To get around the conundrum of loving Star Wars but hating George Lucas, fans have created entire alternate realities. The Secret History of Star Wars is a book-length attempt by fan/possible mental patient Michael Kaminski to give credit for everything good about the original three films to somebody, anybody, besides George Lucas. It was Ralph McQuarrie, Gary Kurtz, it was Lawrence Kasdan, Irvin Kersher, Marcia Lucas, it was maybe the craft service guy, but it was most definitely not the guy who wrote, directed, and originated the entire thing. Kaminski makes baroque conspiracy theories about how Lucas has lied about the development of all of the films, based on the fact that Kaminski has “uncovered” that the story did in fact evolve over the different script drafts and didn’t originate fully formed in the version that Lucas has chosen to finally present. The way that fans are able to twist reality to fit their preferred version of events is displayed in fact that he presents these revelations as “secret” when he has no special access of any kind and all of his research is based on information readily made available by Lucas and Lucasfilm themselves.
Almost all those other contributors I mentioned did in fact make important contributions to Star Wars, but to say that their contributions negate Lucas’, or that it means that these films are not Lucas’ creations, simply displays a basic ignorance of how art is created.
Everything about Star Wars- The love of fast cars, the Saturday matinee influences, the Kurosawa influences, the Joseph Campbell influences, the daddy issues, the editing style, all of it- this is George Lucas’ life on screen. Star Wars is what happens when you take his life experiences, things that he absorbed and that inspired him, and throw them in a pot together. The stew that happens is Star Wars.
This is how any work of art happens, really. Film is of course an especially collaborative medium, but in any work of art, even a novel, every person that enters the artist’s life directly or indirectly has an effect on the person that they are and the life experiences they are drawing upon to create their art. This does not mean that the novel doesn’t have an author. Those other people are influences, but the artist is the final arbiter, the lens through which those experiences are combined into a piece of art.
I was 16 when The Phantom Menace came out, at the right age to be a big Star Wars fan and also at a very impressionable age in my own development as an artist, so the critical reception that that movie- and later the next two prequels- received was a subject of continuing fascination for me. Now, seeing the inverse of that extreme emotional reaction applied to The Force Awakens has been fascinating to watch also.
For me, the entire reason that I had a big interest in the prequels was George Lucas. There actually isn’t any comparable situation in film history where one man got to originate a story and, on this scale and with this kind of budget and over 30 years, do it all his way without ceding control at any point. This is the only time ever that a project like this could really be said to have one author creating it. That was what interested me, to see what he would do.
Not all Star Wars fans feel that way, obviously. They’ve even created a feature-length documentary, The People vs. George Lucas, to present their case, without any apparent irony, that Lucas should be held accountable to them, and that he owes it to the fans to make the movies he is told to make. If you’d like to see a long parade of people who have never created anything in their lives talk about how they know more about making movies than the guy who made movies they are obsessed with does, then go ahead and check it out, but I’m not responsible for the headache it could create.
Alan Moore said, “If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience, they would be the artists.” I go to see a film or a piece of art because I want the artist to show me something new, something I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Were the prequels the way that I would have made them? Of course not. And it would have been totally boring if they were. If I wanted to see fan fiction, I would have written some fan fiction.
I wanted to see what George Lucas would come up with. Somehow petty, irrational hatred toward the man has become the accepted tone of the conversation online over the last 16 years, and somehow people forgot that Lucas is a genius. THX-1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars, in the span of a few short years. Not only are these all radically different films and all brilliant, they were also all bolts from the blue that showed entire new directions in which the medium of film could go. There wasn’t anything like any of them, and he did it three times in a row.
2- The White House
“The point is, like if you paint your house white and somebody comes over, ‘Well that should be a green house.’ Well, fine, but I wanted to paint it white. I don’t think there was anything wrong with painting it white. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me for painting it white. Maybe it should be a green house, but I didn’t want it to be a green house. I wanted it to be a white house” –George Lucas 2
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a negative review of the Star wars prequels that talks about the movies that George Lucas actually made, as opposed to talking about the movies that the reviewer was wishing had been made.
People have a hard time wrapping their heads around how very fucking weird Star Wars was when it was first released, because now we watch it from childhood and internalize it. Not only Star Wars itself, but the thirty years of films since that have copied and emulated it. So, it seems like the most natural thing in the world- this is what adventure movies should be like.
Except that that’s contrary to the entire reason it was a success in the first place, that it did everything different. So, when the prequels came along and they were strange, experimental, not what people expect blockbusters to be, that of course couldn’t be more Star Wars of them. The irony is lost on fans of the first Star Wars that they are deriding the new Star Wars for being what Star Wars has been all along. Lucas didn’t change, they did.
They also have rose tinted nostalgia that comes from loving something uncritically as a child. If you think that the acting and dialog in the first trilogy was across the board realistic and somehow different than it was in the prequels, then you’re operating in a version of reality so altered by your perceptions that I probably can’t help you.
When you judge a piece of art, the criteria you’re supposed to use is how closely the artist achieved their goals. If you don’t like musicals, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean that all musicals are bad. They could be a very well done example of something that you don’t enjoy. There’s a fine line there many people struggle to understand, which is the difference between talking about the piece of art, and talking about yourself and your own tastes and emotions.
George Lucas isn’t interested in traditional story structure. This should be obvious if you’ve seen THX or American Graffiti. In fact, he’s actively interested in subverting traditional story structure, and in completely non-narrative films.
But in spite of that, you get things like the Red Letter Media reviews, which point out that Phantom Menace doesn’t have a clear protagonist and then sit back triumphantly, having just mathematically proven that they’re right and George Lucas doesn’t know how to make movies. This is the type of critique you get from armchair critics who have maybe read a “How to write your screenplay in 30 days!” book for hacks, and now think that if they spot something in a film that doesn’t follow that formula precisely, they have discovered a mistake. The Red Letter Media reviews continually mention things that George Lucas went to great lengths to do and wants you to notice- non-traditional narrative structure, visual synchronicities- and point them out as though they are very clever for noticing them and these things are in the movie simply because Lucas is too stupid and lazy to notice them also. These reviews are feature-length illustrations of the Dunning-Kruger effect- people who understand something so shallowly that they think they are experts. These are reviews written for an audience operating at a level where they can’t process a detailed analysis without periodic jokes about murdering hookers thrown in there to spice it up, and, obviously, many Star Wars fans love them.
The prequels are also of course criticized for their dialog. George Lucas doesn’t care about dialog. He has said this so many times in interviews over the years, I don’t even know where to start pointing to examples. He refers to dialog as a sound effect, and he’s said he prefers the French dubbed version of the films because it’s just a better sound, whether or not you know what the words mean. He’s pointed out with pride that children in foreign countries who don’t speak any English can watch Star Wars and understand it based on the visuals and the music.
When you go to Star Wars and complain that the dialog isn’t realistic, that’s like going to Schindler’s List and complaining that it wasn’t funny enough, you were in the mood for a comedy. It’s just not the movie you went to, and again, you’re talking about yourself and your own taste and comfort levels, not the movie you saw. You’re watching an apple and complaining that it’s not an orange. It’s not a problem with the movie, it’s a problem with how you’re discussing the movie.
What George Lucas cares about is “pure cinema” or what he calls “tone poems”. Again, he has said this over and over in every interview where he has got a chance. What he’s referring to is the ability of cinema to create meaning and emotions with editing and the juxtaposition of different images.
And if you’re able to watch Star Wars that way, which is to say the way that you’re supposed to watch it, then the six episodes George Lucas made really are an extraordinary achievement.
His interests are very obvious in THX, but they’re also there in American Graffiti, which doesn’t actually have a plot- it has a series of vignettes, and it worked for people because the vignettes are fun and comic and strung together by entertaining music, so audiences didn’t quite realize what a strange film they’d got. It was further hidden in Star Wars, because the first films had a very archetypal hero’s journey on which to hang the viewer’s attention, but his interests are as present there as anywhere else.
Mike Kilmo with his Ring Theory essay has gone into much more detail about visual synchronicities throughout the films than I will here, but even with his essay’s popularity, I feel like to explain my thoughts on The Force Awakens, this is something I have to go into.
I don’t agree with every detail of Kilmo’s theory, but as for his observations of patterns within the films, it’s undeniable that they are there, and also undeniable that they are intentional. When Kilmo’s essay started to go viral over the last year, I was kind of shocked. Shocked that people were surprised by this. This was news? Again, many details of his theory and many observations that he made are new and very insightful, but the general idea that Star Wars was a visual poem, that the episodes echoed each other, etc… How can you find out anything about Star Wars and not know this already? How did people not know already that this was how you were supposed to view Star Wars?
When I first saw Phantom Menace, I immediately noticed a huge number of shots at the end that paralleled the endings of both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. I’m not patting myself on the back for this or saying that it was extraordinary of me to notice it- I thought it was what everybody was supposed to be seeing. It’s not as though it’s a secret. Again, Lucas mentions this in interviews every chance he gets. He is constantly talking about how the movies are meant to operate on a visual level, and how they are meant to mirror each other.
In the end of Phantom Menace, the first ones you’ll probably notice are Qui-Gon in his funeral pyre, which is a mirror image of Darth Vader when he is later in his, and Obi-Wan holding Qui-Gon’s body, which is a bookend to Luke later holding the body of his father.
These aren’t merely just visually similar moments. They are carefully composed- in fact, the whole scenes in which they appear had to be carefully staged so that the key moments could be composed- in a direct symmetrical reflection of the earlier shots that Lucas wanted to quote.
What is this point of this? Kilmo has his Ring Theory which describes structural reasons for the patterns. I’ve always thought of it more in musical terms, because that’s how Lucas describes it. He describes these moments as the same melody or theme, but played on different instruments. And what is the purpose of it when a particular melody is reprised in an opera, but given a different interpretation? To compare and contrast the two different moments, to mark the differences and create subtextual meaning.
In the case of these particular moments, he is creating bookends for the story of the entire saga. First, the murder of Qui-Gon by a Sith, which is what leads to Obi-Wan training Anakin and all the misfortune that follows, and this is inverted by Vader’s eventual sacrifice where he is able to turn back to Anakin again, and he dies himself. Pulling these two moments together by making these shots direct quotations of one another tells the story of the entire saga in miniature, and it’s beautiful to see.
Some people, of course, will claim that these are just a few similar shots, and ideas of this being a vast symphonic idea that goes throughout the whole series are just people reading too much into it, giving Lucas too much credit. These people are categorically incorrect.
Look at, for one example, the similarities between the parade at the end of Phantom Menace and the awards ceremony at the end of A New Hope. Everything is staged in such a way to create exact symmetrical moments between each shot of characters that recur between the two scenes and characters within the two scenes that are meant to symbolically echo each other.
First we have a shot of Padme looking downward and smiling, which is exactly followed by a shot of Leia looking downward and smiling.
In these two shots, the characters are both looking to the left of the frame, only in the first one it is Padme looking at Anakin. In the next shot, Leia is in the same position and looks in the same direction, only in the following shot, Anakin has been replaced by Luke.
Luke is now on the start of his journey, as Anakin was in the previous scene. Is Luke going to emulate Anakin, or is he going to succeed where Anakin failed? They even have a similar looking smirk on their face, having both just successfully blown up a space station. Leia and Padme looking in the same direction emphasizes the similarities in what they are both looking at, but Anakin and Luke in their shots are looking at opposite sides of the screen, again creating the symmetry or bookends between the moments.
Then we have a reaction shot from Artoo, who is present at the start of each of these journeys. Lucas has said that, really, it’s all Artoo’s story, and he’s the witness to it all, so it’s important to have a shot of him observing each occasion. In each shot his head turns, but in opposite directions, making the moments symmetrical again.
Whether or not you find it interesting or rewarding, if you choose to look into it even slightly it’s obvious that Lucas has gone to extreme measures to do this throughout the entire saga to a minute level of detail.
Beyond specific shots, it happens in the tone of the scenes. The Phantom Menace celebration on Naboo is a parade, there are children playing and confetti. The similar scene in A New Hope again features our heroes that we should be rooting for, but it has a much more militaristic flavor. Specifically, it has direct echoes of Leni Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will.
Nazi imagery has always featured in Star Wars, but mainly in conjunction with the bad guys obviously. Yet Lucas quotes that movie in the Rebel celebration in A New Hope. Was there intended ambiguity in that choice? If there wasn’t originally, there is a meaning to it created by the juxtaposition with the scene from Phantom Menace. The heroes in Phantom Menace are living in a different time, and their celebrations look different. By A New Hope, the Republic, who were the heroes originally, have now taken on the role of the Empire, and the heroes, while momentarily victorious, are now in hiding and living a military life of constant warfare.
This is another problem people had with the prequels- they were watching them in the wrong order.
Many many things in the prequels were expressly designed to work best if they’re watched as they’re numbered- as the first episodes of the series.
The first half hour of Phantom Menace, for example, is mostly devoted to showing you what a Jedi is and what they do, what powers they have, how a lightsaber works, etc. Of course, if you were coming to this movie having already memorized the others, you didn’t need to know any of that.
There are numerous things like this throughout the prequels that would have been befuddling if you were insisting on watching it as the second trilogy, rather than trying to understand that it was supposed to be the first. Threepio being made by Anakin seems like a big coincidence if you go backward, but watching them in order there is no coincidence, the two characters started out connected and later diverged, rather than starting far apart and then being brought together arbitrarily.
Likewise, it might seem odd that out of all the Wookiees in the galaxy, Yoda happens to be friends with Chewbacca, but going the other way, not only does it make sense, it makes more sense than before. Out of the whole cantina, how does Obi-Wan manage to walk up to a qualified co-pilot with a suitable ship on his first try? Because he knew Chewbacca, Chewie had helped the Jedi 20 years earlier! Not only is it not a mistake, it adds a layer and improves things in the original films.
Another reason people have trouble viewing it this way is the idea that the originals will be spoiled if you see the prequels first. Mainly, the idea that the “I am your father” revelation will be ruined. Again, this is people clinging to the way they originally saw the films and what they want the films to be emotionally, rather than trying to understand the films George Lucas actually made. Because if you can make the effort to look at it that way, you would realize that, actually, it’s a much greater surprise to go along in the whole prequel trilogy thinking that Anakin and Obi-Wan are the heroes, and then have Anakin turn and become a Sith. That’s a far bigger and far more consequential twist.
It also happens to make the moment in Empire Strikes Back better, because we have now seen Anakin turn, and we know the movies can go there, so you wonder if it actually is possible that Luke will go there too. As a kid, I never really bought that Luke could turn to the Dark Side- he was the good guy! Wasn’t gonna happen! However, viewed the other way, it already DID happen, it certainly could happen again.
I grew up with the original movies before I saw the prequels, too, and so I understand that it’s a difficult adjustment to make. But that’s the way Lucas made it, because that’s what the movie was. He wanted the six films to work together as a piece, rather than just doing what would be more easily accessible to a certain group of fans who had grown up with the other three films first. And he was right, because he knew that eventually, if the films lasted and new generations kept watching them, that first generation would be in the minority, and it didn’t make any sense to compromise how the films worked for every other generation to please that first one.
And the thing is, it’s always more rewarding to try to understand the piece of art that’s in front of you, rather than only understanding your own predispositions. When the prequels were coming out, it was a fascinating puzzle to me, and I was watching very closely how the structures of the two halves would tie together. Before Episode II came out, I predicted to my friends that it would end with a shot of Anakin and Padme’s wedding. I predicted too, also in 1999, that Episode III would end with the arrival of the twins in their new homes, the last shot being Luke with Owen and Beru on Tatooine. I even predicted that the first shot of Episode II would contain a camera tilt up to a planet, rather than a tilt down. Every other episode started with a tilt down, but once Lucas had a rule like that, there was always one exception as a counterpoint. I could see the musical structure to it, and enjoy what he was doing, rather than bitching because he wasn’t doing what I wanted him to.
Again, I’m not patting myself for noticing or predicting these things, and I don’t think it’s extraordinary to notice them. These are not small, hidden Easter eggs- they are the entire language with which Lucas is trying to communicate. And it’s not just a matter of visual quotes and similar compositions in particular shots. It’s intrinsic to everything about the movies.
To use one example- the three villains of the prequels, Darth Maul, Count Dooku, and General Grievous. They are all precursors to Vader. Darth Maul shows you the power and ferocity of the Sith, Count Dooku sets up the idea that an intelligent Jedi can turn to the Dark Side, and General Grievous shows us a villain whose body has been destroyed, and who is now more machine than man. These are establishing the ideas in the universe necessary to understand so that when Anakin is transformed at the end of Episode III, it makes sense within the rules of the films and it has been foreshadowed. Otherwise, Anakin turning like he did and becoming a machine like he does would be too large of a leap for people watching the films chronologically.
These echoes and similarities between the stories and visual symbols Lucas is using are where almost all of his creative energy was directed, and many people watching the films don’t pay any attention to them. It’s pervasive, in every scene and idea of the films. To claim that it is all accidental and that Lucas wasn’t thinking in these terms is absurd. In the prequels, people got three vastly more weird, esoteric, and ambitious movies than they expected, and many of them just couldn’t be bothered.
The one problem with talking about how the films operate on these abstract, visual levels is that they’re also meant to be kid’s films. People would point to this as another failure, but I think it’s the most impressive thing of all. It’s a small miracle that these films operate on all those other levels, and are also completely enjoyable to a child. Whether or not they understand it in a way they can articulate, the fact that so much of the meaning of the films rests in the visuals rather than the dialog makes it easier for children to understand what they’re about.
I’ve been told many times on the internet that the prequels are “objectively bad” and “universally” hated. Which is strange because they were all extraordinary financial successes and, to reference Mike Kilmo again, they were also critically as well received as the original series. And kids that grew up with them as their first Star Wars like them as much or even more than the original films.
People say, how can you call them children’s films when they’re full of long discussions about trade routes and taxation and politics? The thing is, I have never heard a child complain about those scenes in Phantom Menace- I have only heard adults claiming that children don’t like them. The longest scene in the senate in the prequels- aside from a lightsaber fight between Yoda and Palpatine- is barely over two minutes, and kids react to all the political talk the way they react to anything they don’t entirely understand- they gloss over it. Just exactly how when I was a kid watching A New Hope I glossed over discussions of diplomatic missions to Alderaan and the bureaucracy of the Imperial Senate. I didn’t know what any of that meant, and it didn’t matter because the story was told to me visually. You could tell who the bad guys were, you could tell when they were doing something that created a bad situation for the good guys.
Kids love the prequels. Kids even love Jar Jar. At the Phantom Menace reissue in 2012, I sat in the theater in front of a six year old that was patiently explaining the movie to his dad, although I’m pretty sure the dad was already a Star Wars fan. When Darth Maul first appeared, the kid gasped and then whispered to his dad, “That’s Darth Maul- He’s BAD.” When they arrived at the Jedi Temple for the first time, he said reverentially, “That’s MASTER Yoda…” And, when Jar Jar first showed up, the kid immediately giggled with excitement and then said, “That’s Jar Jar, Dad- He’s FUNNY.” Jar Jar is an audience proxy character for children, he covers his eyes when something scary is happening, he’s confused and overwhelmed by the big events around him, as children would be. And I think in that function, which is his intended function, he is undeniably a success.
3- Who Shot First
“If criticism were the kind of analysis it was meant to be in the first place – as it is in other arts, where you have literate, sophisticated people, who are knowledgeable – then it would be worthwhile to listen to it. To have them rant and rave about their personal feelings is a waste of my time,” –George Lucas 3
Let’s talk about midi-chlorians, shall we? Because that’s the perfect example of the problem with how fans view the films. For one thing, the vast majority of the people I’ve talked to about it simply don’t even understand what they are. They are NOT a “scientific” explanation for the force. They do NOT remove anything mystical about the films. Midi-cholorians are NOT the Force. They are a lifeform that communicates with the Force, they are one link in the chain, one of many creatures that the Force affects, and simply Lucas’ way of saying that the Force- the same mystical energy field it has been in all the movies- affects everything, and that living creatures are all in symbiotic relationships with each other.
They also don’t determine the path a character is to take. They talk to the character, they give the character information, but it is still up to the person what to do with that information, whether to be a hero or a villain. The Force has always had a hereditary aspect to a degree- as Luke tells Leia, the Force is strong in their family, and you do have to be born with a predisposition. I think it’s obvious in the original films that if Han decided to train hard enough, he could not become a Jedi. It was a mixture of nature and nurture- characters were born with certain abilities, and then decided what to do with them.
But still, when midi-chlorians were mentioned in the prequels, people said that Lucas had changed things, that he had ruined something that was special to them.
The interesting fact is that, actually, midi-cholrians have always been part of Star Wars.
They were there in the original treatments Lucas was writing in 1975, with the same name and everything else. Along with many other details of the universe and backstory he was creating with his scripts, they didn’t make it into those first three films. For Lucas, though, this was always part of his story. He didn’t change anything. It’s just the fans assumed they knew what he was thinking, which of course they didn’t. Which is the entire reason the series has had a continued fascination for me- because I’m actually finding out the next piece of this world and this piece of art, rather than having something new grafted onto something that was already finished and complete.
It’s a strange phenomenon wherein the fans at some point decide that they now own a piece of art, and that they know more about it than the person who made it. At some point, with the Special Editions, Star Wars fans came to the conclusion that they could now say George Lucas no longer had a right to final cut of his own films.
They’ll say this is about preserving film history, which is blatantly false. For one thing, there is no single, original version of A New Hope to preserve. Even in its original release, the first film had different sound mixes for different venues with changes between them as major as a completely different voice actress for Aunt Beru. And of course as early as 1981, the film was changed again when its episode number and “A New Hope” were added to the opening crawl.
If it had just been the “A New Hope” addition, would people be talking as though there is some moral obligation for a filmmaker to never alter a film after its initial release? That’s a fantasy. Filmmakers alter films after they’re released all the time and for all different reasons. There is not an invisible line in the sand where a film becomes sacrosanct and it is never permissible to touch it again.
Campaigners for the “unaltered” versions of the first three movies are fond of using this quote from Lucas:
“People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society.” 4
It almost makes him sound like a hypocrite, if you completely ignore the context and the point he was making. He was talking about corporations colorizing and altering their old catalogue of movies after the filmmakers have died and without their consent. They don’t use this quote, from the same speech by Lucas:
“American law does not protect our painters, sculptors, recording artists, authors, or filmmakers from having their lifework distorted, and their reputation ruined. If something is not done now to clearly state the moral rights of artists, current and future technologies will alter, mutilate, and destroy for future generations the subtle human truths and highest human feeling that talented individuals within our society have created.” 4
Even more specifically, Lucas said to Wired magazine in 1999:
“Everybody signs on to bring forth the director’s vision- that’s part of the way movies are made and always have been. The real issue is whether a corporation that buys the film 10 years later has the right to change it. My response continues to be no.” 5
His concern was, and always has been, that the artist behind a film have their intentions and vision honored, which is why using this quote to talk about how he SHOULDN’T be able to alter his own movies is fairly idiotic.
The next line that people use is that it’s disrespectful to the artists who worked on the movies to alter their work. This idea is even dumber of course. As Lucas said, the artists who work on a movie sign on to bring forth the vision of the director. He has the final say in what to use and not use. Claiming that he has some sort of obligation to the artists to leave their work as it was is the same as saying that he has an obligation to the actors to present every take of their performance in the final cut. It’s just nonsensical.
They’ll point out that Lucas wasn’t the director of episodes V and VI… which just illustrates a lack of knowledge of how those films were made. The directors contributed, especially Kershner, but they were hired by Lucas to make his movie for him. Lucas also worked with other screenwriters, but the story and situations originated from him, and he was the final arbiter and had final cut, too. From beginning to end, they were his films and he was in control, no matter how many other people worked with him, and everybody knew that. The argument is grasping at straws.
And of course, many of the same people who hate the Special Editions will complain about how the older special effects look when the films are released on Blu-ray and other high definition formats. I’ve seen countless lists where people say, we want the original versions! And also, he needs to fix the lightsabers, clean up the matte lines, etc., etc.
And people like Petr Harmy, who has been making a “Despecialized” edition of the original films, are going even further to insert themselves as the editor of the films. His “Despecialized” film is actually an amalgamation of dozens of sources that he has combined to make a Frankenstein film of his own that approximates what he imagines the earlier versions to have looked like, but is even further from the original versions than anything Lucas has done.
Another interesting thing about all that is that Lucas and Lucasfilm have never attempted to stop fans from creating and illegally distributing things like the “Despecialized” edition, or the “Phantom Edit” which is supposed to “fix” The Phantom Menace. Lucas has always allowed these people to openly tamper with his work and distribute it to satisfy their own egos. The only thing he has ever said is that when he releases his own films with his name on them, he will release the version that he feels is best, as is his right as an artist.
So preserving the films really has nothing to do with it. What it’s about is the fans feeling they should have control over how the films are presented, not Lucas. People will also say, fine he can have his versions, but he should also include the originals on the home video releases. I guess he could, and he has, but people complained that those releases weren’t restored up to a high standard. So he’s supposed to release a version of his movie he doesn’t like, and also pay to restore it up to a high standard.
And which version? For kids that grew up on the first Special Editions, does he have an obligation to keep those in the rotation? Because there have been significant changes to those, also. What if kids who saw it in 1997 want Jabba in Episode IV to look like he did then, rather than when they upgraded the CGI for later releases? Damn it Lucas, you’re raping their childhood memories! Does he have an obligation to release every version that people have ever seen in perpetuity, and each time restore all of them to the latest highest home video standards? You can see where this idea is ridiculous.
But the fans complaining about this stuff don’t want every version, they want THEIR version. If he had just taken out the matte lines and improved the lightsabers, obviously nobody would have a word to say about this. Notice also that you don’t hear anything about him releasing unaltered versions of the prequels, which had arguably bigger changes made to them after release than the original trilogy. Phantom Menace had a couple of whole new scenes added, along with the entire character of Yoda being replaced throughout by a CGI version. Does Lucas have an obligation to release the earlier version to “preserve film history”? No, because that’s ridiculous. The sense of “obligation” that people have in this case is relative to their own emotional investment in the film, not to any sensitivity to film history.
So what it’s really about isn’t that there were changes, it’s that there were changes that they didn’t like. But are the changes actually that bad? Did Lucas somehow between 1983 and 1997 get dropped on his head, lose the part of his brain that had made these movies in the first place, and suddenly become an idiot? Or could it be that these people simply prefer the version that they saw when they were young and impressionable? Hmmmmm… Tough call.
There’s the big one, of course, which is Han not “shooting first…” This change doesn’t actually alter the movies any more than a dozen others, but people like to cling to it because they can say that it’s not just a change to the effects, it’s a change to the character and his story, and this makes it look like their concerns about the changes to the films come from their place as high minded cultural critics with a deep insight into narrative, rather than, say, their desire for the movie to always look like it did when they were six.
The thing with this change is that it’s barely a change at all. Greedo was always ABOUT to shoot Han. It’s there in the dialog. He means to shoot Han and kill him in every version of the scene. Han never has shot Greedo in cold blood. That scene doesn’t exist except in the minds of some particular butthurt man children obsessed with a movie. So if Greedo always meant to shoot Han, the only difference is that in the altered versions he gets a shot off, and Han’s actions and motivations are identical.
So then why change it? It’s just a clarification. The idea that Greedo was about to shoot Han is clear from the dialog, but not as obvious visually, and as always Lucas wants these films to operate on a visual level first. Regardless of that you can say that if, functionally, Han’s motivations in both versions are the same, then the clarification is unnecessary. Which is funny, because that’s where the people complaining about the change prove Lucas’ point for him, since it should have been clear and easy to understand before the change, but it obviously wasn’t since these people, 18 years after the Special Editions came out, are still struggling to wrap their heads around it.
I suppose the other big change would be Hayden Christensen’s appearance as Anakin’s Force ghost. Again, people don’t say that they don’t like it for emotional reasons and because they don’t like a prequel reference in there, they try to say that it’s a bad storytelling decision and it makes no sense. Why would his ghost look like his younger self when Obi-Wan’s ghost looks like Alec Guinness, etc.? In this case I’m not sure if people are being willfully obtuse, or are actually too dumb to understand something that’s really simple, and explained in dialog in the film.
As Obi-Wan says, when Vader was seduced by the Dark Side, Anakin was destroyed, so when he told Luke Vader murdered Anakin, what he said was true (from a certain point of view). So Anakin’s ghost, naturally, would look like he looked when he died, just as Obi-Wan and Yoda’s ghosts do. It’s also a nice little visual cue that he was redeemed, and he went back to who he was before he was twisted by the Dark Side, more machine than man, and all that.
A couple years ago I was dating a guy who had never seen Star Wars in his life, and so I was able to show him the films for the first time ever, and in the correct chronological order. He didn’t notice almost any of the Special Edition changes, other than the obvious special effects that were beyond the technology available in 1977. One that he did notice, though, was Anakin being in Episode VI, since obviously Hayden Christensen wouldn’t have been that age in 1983.
After the movie he asked me if it was a new shot.
I said, no, it was an old shot, but it used to be the actor who played the older version of Anakin. Curious how somebody who wasn’t versed on all the “controversy” around the change would take it, I asked him, “Why do you think Lucas would want Anakin’s ghost to look like that?”
My ex said, without pausing to consider it, “Well, because Anakin died when he became Darth Vader, right?”
That’s how “confusing” it is, folks. Somebody who didn’t know a single thing about Star Wars can figure it out in all of five seconds. And this ex-boyfriend wasn’t even all that smart, if I’m being honest.
So is the fan outrage actually because it’s a bad change that doesn’t make sense? Or could it, just possibly, be because they don’t like the prequels and it pisses them off to see a prequel actor in there? Hm, I wonder.
Like the people obsessed with how much they hate the prequels, the people who hate the Special Editions have kind of already lost. For almost 20 years of fans now, a couple whole generations, the “Special Editions” ARE the movies. If some day Disney does decide to release the “unaltered” versions, it will be as a special feature for a niche market of fans. For the poor child who has a crazy uncle who insists on them watching the “real” Star Wars, they will only be confused as to why the special effects suddenly get much worse in the middle of the series, why the Emperor is an old woman for one scene and then back to being the same actor in the next movie, and so on. You are not going to have children who say, “Ah, Greedo didn’t get a shot off… Han Solo is now a completely different character, thank you crazy uncle!” That’s just not going to happen.
But keep living the dream, Star Wars fans. Keep living the dream.
4- Objectively Bad
“Oh, it always hurts. It hurts a great deal. But part of making movies is you get attacked, and sometimes in very personal ways” –George Lucas 2
The prequels and Special Editions were all huge financial successes, and generations of kids now view that as their Star Wars with no reservations. The Blu-ray set of JUST the prequel films without the original trilogy sells almost as many copies as the set of just the first three films. So how have a vocal minority of butthurt fans on the internet created the impression that their reality and their views on the films are the only ones that exist?
Lucasfilm since the Disney buyout has allowed this, because they have identified those fans as the ones they need to win over. Their new movies are already presold to everybody else, so the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
That’s why we’ve been subjected to an endless marketing campaign about how The Force Awakens isn’t like those other, bad Star Wars movies- it’s like the ones you like! Yes you, the angry 40 year old who spends his days online endlessly talking about movies he didn’t enjoy! This new movie will be just like the ones that are “objectively” better, and that, also (coincidentally!) you saw when you were six and impressionable and not 30 and angry!
Disney has played these guys like a harp, and it’s funny that rather than realizing they’re being played, they think they’re being respected. Respect, I would say, is an artist honoring their own instincts and doing the movie the way that is true to their inspiration, not shamelessly pandering. What an artist has to give the world is their own views, their own life experience, their own insights into the world around them. If they’re just doing what the audience tells them to do, they’re not giving the audience anything. They’re ripping them off.
Some people really like being pandered to, though. They’ve lapped up all the carefully released promo clips talking about “real” sets and “practical effects”, not CGI! Forget for a minute how ridiculous it is to think that The Force Awakens isn’t brimming over with CGI- even the practical creatures were of course enhanced by CGI, had rods and supports removed in post, etc. But there’s also the fact that Phantom Menace had more physical models built than the first three Star Wars movies combined. All three prequels had hundreds of sets and also multiple location shoots.
Like any film since about 1993, including The Force Awakens, they used a mixture of practical effects and CGI, depending on which was deemed best for each situation. The Geonosis arena scene, for example, was not filmed with a full set. That’s because, obviously, it’s impossible to build something of that scale for a movie. Any movie since the silent era, including the original three Star Wars films, would have accomplished those scenes using partially built sets and then matte paintings and special effects to complete them. Interestingly, though, the arena you see in the background of the shots, while not a full set, also wasn’t CGI. It was a physical model they built.
Again, the films use whatever methods are most suitable for a given situation, which is how films are made. The difference was the emphasis placed on CGI in the discussion around the prequels because they were pushing the technology to new places, places casual film fans didn’t really understand since they were new. So a lot of people came away with the idea that the entire film was done on a keyboard. That’s just not actually what happened.
While people are pointing out how similar the plot of Force Awakens is to A New Hope, the common retort is that A New Hope was derivative too, of Hidden Fortress and Buck Rogers. It’s actually derivative of a lot more than that- nice sized pieces of it are ripped straight out of Dune, for one thing. The prequels are just as much inspired by other films- Jar Jar on the battlefield accidentally dispatching enemies is pretty directly from Buster Keaton’s The General, there are homages all over Attack of the Clones to everything from film noir lighting to Ray Harryhausen, and so on. These are things that Lucas wants you to notice, and that he cheerfully points out on the audio commentaries.
All of Star Wars is pastiche. What it never was before was derivative of ITSELF. Every new Star Wars episode was drastically different than the ones that preceded it. That’s why all of them after the first- including Empire, despite revisionist history- have initially been met with a lot of resistance and negative reviews. They weren’t what people expected. The Force Awakens is the exact opposite of that.
I should say that I actually did enjoy The Force Awakens, and I’ve seen it three times already. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, however. I think the initial hugely positive reaction was largely determined months before anybody saw the thing. What they wanted was no Lucas, the original characters, and a more serious tone. Lucasfilm listened and delivered. This movie was made to order for the fans. Fans feel that this means that they are being “respected”, I would maybe use the word “exploited” instead. Star Wars used to be the work of one person, doing it how he wanted. It is now the work of a corporation, and they will use their sausage factory to turn out whatever they feel will make the most money. It’s pandering, and it’s calculated. Some people like that, if the reception of the 5,000 functionally identical movies Marvel Studios has puked up is any indication. But it’s a mistake to think that they respect you. They respect the spending power of whatever demographic research has showed them you belong to.
But I don’t think the repetition and similarities to the earlier episodes is actually the problem. As I’ve discussed above, repetition of key themes is an intrinsic part of Star Wars. Each trilogy is about a new generation, and each starts with a Skywalker on a desert planet, not knowing the truth about their parentage and yearning to get away and see the galaxy. That’s the core of Star Wars, that’s fine.
What’s less fine is the ending of Episode VI being completely undone in an effort to get our characters back into the same situations they were in during the movies Disney has decided it would be most beneficial to emulate. There are key things repeated between the earlier episodes, but the story always moves forward.
Now we have a movie where Han Solo, who you may have thought grew during the original trilogy and learned the value of helping his friends and even became a Rebellion war hero, he’s now back to exactly where he was at the start of the first movie.
I can buy that Han and Leia had a hard relationship and that whatever happened with their son would have ended it. But for Han to backslide all the way to being a smuggler and petty criminal? What, was he broke? They didn’t have a prenup? This total reversal of Han’s character, by the way, is glossed over by people who love this movie but scream bloody murder about how him not shooting first means that his character doesn’t have an arc.
Now in Force Awakens, we have the Empire ostensibly defeated- except that it continues to function, and on a large enough scale that they can turn entire planets into weapons super projects. They actually seem more funded and more put together than they ever were before the defeat. We have the good guys supposedly taking back over the government, but for some reason the Rebels/Resistance are still operating from hidden bunkers. I know that there are complicated explanations for that, since I bought the Visual Dictionary and read them, but it is never made remotely clear in the film.
In the first Star Wars of course, there was no explanation for what the Empire was, or what the Rebellion was- or, for that matter, why an Empire had a Senate that it needed to answer to, or why Leia, presumably an elected official, was also a Princess. Lucas has said that this lack of information was deliberate, and that he wanted to recreate the confusion that he felt as a student first watching Kurosawa films without any knowledge of Japanese culture.
The difference is that in the case of the first film, you don’t get the particulars, but it never gets in the way of you following the story. So there’s an Empire, they’re the bad guys. The good guys are the Rebellion, because they’re rebelling against the bad guys. That is what you need to follow and enjoy the movie, and there’s never any problem getting there. The rest is flavoring that you can choose to delve into more later.
In The Force Awakens, on the other hand… You have no idea why the First Order is allowed to exist, no idea why the Resistance is underground, and no idea what the Republic really does, which becomes a problem when the whole thing the First Order wants to do is destroy the Republic. Why? Because, reasons? And then they do blow up the Republic Capitol- is it Coruscant? Maybe, who knows, buy the Visual Dictionary to find out I guess? And what has been accomplished? Did they just wipe out the entire government for the whole galaxy? Really? You think that might be something pertinent to tell us?
The reason they don’t tell us, I would bet, is because they’re afraid of bellyaching from Internet man children who feel like the prequels were irrevocably destroyed by the fact that they each have a couple minutes bothering to explain the pertinent political information. How many times in the last 16 years has somebody complained about how they had to read the word “taxation” during Phantom Menace, and thus had their whole childhood raped? Yes, it truly was a horrible crime against the audience.
Beyond the film refusing to give necessary information about the motivations for the organizations the characters belong to, it’s equally muddy with most other things across the board.
I suppose it’s vaguely hurried past that Starkiller Base can send its lasers or whatever through hyperspace and thus blow up far away planets, but it’s never made very clear. The first time I watched it, when the heroes look up and see planets exploding overhead, I assumed that meant Starkiller Base must be near. Except it’s a planet, can it move? Don’t know, they never said. Does that mean it was nearby the whole time? Don’t know, couldn’t tell you. Oh wait, it’s not near? OK, but apparently this whole time they were near enough to Coruscant to see it blow up with the naked eye in a daytime sky. Except, wait, that wasn’t Coruscant? Oh, OK, it’s just a city planet that looks exactly like Coruscant and is also the headquarters of the Senate and the heart of the Republic, like Coruscant was. But not Coruscant for some reason.
Speaking of similar planets, again, in the original movies Lucas echoed things deliberately and often, but he never had two planets that looked exactly alike. It was of paramount importance to him that the visuals would let you know where you were with a minimum of confusion.
In The Force Awakens, on the other hand… We have Jakku, a desert planet that looks exactly like Tatooine, but is not Tatooine. Then, due to Abrams’ instance that “You guys, it’s all real! Practical effects! We totally carved out the center of Mars and made Starkiller Base for reals, you guys! Man, CGI is laaaaaaame, amirite?!” we get about four other planets that all look kind of green and blue and identical to one another. We get some sort of lake planet, which looks like just some generic trees by a lake, and then we get some other planet that kind of looks like hills and trees where the rebel bunkers are, and then we get Starkiller Base, which looks generic and like forest on Earth just like the last two, except there’s a little snow, and then lastly we get what I guess is supposed to be an island planet, which looks like a green hill in the water, but you know, definitely different than the green hills and water in the other planets.
Lucas used locations, of course, but they were extreme locations that you had no problem buying as alien worlds. They were also each extremely visually distinctive, you had no problem understanding that Hoth was not Tatooine. In The Force Awakens, when they get to the Resistance hill planet, I wasn’t even sure they had left the boring lake planet. And since, until I read the Visual Dictionary, I thought the lake planet was in orbit somehow about 100 miles from Coruscant, it seemed like the entire movie was happening in one location, and I had no idea of the relative situations of the characters.
This problem I again put at the feet of the altar of fan service. Fans bitched about the politics in the prequels, so no politics now, even when it’s necessary. Fans bitched about the CGI in the prequels, so now we don’t get CGI environments even when these movies have long since run out of visually distinctive shooting locations on Earth, so now the planets all basically just look like generic English countryside.
This is why you can’t always listen to the fans. To re-quote Alan Moore, “If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience, they would be the artists.” Fans have a sort of vague feeling of dissatisfaction with the prequels because when they went they didn’t magically become six years old again, and they’re looking for a reason, so it’s the political stuff, it’s the CGI. Those aren’t actually the reasons, but they’re convenient targets, and now we have movies made by a corporation who hears those vague, incorrect complaints and take them to heart, and it’s a blow to the movie.
But fans feel that they got what they asked for, and so they heap praise on it. That’s the reason why people who criticize this movie online have been met with such anger from the superfans. I’ve read so many times now: Why do people have to criticize everything? Why can’t you just let other people enjoy the movie? So now it’s not OK to criticize Star Wars, according to the same kind of fans who created an environment where for 16 years you were not allowed to compliment certain episodes in the series without them feeling it was their duty to tell you how dumb you were and how you were an apologist.
When I went to see Revenge of the Sith, I made a dopey fan poster that said “Thank you, George Lucas,” and the idea was that I would get the people in line to write their thanks on it, and then send it to him as a token. These were people, after all, who were camped out in tents on the sidewalk to see Lucas’ next movie, so you would assume that his work had had an impact on their lives, and they must have a lot of affection for it. So I sent the poster around the line with some pens, and it came back to me graffitied by people talking about how they wanted to kill Jar Jar.
That’s the way that Star Wars fans have talked about Star Wars for over a decade, but now you’re a jerk if you say anything critical about the new one. What’s the difference? It’s because the new one was tailor made to their specifications, so if you criticize it, you’re criticizing them.
This fear of angering the fans has even extended to shunning things that were part of the first Star Wars. Of course I’m speculating as to fear of the fans being the reason, but I don’t see another explanation. They’re terrified of their movie being seen as campy or silly, which of course Star Wars was from the start. It presented itself with an entirely straight face, but it was never afraid of embracing its pulp origins. But now, for example, the new film doesn’t have wipes and dissolves to transition between scenes, as Star Wars has always had. I’m sure they were afraid touches like this looked too much like a cheap B-movie thing, which of course was the point of them.
More importantly, they’re afraid of echoing anything that fans have criticized, even when an echo is appropriate. In the first Star Wars, Luke watches as Obi-Wan is killed by Darth Vader, and in Phantom Menace Obi-Wan watches as Qui-Gon is killed by Darth Maul. Both times the characters react with the same scream of “No!” In this new film, Rey, Finn, and Chewbacca watch as Kylo Ren kills Han Solo, and it obviously meant to be an echo of the previous two moments where the new hero is sent on their journey by watching the murder of their mentor. I like this. As I’ve discussed above these echoes are key to the generational nature of the entire saga. Except, nobody screams, “No!”
A little detail? Sure. But not including it is a very un-Star Wars choice. It still wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that the reason for not including it seems obvious- fans have so roundly mocked the “No!” moments in Revenge of the Sith and the latest version of Return of the Jedi. This is a classic example of the fans changing and growing older, but thinking that it’s the films who changed, not them- the “No!” was always in Star Wars, fans just started finding it silly when they got too old for it. It bothers me to have creative decisions made with that type of fan mindset being the motivation. Star Wars should not be ashamed of what it is.
And again, I liked The Force Awakens, but I think we should talk about what the movie actually is, as opposed to the fever dream of reclaimed childhoods people are trying to act like it was.
Let’s just go into one example, although there are several like this… R2-D2 waking up and having the rest of the map. When I saw the movie, this didn’t bother me much, because I figured it was meant to be a mystery, and there must be a good explanation for it later. Maybe Luke had deliberately given R2 the information, and he had chosen to remotely activate him at that time, because he knew it was time to come back. Or, you know, something.
Then, JJ Abrams gave his answer to Entertainment Weekly. You can read the article, but the gist of it is, Artoo had the map because in the first movie he plugged into the Death Star computer and saved the Imperial database, and then he wakes up at the end of the movie because BB-8 asked him about the map earlier, and it just took him a while to respond.
No really, that’s the explanation.
So apparently, on the Death Star, any droid without any authorization that plugged into any data port could have access to every piece of information that the Empire had. None of this was compartmentalized or encrypted in any way, basically just if you plugged your iPhone in to charge over near Judy’s HR desk, you would have access to All The Information Ever Recorded About Everything. This is also the only copy of All The Information, because by the time of Force Awakens Artoo has maps of things that apparently nobody else in the galaxy has.
This is a galaxy where hyperspace travel allows them to cross the entire galaxy within weeks, but nobody has a map of any of the stars in the partial map that BB-8 brings showing Luke’s location. There WAS a map, of course, but the Empire only had the one copy, and they put it on an under construction weapons station that I guess had no wireless access. This wasn’t just All The Information that the Empire had either, apparently, because it also seems to have information about secret Jedi temples, so we can assume it was also the whole Jedi library, unless they just stored this one piece on the Death Star in case any stray Rebel droids felt like looking it up.
So you’re R2-D2 on the first Death Star, and you plug in, and you apparently have access to All The Information. And he just decides to download all this shit, because you never know- that farm boy they just picked up could one day turn out to be the last Jedi, and then have a school for all the new Jedi, and then that smuggler they just met and the Princess they’re trying to rescue could have a kid, and that kid is Force sensitive too and so the farm boy is training him at his Jedi school and then the kid goes evil and kills all the new Jedi and then the farm boy is filled with regret and decides he needs a secret place to hide and he needs to find the first Jedi temple. I mean, you can’t know that that’s what’s going to happen, but it makes sense that Artoo would want to prepare for such an eventuality, right?
So Artoo downloads and saves All The Information (But nothing else that he found in his survey of all recorded history ever turns out to be pertinent other than that one Jedi temple bit, so it’s not mentioned. Maybe a bit of a waste of hard disk space, but who’s to say).
So fine Artoo has this information and they need it. The whole plot of the movie is that the Resistance and the First Order need this information and they must find it, because reasons. That’s the entire story of the entire movie, them finding this. So, how do they retrieve the information from Artoo? What exciting adventures must they go on to repair him and find Luke? Well, he just sort of turns on one day. And then, you know, he shows them and stuff. Yay! Victory! Now that’s a story, eh?
I’ll compare it to Raiders of the Lost Ark, since the people who love this movie have such a Lawrence Kasdan boner. This is the equivalent of if the Ark of the Covenant- that movie’s MacGuffin, as Luke Skywalker is this movie’s MacGuffin- just turned out at the end of Raiders to have been sitting in Marcus Brody’s office the whole time. Maybe it was, like, hidden in a corner of Brody’s office? No, actually it was just sitting on the desk. Why didn’t he find it until the end of the movie, then? Well, because it wasn’t the end of the movie yet. You can’t find the MacGuffin until the end, so the Ark just was in a “droid coma” until the people for the next showing started to line up and buy popcorn.
I mean, come on. Let’s just be honest. This is some next level stupid shit.
Moments like these, though, are actually the only time that I feel the touch of JJ the auteur. What’s something else as dumb as this in another recent major movie? Hm, I’m remembering something about tribbles containing the secret to immortality and thus making every character in your film series invincible because, why? I guess because tribbles are cute or something, so it seemed like a good idea?
This is the movie that The Force Awakens actually is. It’s also a movie with some snappy dialog, a lot of fun scenes, a lot of very forgettable scenes, some great performances, some sure, whatever, it’s good enough performances, and I’m sure I’ll probably see it a fourth time and a fifth. I kind of like Star Wars.
But I will always think that Star Wars was much more interesting- and also much more literate and ambitious- when it was the vision of one particular quirky genius who had the courage, in the face of massive fan opposition, to stick to his guns and make his movies the way he wanted to make them.
Notes
- From a 1999 60 Minutes interview, a clip of which was used in The Beginning documentary, available on the Phantom Menace DVD.
- 60 Minutes interview, 2005
- Star Wars Insider #60
- Lucas’ speech to Congress on March 3, 1988
- Wired magazine 7.05 -Incidentally, this quote is why I think that all the rumors about Disney now releasing the original versions of the first trilogy are wishful thinking. I find it very unlikely that, when Lucas sold his company to them, he wouldn’t have had some stipulation in place about how his work would be preserved and presented in the future. The right to have control over the final cut of his work was the motivating factor for practically his entire career. However, if they do have the right to release other versions of the films, it will obviously only be as a special feature or as a small release for a niche market. The Special Editions are the films now, and it will stay that way.
Maybe I’m the only person who made it to the end, but this was a great read. I’m a former Star Wars fan who basically outgrew the series … although I’ll admit to finding the prequels kind of tedious on first (grown-up) viewing. You’ve made me want to revisit them, and you make excellent points about how fans have become grasping in their “ownership” of one man’s movie. I’ll be passing this one around to the Star Wars fans/Lucas haters in my life.
I don’t know how many people finished it, but I’m glad I wrote it because it’s a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about for 16 years, which is why it’s a little long.
For those who need a nice PDF of this massive essay to read it (especially since this site isn’t all that mobile friendly), here you go:
http://www.rickworley.com/The Force Awakens vs the prequels by Rick Worley.pdf
I agree with almost everything you say, except that the prequels are successful. I didn’t come into Star Wars until the special edition re-release in 1997 when I was a teenager, and it felt like a family adventure film series. Not a kids movie, not a movie for adults, but an all ages adventure (similar to the Indiana Jones series). The Phantom Menace feels more like a kids movie that sants to be an adult movie.
I think that Lucas has great ideas, but he needed to collaborate to fully communicate his stories to the big screen. I don’t think American Graffiti is all that successful, nor have been Star Wars or Red Tails. In a way, I think Lucas understands the visual medium as a canvas, and knows what he wants to convey, but I think hestruggles to communicate emotions.
Watching The Force Awakens, I more appreciate that Eps 1-3 were doing something different with echoes to keep them in the same universe, but I think that they would have been vastly improved if Lucas had hired a different director to fully translate. Instead, we get acting stiffer than Howard the Duck in extended romantic scenes where chemistry between the actors is essential. Say what you will about the acting in A New Hope, but neither Hammill nor Ford looked constipated while falling in love. Besides that, because Lucas has such a tin ear for dialogue, would it have hurt to run the script through a dialogue polish or three? He reminds me of various geeks I know who grow egos large enough that they feel they are too good for help, and the flaws in their design start becoming chasms because nobody is around to help them out.
Still, at least they were original. Unlike The Force Awakens, which, as you say, was derivative of itself and also victim to Abrams’ Mystery Box storytelling devices (who is that? Aren’t you intrigued? Buy a ticket to Ep VIII to find out).
I don’t know why nobody has explained to Abrams that if you’re going to do a “Mystery Box” then you ought to put something inside of it. The “mysteries” in TFA entirely fell into two categories: Khan-style where you could work out the answers years before you even saw the movie, or completely dumb non-answers, as in the case of Artoo having the map for no reason.
I should make a correction that I meant the prequels weren’t that successful when I said “Star Wars” wasn’t that successful, since they were much purer Lucas than A New Hope was.
Yeah, the mysteries of The Force Awakens were bad, and the reveals never paid off in an emotionally fulfilling way. I kind of expect Star Wars to take me on the journey, not hide whole chunks of character for shocking reveals later on. This isn’t the National Enquirer. Or an M. Night Shyamalan movie, for that matter.
While I think The Phantom Menace was largely filler that resulted in the plots of Ep 2 and 3 being hyper condensed, I think that we’re missing an episode between 6 and 7 (that is assuming we have to use the storyline as it currently stands). There’s a good movie to be made about the rise of The First Order, the new school being destroyed by Kylo Ren, and a young ingenue being hidden from that wrath. It would mirror Episode 3, move the plot forward, and set a better stage for The Force Awakens with much of the current plot intact. But that’s me backseat driving.
I like that there is a 30 year gap and a lot went on in between. Each trilogy is a new generation, I like that structure. But I agree Kylo turning and killing all the Jedi kids or whatever he did is too major to happen offscreen in between trilogies. That would be like Episode II happening and then when Episode III starts Anakin has already turned to the Dark Side and we just get a couple lines explaining it. In between III and IV, stuff happens, but not many things that are important to understanding IV. Mainly the gap was just so that Luke and Leia could grown up, Luke didn’t find Obi-Wan and become a Jedi before Episode IV started.
I first just want to say that as an aspiring filmmaker (in high school but still) and star wars lover of all the movies your essay has really really made me realize just how amazing the mind of George Lucas is.
When I first heard about episode VII (I hadn’t known that Lucas wasn’t going to direct it) I was admittedly hesitant on the idea. To me, the Star Wars saga had been about the lives (not life) of Anakin Skywalker; a boy, padwan, jedi knight, sith, and chosen one who brings balance to the force. I felt that the story was complete and finished, all those extra books and supplementary materials provided by other artists and authors, I considered fanfic that was never really canon.
The Force Awakens was an entertaining movie and I had heard an overwhelmingly amount of praise, some even claiming it the best of all the movies. However, something was missing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
After reading your essay I realized that it was marketed toward audiences with dramatic pauses when a beloved character reappeared after decades, and when famous dialogue was placed into situations that probably could have done without it.
I had always loved the prequels (I watched the episodes chronologically with new edits) and how they tied in and supplemented the original episodes, but felt like I could never voice those opinions without being shunned and berated.
Your essay was really mind-blowing, It had never occurred to me how opinions on movies are often derived from past experiences and how it so easy to create a billion dollar movie with no substantial…anything. It’s creation based off of what the people want no what the artist wants.
Anyway, to end my rambling…whatever this is…I just wanted to say thank you and that this was by no means a waste of time and not only changed my outlook on star wars but on film artists and all movies in general.
Also just food for thought…
What are your opinions on Star Wars the Clone Wars, a tv show with Lucas himself as an executive producer and comparing with other children tv shows such as star wars rebels?
and to Julius: perhaps there will be a potential show to fill in the thirty year gap between VII and VII? who knows?
Thank you very much for the kind words about my essay!
I like the Clone Wars show, but it’s not as interesting to me as the six films Lucas made. As you say, those six films are fascinating viewed as one piece together, a complete idea, and everything else is supplemental. Lucas did have a lot of input into the Clone Wars show, though, and there are a lot of things in there that expand on things that the films didn’t go into as much. Of course when you’re making something like Star Wars, you work out a lot of background and philosophy behind things that can never all make it on the screen. I think the Clone Wars show was a way for Lucas to put some of that extra stuff out there that didn’t make it into the films. Some of the episodes are very good, fun adventure stories on their own, but I enjoy the show most when I view it kind of as DVD special features that take you behind the scenes and give you more information about the movie, and viewed that way they’re very interesting. The episodes from the last season going into Lucas’ ideas on the Force Ghosts and all that were especially interesting.
As for Rebels, it’s fine. I have enjoyed it so far. The whole thing gets less interesting to me the less Lucas is involved, though. I stopped somewhere early in Season Two, I think in part because all the hype around Force Awakens just got me a little burnt out on the Disney Star Wars promotional machinery. I will probably catch up on the show sometime after I’ve had a break… I am curious about where they go with Ahsoka, and her fate is supposedly something Filoni had a lot of talks with Lucas about, so that’s a loose end of what they were working on that I would like to see tied up.
Excellent read. We can tell you love film and you also love true film making. Thank you for putting all of that to “paper”. You’re saying things we all feel, but can’t articulate. Thank you.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.
Great essay, I couldn’t come up with a better response to all the Prequel and Lucas haters out there. Lucas doesn’t deserve all the hate he gets, any more than JJ deserves all the praise either.
The Force Awakens is in the lime-light right now, but over time I think it won’t be viewed in a favorable light.
Its charms wear off surprisingly quickly. By the third time I saw it, a couple weeks after release, the initial audience reaction of applause at all the reveals and big laughs for every joke was almost gone already. BB-8 still got some laughs, but that was mostly it. To be honest, I almost fell asleep the third time, and I haven’t seen it a fourth.
The new characters were the only redeeming parts of the film, despite their flaws.
Poe I liked straight on. Sure he was gone and then just showed up at the Rebe..I mean Resistance Base; I still was happy to see him. And Finn and Poe hitting it off..yeah I could go see a spin-off movie with just those two.
It took me a second time to see the part with BB and his flame”thumbs-up”…he won me over.
Finn…I like despite him not really acting like a storm-trooper raised and brainwashed. But I can go with the idea that perhaps he had broken control of the brainwashing earlier before the film. That storm-trooper that died before him; that was someone else who broke free before him, and the two were actually planning on escaping the First Order during that assault on Jakku.
Rey, I loved despite being a female Luke-MarySue. I’m agreeing with the theory that she is really Anakin Skywalker reincarnated.
All the pressure really is on Epi-8(I’m praying isn’t, but will be Empire 2.0)
I am praying for an interracial love-story between Finn and Rey. A good one; with a on screen kiss, and where in the end they end up with one another.
Fantastic. Really, really fantastic. Hands down one of the best Star Wars-related essays I’ve ever read. Great quotes (love the inclusion of the Alan Moore one), and many sections very quotable in and of themselves. The state of this “fan”dom is truly tragic, isn’t it?
I’m very much a prequel-genarian, but I still saw IV-VI first (although I confess it did take me three cracks at ROTJ before I could get past the Rancor). Now, if push came to shove, ultimately I’d say I love the prequels more than the OT – I just prefer the story, characters, settings, and I get more emotionally stimulated – but that doesn’t change the fact that to me, there has always only ever been one Star Wars, and that is the SAGA which Lucas devoted so much of his life and energy to tell. It frustrates me beyond belief when I hear people say things like “Lucas lost touch with what Star Wars is” or “Lucas doesn’t understand Star Wars” , because, really, George Lucas is the only person who ever truly DID understand Star Wars. To say that something he adds to it from his own, quirky, brilliant mind isn’t Star Wars anymore – especially something which follows and perpetuates the progenitorial spirit as beautifully as the prequels do – just seems stupid, ignorant and incredibly arrogant to me.
As for TFA, I thought it was alright, but forgettable and run-of-the-mill blockbusterish in a way that Star Wars has never been before to me. It lacks oh so noticeably the imaginative and innovative brilliance which existed at the very core of Lucas’ Star Wars. But hey, I’m not going to go and wear away my keyboard petulantly screaming into the ether about how JJ owes me for the childhood he just “raped”.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! And I totally agree with the rest of what you said.
Thanks for this great essay. I always felt the hub bub of the Han Shot first crowd was pointless and doesn’t change anything, but I loved how you were able to actually turn it back on the critics.
I wanted comment on the part about Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi. I notice you used the in universe reasoning for it and I found trying to use that as the bases of defense for why he replaces Shaw can kind of go nowhere because well it’s fiction and fantasy and the Force being the most fantasy element of Star Wars can be twisted in anyway to support either argument. Last year I saw this comment that kind of exemplifies why the change had been made.
“Hayden as Anakin at the end isn’t a change I agree with… But it’s one I understand. After seeing my younger sister watch Star Wars in chronological order, including Clone Wars, the ending had an enormous impact. Hayden’s Anakin was her hero and she finally got to see him return to the side of good. The ending was incredible to her and it really made me appreciate it a lot more too. When you look at something through the eyes of a child, it’s an incredible thing to see.”
– Jonathan Urbina
I figured it was made for story purposes and the impact on the audiences. What is going to matter to an audience more; Seeing some random 70 year old guy you only saw for two minutes completely caked in make up, or the image of a lost Hero you went on an adventure with for two movies and now we can add The Clone Wars series.
That’s very true… Aside from the symbolic reasons or how it makes sense in the mythology of the Force, it is more emotionally satisfying to see him return. If you buy into the whole Saga and not just three episodes, Vader’s redemption is the culmination of the character you saw earlier, and him coming back is exciting. I didn’t mention it in the essay, but the boyfriend I was talking about who I showed the movies to for the first time got the story logic- Anakin dying when he became Vader- and also he smiled and clapped at the ending of Return of the Jedi. Seeing Anakin come back like that for him was an exciting ending to the 12 hour journey he had just gone on.
I had a hard time warming up to the Original Trilogy. I think it had to do with the fact that it was so different from other movies at the time and how they really changed the landscape of Hollywood storytelling. Probably more so than “STAR TREK”.
By the time Lucas had released the Special Editions, I had truly embraced the saga by then. Perhaps I needed to be older to truly appreciate Lucas’ tale. But here is the ironic thing . . . I had an easier time embracing the Prequel movies. I really loved the complex tale about not only the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, but also the Jedi Order and the Republic. What I really loved about the Prequels is that Lucas did not resort to some one-dimensional writing that made Palpatine solely responsible for everyone’s downfall. Lucas had the balls to reveal the weaknesses of all the major characters involved. And their weaknesses gave Palpatine the opportunity to exploit them and rise to power. That took guts. Which meant all of them – Anakin, Padme, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Mace, etc. – had compromised themselves out fear and Palpatine took advantage of this. Ironically, his actions regarding Anakin and Padme will end up biting him in the ass . . . so to speak.
My god that took balls! I wish I could say something nice about “THE FORCE AWAKENS”. Well . . . it was entertaining. And I was really impressed by three performances – John Boyega, Harrison Ford and Lupita Nyong’o. But overall, it was apparent that this movie was made to cater to the fans who wanted the saga to return to what it used to be. Audiences no longer want originality, just something familiar. And I found that sad.
I agree it’s sad that people want to see them make the same movies over and over.
I also agree about the flaws of the characters in the prequels. I thought it was great that he was willing to show that the Jedi, even Yoda, had flaws.
Rosie i agree with you so much!! I always loved the complexity, world building, and characters of the prequels and I know many have said the acting wasn’t so good, but I felt that only added to the cheesy transition filled, noooo! dialogue, parts that make up the star wars movies. It always tears me up at the end of III when we see the universe being set up for the chapter in it’s history, with the construction of the death star and separation of the skywalker twins
I agree about the acting. Many of the actors in the prequels are highly respected actors with shelves of awards at home… Lucas goes out of his way to get a certain type of performance from them. The Star Wars movies have a certain style, they are supposed to be cheesy, Flash Gordon Saturday matinee serials, but done on a grand, operatic scale, taking themselves seriously. They are supposed to be what those movies seemed like when a little kid saw them before they knew enough to criticize them for being cheesy, and they could just be swept up in the adventure and wonder of it. Cheesiness is always part of Star Wars, it’s supposed to be, the tension between that and the serious themes and the high production values is the aesthetic of the entire thing. But it’s an odd combination, and adults struggle with it while kids just get it and don’t question.
Rey does clearly yell “No!!!” When Han is killed. You missed that one.
Does she? I’m willing to admit if I missed it. I’ll look for it if I see the film again. If it’s there, it’s much more understated than the other ones.
I agree with almost all you write. There is a lot of derivative clutter and significant lack of exposition in TFA but I think buried under all of that there is a decent Star Wars story … just not one that was visualised very well. I would love to hear what you think about Dave Filoni’s work in the animation section of Star Wars. And I don’t mean as much the generic episode of Rebels … but the last one of season 2 that we just had for example. I do have the feeling that he has been listening very carefully to Lucas’mentoring during the years they worked on Clone Wars together.
I think Dave Filoni seems like a good guy to run the animated show, he seems to get Star Wars, and because of his years of working with Lucas I think he has a good insight into things that outsiders might have. That said, I got kind of bored with Rebels, I have only watched through the first couple season two episodes. I know Clone Wars took a couple years to get good, too, so maybe I will give it another chance. It wasn’t that I actively disliked Rebels, it’s just that it wasn’t all that exciting to me, and combined with the marketing saturation around TFA I think I kind of hit Star Wars burnout. Maybe in a year and a half, gearing up for Episode VIII, I’ll get excited again and catch up on it.
A waste of time to read that fanboy crap.
So don’t read it?
SORRY ABOUT MY WRITING…. I’M FROM COLOMBIA SO …ENGLISH IS NOT MY MOTHER TONGUE.
I liked every bit of your article. It made appreciate Lucas for his work. I even discussed with my best friend something quite particular (very nerdy, but particular) –> The function of the midichlorians as a tool of social control. We wondered.
Would the training of Anakin have happened IF Anakin had a regular midichlorian count?
I said Yes. QuiGon would have trained him. But the Council with all these rules would never try to attempt it. You need that count to be trained officialy. We thought about all those really awesome Force-sensitive people, who had great talent in the Force, but couldn’t even got recruited to be a Jedi. They were ignored. The Council is unjust.
Ok… the thing that I really don’t like is how you treat The Force Awakens. I like to think that the REAL Star Wars is the original six movies. Neverthelees, Lucas let go the whole thing to Disney. Disney’s Star Wars is a different affair. An affair that is fully intended to get new fans and to please the old ones. Let us not think that if I loved the original trilogy and loved TFA, I am underestimating myself as a moviegoer. My nephew loved every bit and every second of that film. He has seen it 7 times in the theater and he every time he got back home, he watched the original films and loved them even more. I was also amazed by TFA. I would never bash a film that I didn’t made. I have no power on an artist work rather than just sit and enjoy it and give an opinion. You are fond of Lucas, but you really can’t just bring on some stupid things in a movie, when every movie ever is so full of stupid things just to realize that TFA is not as special as the movies that you love. You are right, but please don’t behave yourself as a prequel hater. For me Star Wars ends with ROTJ, TFA is a Disney commercial stuff, but somehow a necessary treat for people who will be introduced to the REAL, ORIGINAL and SPECIAL thing that is STAR WARS.
I was introduced to Star Wars with one of the most epic and emotional films I have ever seen, Revenge of the Sith. And I guarantee you that I can love and hate and cherish Star Wars as anyone. And I hope you have the chance someone cherish something in the way my nephew cherished TFA,… that light in the eyes of my nephew after we left the theater after TFA…He was waving my blue Obi Wan lightsaber in the street trying to bring down evil and believing he was some male version of Rey. She was so striking to us… the way she discovers the Force in a beautiful fashion as Anakin and Luke. He was so happy, and he couldn’t shut up about it. When Han died, he really couldn’t hate Ren, he was just like “Why the Skywalkers made that kind of decisions??” … I wanted to tell him ..” They are just human and flawed”….
Back to my thing… your excellent essay cost me 2 hours. And I have an exam on thursday….
I don’t hate TFA, I just think, as you said, it’s a corporate product and separate from George Lucas’ creation, so it won’t ever be as interesting to me.
Glad you enjoyed the essay!
This was an excellent read – you articulated what I’ve been trying to say ever since the Disney sell. I am glad new Star Wars films are getting made and enjoyed TFA (I only saw it once in the cinema, but I’m really looking forward to watching it umpteen times on Blu-Ray) but I find the joy so many people took in a massive corporation taking over from a single artist really quite sickening.
So many of the problems with TFA were because of an obvious knee-jerk attempt to distance themselves from the prequels: the film-makers didn’t seem confident in their grasp of what made Star Wars good, all they knew was that they wanted to avoid being at all like the prequels.
The prequels went out of their way to have variety in their environments – let’s make sure we only use planets which look exactly like Tatooine, Hoth, and Yavin 4.
The prequels had a (small) amount of political exposition – let’s make sure we’ve none of that, even at the expense of making the relationship between TFA and the end of ROTJ totally unclear.
The goodies were on the ascent at the end of ROTJ, but they were in control during most of the PT – better make sure the status quo is instantly reset so that the heroes are the underdogs, even though it would make a shit tonne more sense for Leia to simply be a Republic general.
Agree 100%!
I love the prequels AND the 2004 Special Editions. I first really paid attention to Star Wars in 1997, but I had seen them before on tv (USA played them all the time). But man, when Episode 1 came out, I was stoked! I saw it a whopping FOUR times in theaters! I was excited and thrilled with each prequel.
When I found out they were making an Episode 7, I was excited. But the more I heard and saw of it, my excitement waned to apathy. I did go to see it and was generally entertained while watching it. However, I don’t have any desire to see it again. It was…..forgettable. Forgettable to me, anyway. I used to try to argue the merits of Episodes 1-3, but I found it futile. You have articulated the defense of those films and what was wrong with TFA beautifully.
A sincere thanks for your wonderful musings.
Thanks!
People tend to forget that the original Star Wars was little more than a simple, fun movie that came out at just the right moment – a movie that through some stroke of luck managed to capture the imagination of hundreds of millions of people and ignite a cultural phenomenon. It is a testament to Lucas’ storytelling ability and his spark of ingenuity that Star Wars endures as it does today, but its longevity is as much due to his business acumen. You’re kidding yourself if you think the prequel trilogy wasn’t precisely engineered, on some level, to make tons and tons of money.
For example: take the ship designs in the prequels. There are a ton of them, and some of them are really cool. But the reason they are so numerous is because spaceships make great toys, and children make a great market for toys. ROTJ has this problem too – somewhere between Empire and Jedi, Lucas realized that the real way to generate a perpetual sustainable flow of money and solidify Star Wars’ legacy was through merchandising. While it was a frustrating aspect of Jedi that detracted from the movie’s narrative at points, this philosophy absolutely dominates the prequel trilogy to the point that it supersedes the story. If you thought the TFA media blitz was bad, then you either don’t remember the hideous extremes of TPM’s merchandising vortex or your nostalgia goggles must have a particularly heavy tint. George Lucas, by the time the prequels rolled around, was a corporate entity unto himself; Star Wars sold out way before TFA was even conceptualized.
If you separate the Star Wars movies from their brand (an almost insurmountable task) and evaluate them as films first, then you are left with a series of six visually striking and imaginative space adventure movies. Three of them tell a rudimentary story of good vs evil in a satisfying, relatable way. And the other three tell a tragic, mature story of corruption and loss that is unfortunately crippled by a confusing plot, flat characters, and ham-fisted political allegory.
This entire article smacks of a massive, throbbing persecution complex. It is dripping with the telltale venom of a thoughtful yet self-righteous fan who has been told, repeatedly, that what he or she enjoys is garbage. It is definitely okay to like the prequels. You are entitled to your personal preference, and no one should ever take it away from you. But it is difficult to take a piece like this seriously when you spend so much of it lashing out at perceived superfandom, all while defending George Lucas with a fervor that approaches hero worship. It just comes from a place of bitterness, a “me-against-the-world” mentality that borders on delusional.
Star Wars is a lot of things to a lot of people – that’s what makes it special. TFA is no exception, and neither are the prequels.
Rick, first of all, I’d really like to thank you for writing this post. It offers a whole new look on the saga as a whole, and it hooked me from the beggining to the end. I didn’t even notice how large it was until I was done reading it.
To diverge a little bit from the topic at hand, I found your brief comment on Marvel Studios films kind of interesting, considering your stance on The Force Awakens. Ever since it dawned on me that they were making a huge, diverse cinematic universe after watching the post-credits for Iron Man.
The guy in charge of them all, Kevin Feige, is a huge comics fan since childhood. And what he figured out with the MCU was how to translate all those properties into entertaining movies in a single coherent universe that will hook audiences in a way that’s not unlike TV shows. You have swashbuckling space adventures with Guardians of The Galaxy, gritty street-level crime with Daredevil and a WWII sci-fi adventure with Captain America, each one tying itself to the other.
You say that they’re puked out and are the same, but I gotta disagree on that. There is no formula for Marvel. The formula is sticking to the source material and handing the right material to the right people. Every single person I know is entertained by them, and wants to see what’s next. And they’re regular people who didn’t even know who halfthese characters were before their respective movies.
And all-in-all, they sell exactly what they’re advertising. A good time. Just like Star Wars, it’s not like George Lucas created some experimental indie art project. It’s a franchise made to entertain people and sell toys. Reality is harsh like that.
Nothing is preventing Episodes I through VI from being BOTH “a franchise made to entertain people” AND an “experimental indie art project”. The Force Awakens is only the former. Reality is harsh like that.
This is a fantastic article, well worth the time it took me to read it! And I´m glad for anybody who actually liked TFA, since I really didn´t. Although I tried!
I especially share the notion that the people who made it were mainly trying to play to a certain group of fans, and it actually makes me sad to see that a rather small group of people was actually able to gain such a big influence on the direction of the franchise. With TFA (and it´s silly “nothing like the prequels!” premise) out of the way, i do however look forward to the next movies! And I already liked the trailer for Rogue One better than the ones for TFA! For example I found it a nice touch to bring back Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma (although it appears that she has only one robe in her collection [despite the earlier efforts of Trisha Biggar ;)] Sorry for my bad English..
Thanks! And your English is fine. I’m cautiously optimistic about the upcoming films. The Rogue One trailer was fun, but, like the TFA trailers, it seems to mostly play on nostalgia for the first movies and not bring anything new to the mix. Hopefully they are saving a lot of surprises for the completed film, but that’s what I was hoping after the TFA trailers and it turned out they weren’t. These movies, if there is going to be any point to them, need to find new reasons to exist rather than just playing on nostalgia for the first ones.
Before I began… I’m Italian, so sorry if I made some mistakes!
This was absolutely brillant, you understood what truly is Star Wars and made an exellent analysis. I feel really sad for George Lucas, he created Star Wars, an intere universe with great stories and characters, and a big part of “fans” hates him. I can’t believe they say that Abrams saved the franchise with TFA, everything we see in TFA is just a copy of what Lucas had already created. You know, when I started to search information about Star Wars in English and found the opinions of American fans I was shocked, I was like: “Wait… Are you serious? Or this is just a prank?”
Here in Italy the Star Wars fandom is very different, also here there are the OT fanboys, but they are a minority. Here a lot of people hate The Phantom Menace, but only that, not the entire prequel trilogy. Now is full of fans who hate TFA, there are a lot of fans that consider only the first 6 movies as the real Star Wars. Also the results of the polls about the favourite Star Wars movies are very different in comparison to the American polls. Here in Italy Revenge of the Sith and The Empire Strikes Back are the most loved by fans. ROTS is also my favourite. I have to say that the Italian version of the prequels is a lot better than the English version, and maybe this plays a great part. Here in Italy we have really terrible actors, but on the contrary Italian voice actors are considered among the best in the world, so the dubbers fixed the problems of acting in the prequels. They perform the lines so well that you don’t even notice if the dialogue is bad. So ok… The acting wasn’t so good in the prequels, but in the originals? It was even worst, I can notice so many scenes in the originals with bad acting… But the fans are blinded by nostalgia. So sad they can’t notice all the good things in the prequels, the amazing creativity of George Lucas, the plot, the rise to power of Palpatine and so on… To me the policts were great and made the story much more adult and interesting. You already said everything in your article, everyone should read this.
Thanks, I agree 100%! I think I mentioned in the article that Lucas prefers the French version, because he considers the dialog a sound effect, the words don’t matter to him as much. I would love to see an Italian version. Maybe dubbed versions would be preferable for American audiences because it would take their focus off the line readings, which really aren’t the point.
Actually it isn’t just a matter of sound, in my opinion the point is how the actors perform the lines. As you said the dialogue isn’t important for Lucas, but I think the lines are fine, even who cares about the words can enjoy the movie, what makes the difference is the actors’ performance. When I watched ROTS in English for the first time it sounds weird to me, because there is a sort of “discrapancy” between the actors. The voice acting of Ian McDiarmid was awesome to me, also Ewan McGregor did a good job, but the voice acting of Hayden Christensen or Natalie Portman was very different, Hayden in particular sounds weird to me, sometimes it seem that he was simply reading the lines instead of really acting. The point is that George Lucas isn’t good in directing actors, he admitted this weakness himself. He insn’t interested in directing actors, he cares much more about the images, the music, details… So the actors with more experience like Ian and Ewan were able to perform well the lines even with the lack of direction, but it was very difficult for the younger actors like Hayden. Unfortunately, a good voice acting can really make a big difference for the audience. The Italian dubbing was made by exellent voice actors, and the final results is very enjoyable. TFA is very different… The acting is good, also the voice acting, all the technical aspects are well made, so it’s easier for the audience to enjoy the movie, but it lacks of heart, attetions for details, passion. It’s a movie easy to enjoy without thinking, on the contrary to really appreciate Lucas’ movies you need to concentrate more on details and understand his creative vision.
Talking about the Italian dubbing, if you would like to listen to it you can easily found the movie in Italian with English subs on the internet. Just don’t search on Youtube because you wouldn’t found anything, on Youtube there is just this short part with a decent quality and the official Italian dubbing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J00C_qkDkA
What a great read. Really interesting and well thought of.
I’ve one of these people who have always liked the prequels – and hold massive respect for George Lucas who I believe is the heart and soul of Star Wars. My kids are actually currently watching the entire series again.
What I’ve noticed now that I’ve watched them again is how damn good they actually are! Seriously, they are truly an amazing awe inspiring experience. When I first showed them to my kids, I showed them in order of 4,5,1,2,3,6 – and that’s only because “I am your father” is probably the greatest movie twist in history and to me – I wanted them to experience it the way I experienced it in cinemas when I first saw them as a young kid.
But the most important difference between The Force Awakens and all the other Star Wars movies is that TFA lacks soul… It’s entertaining, but it doesn’t feel like Star Wars to me… not really. It misses the heart and soul of what made Star Wars special. Quite honestly, it’s a movie by numbers. I enjoyed some of the humour, but come on… Finn saying, “you have a boyfriend, is he cute?” has got to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in a SW movie – it actually made me cringe.
I don’t feel any emotional connection to TFA as I did with each of the other SW movies. I didn’t really care that much when Han Solo died, despite the fact that I love the guy! I just knew it was coming.
TFA was not made with the love and with the commitment and with the respect needed to make it an emotional experience. It was a corporation movie made by polls and committees and focus groups – and despite people oogling over it now, in the long term it will be recognised as such. I can also tell you that just talking to other people – people who actually really disliked the prequels – have now actually changed their mind and are recognising how brilliant George Lucas actually is.
The thing about TFA is that it’s… well… it’s stupid. Han Solo – hero of the Rebellion is back to being a two-bit crook? Luke Skywalker – the man who stood up and helped defeat the most powerful Sith Lord in history simply ran away? And the defeat of the Empire has had…well… no effect on anything! It’s stupid! The story is stupid! Makes no sense. No continuality and quite frankly, it’s like Episode 1 of a spin off saga than a new story. I mean… it’s still entertaining, but as far as the Star Wars story goes… it simply makes no sense.
I do think some things could have been done better in the prequels… but I guess that caters more towards my own ego. And yet I also think some things could have been done better in the OT! And boy…. I can think of a million things how TFA could have been better.
There’s actually so much more I could say, but I’ll leave it for now. I do particularly like your line about fans being “exploited” rather than “respected.” I agree completely!
And I have to say that it is with sadness that George Lucas moved on from Star Wars, because no one understands it the way he did and the continuation of the story suffers without him.
There was a recent quote from Lucas I really liked where I think he was being very gently passive-aggressive about the new movies… He said he didn’t want to do the new trilogy himself because (I’m paraphrasing) to do one of these trilogies “right” takes a decade of his life. The six films he did took three years each- more for the first episodes of each trilogy for planning and research etc.- and he wasn’t just dragging his feet. He had the biggest special effects company in the world, and if you read about the making of any of those movies, they were working around the clock and scrambling to meet the deadline, which they barely made each time. That’s because he was never content to repeat himself, and each of those films pushed to do completely new things, and push the boundaries of what was possible. And aside from the special effects, that was how long it took him to craft the story to his satisfaction, also. On each film he was rewriting, reshooting, and editing until the last possible moment and, as we know, in most cases he continued editing and working on them after they were released.
Like them or not, these were never dashed off trifles to him. They were things he labored on for years and years, and the most important part was to innovate and do something that he hadn’t done yet.
The Force Awakens, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of that. It is a corporate product, and Disney will make a new one every year until the revenue dries up, which will probably be many years after they have run out of story worth telling. Whereas Lucas always had to be a technical innovator, the new films are proud of trying to look like the first film he made nearly 40 years ago. They don’t have the time to innovate, anyway, because the clock is ticking and Disney needs a new one every December. It is the same with the story, their primary aim is to recreate what has already been successful. Lucas wanted his movies to make money for sure, especially since he was mostly financing them himself, but he also wasn’t an idiot, and he was fully aware that he was doing things that would piss off certain fans. There was an interview he gave before Episode I where he said (paraphrasing again, maybe I’ll look up the original quotes when I have more time) people are going to hate it- it’s about a nine year old, it’s a kid’s movie. He compared it to the Benji movies. Years before Episode II, he gave another interview where he said some people are going to hate this one, because a lot of it is a romance, and it’s a romance done in an out of fashion 1940’s style.
Both times, he pinpointed the reaction that the displeased fans would have, and the exact reason for that reaction, years before people on the Internet were saying exactly what he predicted they would say, and thinking they were very original and insightful for saying it. BUT HE DID IT ANYWAY. Those were the movies he wanted to make, and so he made them. That gets all the respect in the world from me. Again, sure, he wanted the films to make money. He let them do practically every product tie-in imaginable. Because he didn’t want to go broke and not be able to make more movies afterward, and because he was running several companies with thousands of employees that depended on him. I think those are decent reasons to make money, and he did it without ever compromising the films themselves. And besides that, sure he became a billionaire, but if you learn about what he does with the money he’s actually a pretty awesome guy. He donated almost the entirety of the four billion dollar sale of Lucasfilm to educational charities, and he’s done a lot more besides that. His motivation to make money was to keep his companies going, and to ensure his independence to continue making movies how he wanted. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Walt Disney said once that they didn’t make films to make money- they made money so that they could make more films. Sadly, after his death, his company has become the opposite of that ideal and, likewise, since the sale to Disney the reason for Star Wars existing has also reversed course. I understand the reason for Lucas selling- if he didn’t want to shut down the company entirely, either he or somebody else had to keep it running, and he didn’t want to spend the entire rest of his life doing that. I’m sure he loves Star Wars, but also also imagine there is a sense of loss. It was one film project of many that he had in mind when he started, and it ended up taking 40 years of his life. I would have rather seen somebody like him take over Lucasfilm and keep it going the way it did under him, but there simply aren’t a lot of billionaire creative geniuses that would want to put up the money for his company and then also spend decades working on his films for him. It was a big sacrifice for him to spend 40 years being the caretaker of Star Wars, there’s no single other person that would want to make that same sacrifice for something that wasn’t even their creation. It had to go to a corporation, and I’m sure Disney was the only one there with a four billion dollar check in hand, and he obviously saw that he could do a lot of good with that money.
I don’t want to be overly dramatic about problems with The Force Awakens just because I’m a prequel fan and a fan of Lucas… But honestly, its charms wear thin very quickly, and the more time passes and the more I watch it and think about it, all I find are new flaws. I was perfectly willing to give it a chance, and I wanted very much to like it. In the essay I wrote above, I still liked it much more than I do now. I wanted so much to like it that I think when I first saw it I felt like it was a much better movie than it is, and I think many other people are having a similar reaction. When it first opened, people were euphoric- basically because, you know, Han, Luke and Leia are back, there’s no Jar Jar, the tone is more “serious” (Whatever people who say dumb things like that think that means), and that was enough. They all WANTED to like it, just like I did. But you know, post joygasm, after people come down from that initial rush, I know a lot of people who have started liking it less and less. For the plot reasons you listed above and many, many other reasons, the thing is kind of a gigantic debacle.
Meanwhile, I have seen many more articles these days defending and reappraising the prequels. As I said before, I think Lucas was playing the long game. Fan service like TFA is instantly enjoyable because it’s deliberately hitting all the right buttons to remind you of things you were already predisposed to enjoy. After you scratch the surface, though, you find it’s hollow. Real art, on the other hand, can take longer to understand or appreciate, but if you’re willing to look and understand it on its own terms, you just keep finding more and more there. The prequels have a richness. TFA, on the other hand, is already coming to the end of its shelf life for many people.
George Lucas isn’t really some imaginative genius though, all of the SW films are like carnival mirrors of stories and themes already in existence. The distorting effect make them appear like something new and fantastic but they’re not really.
It amazes me that someone so obviously intelligent and articulate would devote so much of their time and energy to defending something as charmless and flimsy as the SW PT. At least the other films have Han and Chewie.
“mirrors of stories and themes already in existence”
Like ALL films.
Great essay, easily the best about Star Wars I’ve read so far. To me Star Wars is and always will be six films. If Lucas is not involved it is not Star Wars for me. I love the classic trilogy, I grew up with them, but I love the prequels too. I love Episodes I and III, “Attack of the Clones” is the weakest of the entire saga in my opinion, although I love it too. I liked TFA (entertaining but soul less copy pasted money maker) but I do not find it as interesting and timeless as the six-Lucas-involved movies. Star Wars is and always will be George Lucas. Period. I wish Lucas never sold it.
Totally agree! I like all six films and I understand why AotC is the way it is… It is the odd one out for many reasons, and structurally it’s designed that way. It’s when things pivot from the days of the Republic to the beginning of the Empire, and the shroud of the Dark Side falls, as they say in the film… so tonally it’s unique. It’s slower for the middle part, and more based in dialog than the other five, and it can be less exciting to watch. But I still like it, and I get why it’s there. And it’s still a real Star Wars film, not fan fiction and a product, which is what I consider TFA.
To me AOTC is the weakest not for being the film in which things begin to change (look at “Empire Strikes Back”, things begin to change in it too but it’s the best one of the entire saga). What I always find weak in AOTC is, for example, the chase in Coruscant, the creatures’ circus sequence in Geonosis or Dooku character. You know, one never know what is Dooke about (I know now because the The Clone Wars TV show). And although the love sequences have that “one of a kind dialogue” and the love story feel forced, I still love the shots Lucas made. Padme and Anakin, for example, in the lake parade. You know what? In “The Force Awakens” there is no a single shot with the power, classic elegance of Lucas’ framing style have. I think for example in that powerfull shot when we see Padme and Anakins’s shadows in that Tatooine hut when Anakin is about to go away to rescue her mom or when Anakin says to Padme “it won’t be long” walking to the speeder bike. That’s a real skilled filmmaker in action! I’m so tired of people bashing Lucas. He’s a great director. To me Lucas has a real epic way in his framing style, JJ Abrams… Well, he’s got a more TVish style you know. This new trilogy I’m afraid will be affected by that “hey-guys-this-is-very-different-from-prequels”. So I agree with you we are going to see different planets that will all be looking very earthy, boring… and just because they are afraid of using CGI. That’s real stupid.
Things change in between all the episodes, that’s not what I meant exactly… I was trying to say that AotC is a counterpoint to the other episodes in many ways. Usually when there is a motif that is repeated in each episode, Lucas breaks it once for counterpoint. AotC had a few large changes that affected the style of the whole episode, starting with the first shot. Usually the episodes each start with a camera tilt down, whereas AotC starts with a camera tilt up. The other episodes have a starker color pallet, whereas AotC has more grays and pastels. The other villains have costumes mostly red or black, whereas Dooku is brown, about the same colors as Anakin and Obi-Wan at the time. It’s a visual way of indicating that the world the characters knew in TPM is being turned on its head- literally in the first show where is it upside down- and the things they thought they knew are being called into question, which is indicated by them entering a gray fog when they come to Coruscant. The shroud of the dark side is falling, and the characters can’t see their way any longer. Visually, the differences between the good guys and bad guys are much murkier. This extends to other aspects of the movie, the pacing is slower, things are a little dreamlike. It’s also the longest of the movies by several minutes. This is again for counterpoint and balance… Most of the other episodes are almost exactly the same length, but ANH is a few minutes shorter. AotC balances that out by being a few minutes longer. So that’s what I was trying to say.
As for the CGI debate… Yeah, that’s one of the things that has most annoyed me about the marketing around TFA. I actually just saw this article today: http://www.slashfilm.com/force-awakens-visual-effects/ which confirms what I think most people with common sense could see about TFA: it is FULL of CGI. It actually has about 200 MORE effects shots than TPM. They had digital sets, digital Stormtroopers, even BB-8 was CGI about 25% of the time, and the shots where he wasn’t digital were also digitally enhanced by removing tracks he ran on, etc. They had NO practical models for shots of flying spaceships, whereas TPM had more practical models than the first three Star Wars films combined. Of course TFA was full of CGI, that is simply a reality of making movies now, they would be stupid not to. The whole “practical effects” thing they kept harping on was simply a marketing strategy to appeal to the people who didn’t like the prequels, and it led to them trying to LOOK like they weren’t using CGI even when they were, so you had all these very boring Earth-like environments. Even in this article where they are admitting how much CGI they used, they talk about how they tried to use elements of real places in their CGI environments to keep them grounded… Using real desert photography in their CGI desert environments, etc., which I see as a passive way of again trying to distance themselves from the prequels. Of course, if you know much about the prequels, you know they did exactly the same thing. The shots on Kashyyyk are often real photography of mountains in China, combined with practical models of the Wookiee tree cities. In the backgrounds of Mustafar, there are many, many shots of real volcanic eruptions that they went to great lengths to film. And so on. The difference is that, although he did use real photographs and practical models, Lucas was brave enough to combine them into something much more visually striking. I have no idea why anybody would go to a space adventure movie because they wanted to see environments that look exactly like Earth. I also find it really insulting that people making a movie built on Lucas’s life’s work would go so far out of their way to appeal to people who hate half of that work. And, kind of hilariously, to create the faux-practical effects look they were going for, they relied on many techniques that didn’t exist before Lucas pioneered them in the prequels.
Totally agree. Even a filmmaker like James Cameron defends prequels saying that they were way more visually innovative than TFA. I have TFA in blu ray but I simple can’t consider it a real Star Wars movie. TFA is a fan film with the highest budget ever… but still a fan film. And every “Star Wars” movie to come will be just that: very expensive fan films. Lucas had a story to tell and he told it. TFA and followings have nothing to tell. That’s it.
Gosh, the way you just tackled the imagery of AoTC is brilliant. I have never thought of such things in that way. Every time I come here to see the updated replies, I wind up disliking TFA even more. I miss George’s hand in these things. Hell, he even had his hand in the EU. What I loathe so much is that Disney stated they aren’t going to use the Zahn, or any other EU books, as plot points. Yet we have Ben Solo (Jacen) and now Thrawn in the Rebels show.
I love Disney, but they really have royally messed up a good thing. I hope they can turn the tide, but without George, it’s really not the same. At all.
To me AOTC is the weakest not for being the film in which things begin to change (look at “Empire Strikes Back”, things begin to change in it too but it’s the best one of the entire saga). What I always find weak in AOTC is, for example, the chase in Coruscant, the creatures’ circus sequence in Geonosis or Dooku character. You know, one never know what is Dooke about (I know now because the The Clone Wars TV show). And although the love sequences have that “one of a kind dialogue” and the love story feel forced, I still love the shots Lucas made. Padme and Anakin, for example, in the lake parade. You know what? In “The Force Awakens” there is no a single shot with the power, classic elegance of Lucas’ framing style have. I think for example in that powerfull shot when we see Padme and Anakins’s shadows in that Tatooine hut when Anakin is about to go away to rescue her mom or when Anakin says to Padme “it won’t be long” walking to the speeder bike. That’s a real skilled filmmaker in action! I’m so tired of people bashing Lucas. He’s a great director. To me Lucas has a real epic way in his framing style, JJ Abrams… Well, he’s got a more TVish style you know. This new trilogy I’m afraid will be affected by that “hey-guys-this-is-very-different-from-prequels”. So I agree with you we are going to see different planets that will all be looking very earthy, boring… and just because they are afraid of using CGI. That’s real stupid.
George Lucas is a far better filmmaker than Jar Jar Abrams will ever be.
I thougbt I’d just take the time to give you a well deserved bravo for this piece!
It’s encouraging to see a growth in people wanting to speak up for the PT after years of not just a ton of venom towards the movies but also belittling of their fans, which of course reached its apex with the release of the Red Letter Media reviews.
Interestingly, the momentum of prequel support seems to be great enough that Stokklosa felt the need to address it. As if he’s starting to worry about his legacy or oft heralded “victory” being tainted by it. He spent more time on that than actually reviewing “The Force Awakens” in the video where he was supposed to be doing that. And when he did talk about that film, it was pretty much with all punches pulled back as far as possible. Especially when considering just how much scrutiny he tried applying before.
But honestly, that’s not all too surprising given how ridiculously easy people have been on the film in general. Now I certainly don’t think it’s a bad movie, and people who disagree are certainly entitled to their opinions, but I just have a hard time seeing this greatness in it that others do.
A point you mention that is a part of the film’s trend that bothered me most, the part about the double standards in appraisal of Han’s character arc, was the regression a number of previous story-arcs made in order to reset the status quo. The most egregious to me being cutting short the “Return of the Jedi”. Which cannot help but make Luke’s legacy look close to if not being a failure. Him being the heir to Yoda who was tasked to “pass on what you have learned” but almost immediately having his school destroyed by a fallen student of his.
Not even training Leia for some reason as was more than suggested by ROTJ. Because…reasons. Or as you brought up Han having to be a smuggler again. The general reasoning provided being that she had her heart too set on the Rebellion and because he had nothing left after losing his family.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought about it, but what it kind of makes me think on further is the notion that enen the OT, as beloved as it may be, has a number of things people overlook. Like or how Han has a scene meant to specifically illustrate that he had grown enough to where he could accept not having Leia and still be a hero at the end of the Batle od Endor.
I’ve found evidence that Stokklosa is a fraud.
http://thestarwarstrilogy.com/starwars/FILES%2F2014%2F09%2FRed-Letter-Media-Episode-I-Review-A-Study-in-Fanboy-Stupidity.pdf.axdx
I actually sent that first o early by accidentally clicking the send button in the middle of typing that so its jumbled and incomplete. So feel free not to pass it. It really makes me look bad! lol
Thank you for this great essay. One of the best on SW. I grew up on the original trilogy and I love the prequels, too. (Last time I watched all six films in a marathon, I was especially blown away how good The Phantom Menace was. For an old fan like me, it’s hard to unlearn what I have learnt, but somehow I managed to get into the right mindset and watch TPM as if it was my very first encounter with the world of SW. It was awesome.)
As for TFA… I found it passable entertainment when I first saw it, but I never accepted it as a legitimate continuation of the story of Luke, Han and Leia. It basically destroyed their carefully constructed character arc and rendered everything that happened in the OT meaningless.
And with every re-watching, it just gets worse and worse. One cringeworthy – even downright insulting – scene after another (e.g. Finn and Rey congratulating each other aboard the Millenium Falcon / “Boyfriend? Cute boyfriend?” / Kylo Ren smashing the control panel of his own ship / Rahtars).
I’d take the worst moment of those ‘terrible’ prequels over this dumb fan faction any time.
I like you. Far too many people these days are stupid morons who have no respect for art. You stand out as being a member of a dying breed; a person who respects the passion and effort put into a piece of art, even if it’s not done the way you would do it.
However, I disagree with your opinion of The Force Awakens. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t count as art and even if it did, I think it’s mediocre and that’s if I’m being generous. The writing was bad, the directing was bad and only performers who did a good job were Harrison Ford, Max Von-Sydow and maybe whoever was in the Chewbacca costume. I’ll also give credit to Mark Hamill who managed to convey a lot of emotion at the end – I think he was silently telling us that both Luke and Mark himself considered The Force Awakens to be a disaster – but due to his lack of screen-time, it barely counts as a performance. Domnhall Gleeson’s speech was incredibly hammy, Oscar Isaac was forgettable, Gwendoline Christy did nothing except sell out her allies to save her own skin, Lupita Nyong yelled about Han Solo’s arrival alerting any spies in the bar that he was there, Andy Serkis lacked any of the charisma of Ian McDiarmid, Adam Driver was okay while he was with Harrison Ford but sucked throughout the rest of the film, John Boyega was okay in armour but an over-the-top, mouth-breathing idiot the rest of the time and Daisy Ridley had only a few expressions (stupid stare, gritting her teeth and condescending smirk) and the ones she used were either over-the-top or wrong for whatever scene she was in (such as when she smirked at Boyega when he said he was with the Resistance). However, I did like BB8.
I have great respect for George Lucas as an artist because, whether you like his art or not, it’s obvious that there was passion, effort and love put into it. George is what a filmmaker should be; someone who tries to create something special and timeless, not just make money. Hollywood has forgotten this and become so lazy and greedy that they choose amateurs like Jar Jar Abrams to direct movies. And people lap it all up! This and the fact that Donald Trump is actually president makes me think that the human race in general is getting more stupid. I’m glad that there are still people, even if they are the exceptions rather than the norm, who possess real intelligence.
I think you’re absolutely right. Every time I see Force Awakens, I like it less. The first time, just the excitement of seeing Han and Leia and Luke again was enough to make it fun. By around the third time, that starts to wear off, and there’s not a lot else about the film to enjoy, and huge problems begin to become apparent. When I wrote this, I was much kinder to TFA than I would be now.
I loved this essay. I went online to see if other people thought the same way as me (pt being better than tfa), and found this essay. It very neatly sums up my opinions on the topic, which I have spent hours debating. While I have gotten to see it only once with sound, it left me feeling kind of empty, like it was supposed to be a standalone movie, not Star Wars. Combine that with a total rehash of the plot of a New Hope and a completely overpowered Rey and the movie lacked that original but logical feel of the others. I also agree that AOtC is the weakest because it focused to much on the changes that needed to happen for RotS. Personally, I feel ROTS and RotJ are the strongest of all the movies, both end in a way befitting the story arc and with a bittersweet at best ending. I, unlike a lot of nostalgia blinded people, also feel ESB was the weakest of the OT. I feel this for the same reason I feel AotC is the weakest. But, as you said, these all were original and good Star Wars movies, TFA was an ok action movie. I think in some of your more recent comments you have been a bit harsh though. I also do not see the problem some people have with the acting, as that is not what Star Wars is. It was the corniness and bad acting of a good story that made it good, and that charm is exactly what TFA was missing, a movie with an ok rehash story that takes itself to seriously is not what Star Wars is, It’s the wipe transitions and corny look. However, I do disagree about Marvel. All their movies have been different, and the humor keeps getting better as well as having a deeper interconnecting story. That was really my only nitpick with your essay. By the way, If you want some food for thought, Jar Jar is the real enemy in the prequels. Look into your heart, you know it to be true.
I agree that RotJ and RotS are my favorite. When I was a kid, I liked ANH and ESB, but RotJ was the one I would watch over and over. All the creatures at Jabba’s palace, the speeder bikes and big end space battle, the real introduction of the Emperor. The movie is overflowing with brilliant stuff.
Eh I still like ANH and ESB over RotJ. The two terrains(i.e. forest and desert) they used weren’t as interesting as the ones introduced in the first two and the fact that reused the one(desert) of them didn’t help. My main issue with Rotj was the ewoks who were obviously just shoehorned to sell merchandise. They’ve could’ve easily used a more interesting species like Wookies and given them some backstory but they sent with that ewok route….. Why else would the galactic empire lose to a bunch of furballs? Hell at least the gungans could deadly force on their own without being obvious merchandise bait.
Great article. It’s weird. I’ve been saying most of this same stuff for almost two decades now. At points I thought, “Did I write this?” Here is another fandom trope that has annoyed me: “On the original trilogy Lucas had people who vetoed his dumb ideas. Now he’s surrounded by yes men.”
When people have argued that TPM is unnecessary, my analysis is as follows: It’s the introduction to the Jedi and what they do which is keep order in the galaxy by going in and putting a lid on conflicts before they get out of hand. It’s the one time in the saga where they more or less get it right.
AOTC, if this were a television series, is the two parter. They don’t succeed. The beginning of the Clone Wars is things getting out of hand. Can they fix it? Stay tuned.
ROTS. No. Because the problem is worse than they knew. Now they are all just about dead. The stakes have been raised even higher and the disaster has happened.
Lucas is a better storyteller than what is evident in the two newest films. Chief among their issues is an over reliance on deus ex machina. If storytelling is fundamentally about the process of problem solving then it’s unsatisfying if the solution to the problem just comes from out of nowhere and from outside the hero’s own actions.
Yet time and again in TFA and R1, a hero finds themselves in a sticky situation. They are hopelessly fucked and are probably going to die. BUT THEN, they are rescued from a gunshot coming from offscreen. CUT TO the identity of the shooter. You maybe get one of these per movie and even then it had better be a surprise because of who is doing it. Like you’re going, “Oh shit! THAT character did it.”
I agree about the silly idea that on the original trilogy, Lucas had people telling him no, and on the prequels he didn’t. I’ve heard that many times. It’s not true. Lucas always likes working with collaborators. He had a co-screenwriter on AotC, he brought Spielberg in to direct portions of RotS, and he had large teams of animatics artists and concept artists on all the prequels who he gave a very free hand to to generate ideas, which he then used for inspiration. But on all the films, including the two he technically didn’t direct, he had final cut and he got to say yes or no to every decision. Some people assume that the prequels must have been made differently because they don’t like them, so this idea of “yes men” is something they invent with no basis.
And yeah, of course TPM is necessary. It shows the before picture to give context to what happens after. Some people just wanted to see Darth Vader killing people for three prequels, and instead of pandering to the inner 12-year-old of those audience members, Lucas told the story he wanted to tell. Rogue One, on the other hand… I just posted my Rogue One review yesterday, you might like it: http://www.rickworley.com/2016/12/17/rogue-one/
You said Steven Spielberg was involved in Revenge of the Sith. Did he direct the scene where Anakin learns that Padme’s pregnant? It was brief but effective and it seems like Steven’s kind of scene. There wasn’t too much dialogue and both Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman’s facial acting was top notch as they swiftly went through all the emotions Anakin and Padme would have been feeling at the time.
I don’t think he did any on-set directing. He “directed” several action sequences by coming up with animatics and previz ideas for what would happen, and working on editing the scenes. The main one that they’ve talked about him working on was the chase scene with Grevious’ wheel bike and the Boga. He also came up with some of the gags and stunts during the lightsaber duel on Mustafar.
„What´s less fine is the ending of Episode VI being completely undone in an effort to get our characters back into the same situations they were in during the movie Disney has decided it would be most benficial to emulate. There are key thing repeated bewteen the earlier episodes, but the story alway moves forward.“
This pretty much sums up my feelings about this garbage that claims to be a legit continuation of George Lucas ´s story.
Once again we have a dark side worshiping sect that undermines the democracy from within and takes over the galaxy and another young Skywalker falling to the dark side and helping the villains to defeat the Jedi and the Republic.
The Jedi Order is once again pretty much entirely wiped out with it´s last remaining leader force into hiding and living as a lonely hermit somewere in a distant corner of the galaxy.
We have the Republic being reduced to a passive object without agency which´s sole purpose in the movie is to get destroyed once again, this time only after a couple of seconds of screentime. And then we have a new empire and a new rebellion rising.
Palpatine´s death, defeat of the Empire and the Sith, Anakin´s redemtion, balance being brought back to the Force; and the victory of the Rebels and Luke becoming a Jedi, setting up the return of the Republic and the Jedi Order were undone with the the story basically regressing back to where it was in A New Hope, making those so called Episodes VII, VIII and IX nothing more than a redundant, repetitive and pointless retread of Eps. IV-VI.
By doing this, not only did Abrams, Kasdan and Lucasfilm Story Group make Episodes I, II and III insignificant to the „Episode Saga“ going forward but they also cheapened the story in Episodes IV, V and VI. If viewed in the context of TFA, the story of the saga doesn´t actually evolve or progress at all in Eps. IV-VI, it just marks time and runs in cyrcles.
To me all of that´s more than enough to refuse to accept this movie as canon. Disney/Lucasfilm can pretend that this is a legit seventh chapter of George Lucas´s Star Wars Saga all they want but to me it isn´t and never will be.
It could be worse. The Dark Empire Trilogy, which took place after Return of the Jedi, actually had Palpatine resurrected and cloned!
I think I read that back in the day. When they started really doing a bunch of the EU stuff in the mid-90’s, I read the first wave and the Thrawn trilogy and that stuff, but a lot of it was silly and bad, and none of it felt like Star Wars to me. And when the prequels came out, it was pretty obvious that Lucas paid attention to very little of it and didn’t feel beholden to it, which confirmed my feeling that it wasn’t “real” Star Wars. So I wasn’t sad that they wiped it all away a couple years ago. But unfortunately, what they’re coming up with in its place isn’t much better.
One of the things I like about this article is that you’re pointing out how biased, blind and/or stupid a lot of Star Wars “fans” are and making them look like idiots. Most of them wouldn’t be able to come up with effective counter-arguments.
Could you do a review of The Force Awakens? People are tearing that movie apart and I’d like to see your take on it now that the hype has died down.
This is a personal question and I hope it doesn’t offend you. Are you a man or a woman?
I’m a man.
I might write something about TFA now that the hype has died down, because my opinion of it has changed a lot, and I’ve noticed that it seems like many other people’s opinions have changed also. When it first came out, it seemed like everybody loved it, but I think mostly people were excited for new Star Wars. When Rogue One came out, I seemed to notice the majority of people saying, “Well, at least it was much better than TFA!” and I was thinking… Wait, didn’t you all love TFA? It does not hold up to many repeat viewings, and it’s surprising how badly it has aged after only a year. I liked it at first, too, and then when I rewatched it a month or so ago, it was a chore to even finish it.
If you do write something about TFA, I’d like to see you tear it apart. I hate JJ Abrams and just want to punch him right in his smug face whenever I see him.
To be fair to Abrams, he co-wrote and directed it, but it was Bob Iger and Alan Horn who tossed away Lucas´s Episodes VII-IX story in order to pander to the haters and hired Abrams, so it´s mainly them who´s to blame.
Well, Kasdan said he would work on it only if he could toss out what had been done and start over, and Abrams seemed to be involved in that direction. I don’t know how willing he would have been to follow Lucas’ outline if he had been allowed to, but yeah it seems to have been a decision from high up to recreate the original trilogy and pander to the haters, which is why we got a nothing of a movie instead of something that could have added to the story. Still, even with that decision, there are so many ways that TFA could have been a better, smarter movie than it is.
Thank you for writing this. I read the whole thing and meant to reply a little while ago but have just gotten around to it.
I read this a week or two after finally watching TFA. I wanted to enjoy it, really. But aside from one or two cool parts, I had trouble getting much out of the film. What frustrated me most above all was that the film was so crammed full of fanservice that it became the main focus and clearly what the people behind this set out to do first and foremost. It greatly cheapened the experience for me. I was okay with the protagonist starting from humble beginnings in the desert environment; it’s hard to deny that “feels” Star Wars, even if it’s a little too obvious. But by the time they introduced the new Ultra Death Star I was sighing in exasperation. Throwing in an X-Wing trench run just because made me audibly groan. After all these years absorbed in Star Wars, seeing the films multiple times and reliving those experiences in video games, they really thought I wanted to see a new film that did all that again?
And yes I was fully aware of Lucas’ mirroring between the trilogies “like poetry.” I think he accomplished that with more finesse (for the most part– the battle over the droid shield station thingy in EP1 felt forced and awkward to me too). I also think that worked better twice, not so much three times. With a few exceptions I don’t think most people even noticed those things before they were told they existed and were intentional on Lucas’ part (again the droid station was obvious). In TFA, they hit you over the head with it over and over, as if to say: “See? See? It’s Star Wars!”
As an artist and creator myself, the title of this article hit home. I very much believe that it’s crucial for an artist to be true to themselves in their work, and not to compromise that in an attempt to cater to an audience you believe wants something different. Abrams and Co. aren’t George Lucas, and wouldn’t be able to make any Star Wars like he could. While that fact alone COULD be disappointing to some, they could still at least be true to their own creative expression and create something that was different, but still “good.” The fact that they gave up on that right out of the gate is what led to TFA feeling so lifeless. There’s no passion behind it, only the imitation of passion. (The funny thing is, I actually enjoy the recent Star Trek films from Abrams a lot. I think they’re terrific fun and I have few issues with them or the slightly different approach to Trek they take. I feel like in those films, Abrams knew how to more or less capture what Trek was about, while doing so in a style that he himself appreciates, and, for me at least, that was very successful. But Star Wars is an entirely different beast, with an entirely different fanbase, and a different, much larger and more controlling, corporation behind it.)
It seems too easy to say but in the end it really did feel exactly like fanfiction (albeit very big-budget fanfiction). Fanfiction often does fall into the trap of imitation while missing the greater point behind what’s being imitated, and that describes TFA unfortunately well. I want to see what happens with Luke Skywalker and I’m a little optimistic that changing hands somewhat with the next film will lead to a different approach, but needless to say, it is frustrating to feel like we’ll never have “real” Star Wars again. Lucas’ essence really was woven into those films, and that was the foundation onto which the vast world of fiction was built upon. But it’s still entirely possible we will get good new films in the Star Wars universe in the right hands, just from different minds and perspectives, as long as they don’t do what TFA did… (Hopefully Rogue One is an example of that– still haven’t seen it yet!)
Anyways, and this is coming from a fan of the prequel trilogy, I do think there’s still plenty of room to criticize the prequels. Even if not all the criticism is as valid, there are plenty of ways those films could have been better. Yes you could make the argument that they’re “perfect” because they were exactly what Lucas set out to achieve, but you can say that about literally any creative work, and that doesn’t invalidate all criticism. There is definitely a big gray area between “what is this trying to be” and “what do I want this to be,” but that’s a whole philosophical conversation unto itself. There are many frustrating moments in the prequels, some fantastic action segments, and a pretty great underlying plotline and engaging themes.
I wanted to say thank you though for sharing your thoughts and your insights. There was definitely more here than I was aware of that made a lot of sense. And I felt like I understood Star Wars a little bit better for reading it. George Lucas was and is a genius no doubt, even if he wasn’t so talented in every aspect.
Thank you for this – it’s a wonderful deep dive and so right on, especially in the comments about how the rabid fans who hated the prequels drove it all over a cliff. I think as time goes on, you’ll see more and more people realizing belatedly that the prequels were good, as TFA starts to lose its shine, which it definitely is. I’d love to see your take on it now.
I am still at a loss as to why OT fans like this movie. Sure it has some SW signifiers, but Luke, Han, Leia and indeed the whole damn galaxy, are ripped to shreds. Luke’s life’s work is gone, he’s run away? Han’s whole life – he married to a princess, brothers with a Jedi Knight – and then he’s thrown back down to smuggling again? And worse, won’t even bring a map to Luke to Leia? Leia is no longer a princess, and her and Han’s child is terrorizing the galaxy? WTF?
But criticize it and get told that what happened to them is “real and relatable.” That you don’t want conflict if you still want the three of them together.
I’ve seen people say it’s “fun.” I had no fun watching Han and Leia ripped up, Luke run away, and then Han killed in the absolute stupidest way, without any impact on the story – and without even a funeral. One of the big 3 just killed and fifteen seconds later, we’re back to lightsaber duels and that trench run that I could never make heads nor tails of. The movie is so dark and badly framed, and shot like it’s designed to be seen on a mobile device. The new characters made no impression on me, outside of the fact that I want Kylo Ren to die in a burning Hot Topic store but I’m sure he’ll be redeemed because…it’s a Star Wars movie. Oh, here’s a desert planet that’s…a desert and some huts, whereas Tatooine looked like a thriving, unique culture. Here’s the bar on this planet that’s somehow within viewing distance of these other planets – the science is not even the level of a SW movie.
I was dreading Abrams doing this movie because I hated what he did to Star Trek and he lived down to my expectations. What I am still floored by is – he had Hamill, Ford and Fisher – all there, ready to go, and never put them in a scene together. I never saw Abrams asked about it, called on it, and very few reviews even mentioned it. An iconic trio of characters that everyone wanted to see together, but no, can’t have that. It would eat up time that could be used for that ridiculous scene with the Rathtars. And unless they slip in some flashback in 8 or Han really isn’t dead, then they will never be onscreen together again. Abrams should have his DGA and WGA credentials stripped for that alone.
I agree that Han, Luke, and Leia not having a scene together is unforgivable. I used to follow Star Wars spoilers a lot… I do so less now because the last two films have left me not nearly as excited for these movies as I used to be… and I put together pretty early on that Han was going to die toward the end of the movie. Nobody had to spoil that for me, it was just painfully predictable. And then I started reading rumors that Luke didn’t appear until the last scene, and I thought that was just impossible because if Han is dead, that would mean that they had this opportunity to make the next film in the series, they got all of the original actors on board, Han dies so this is the last time that these three characters will ever be in a film together, and then they just didn’t bother to write a scene for the core trio. That’s just such a colossally stupid decision that I couldn’t believe that anybody involved in the film on any level would think it was acceptable. Maybe if they had a good reason for it, but what purpose did it serve? It was all just for this stupid “search for Luke” Macguffin, where Luke is just gone for no particular reason, and then Artoo just randomly wakes up and happens to have the map when the movie is about to be over. There is no search for Luke, no journey, nothing, it has nothing to do with what’s happening in the rest of the movie. It was just to create an artificial goal so that they could have an illusion that the story was going somewhere instead of treading water, which is all it was really doing. And why would they do that? They simply couldn’t be bothered to come up with a story about what happened next to those characters, where their journeys took them after RotJ. They decided they would rather just lazily put them all back approximately how they were in the first movie. Such a waste.
“Luke, Han, Leia and indeed the whole damn galaxy, are ripped to shreds.”
“But criticize it and get told that what happened to them is “real and relatable.” That you don’t want conflict if you still want the three of them together”
Yeah, I always roll my eyes when I read or hear that nonsense. The new Jedi Order and the new Republic don´t contribute anythig to the story and instead get wiped out and basically erased from the story, either off-screen somewhere between ROTJ and TFA, or after about five seconds of screentime.
Episodes VII-IX that George Lucas set out to make were meant to be a culmination of the entire saga and to build upon everything what happened in the first six films, move the story forward and then have it reach it´s final conclusion.
But what we got in the form of TFA is instead nothing more than basically just a reboot of Episodes IV, V and VI masquerading as a sequel and a two hour long reset button in which everything set up in Eps. I-III and acomplished in IV-VI gets undone and the story regresses back to A New Hope without any sense of the story in IV-VI actually movig forward at all.
We once again have the Jedi and the Republic annihilated, the senate gone, democracy replaced by dictatorship, another Empire, another Rebels, another Darth Vader, and another “new hope” to save the galaxy.
Just a bad, lazy, uninspired storytelling.
I forgot to add…the fans who are so outraged about Han not “shooting first” but have no problems with his entire character arc tossed out in TFA – yes! Why is there no problem with this?
And why if you point out how similar ANH and TFA are, you’re accused of being a “prequel loving millennial hipster” because how could you not love and worship TFA?
I’ll say as I have elsewhere – if Lucas had made this film he would have been tarred and feathered. But to have fans tell me that TFA shows such a great love for Star Wars – I have to ask “where?'”
Wow, this is an insanely well written essay. Generally when I’m confronted with such a huge wall of text I just scroll down to the comments to get the gist of things but this kept me hooked the entire read. I want to say that I agree with just about everything, especially the Red Letter Media reviews being a bunch of garbage written by armchair experts, the only thing I disagree on is the best order to watch the series. I’ve shown the entire saga to two friends who have never seen it the whole way through, and I can say from experience watching it 4,5,1,2,3,6 definitely had a more powerful impact on the friend who saw it that way than the one who watched it 1-6. The friend who watched it 1-6 noticed enough the quality of the visuals and other special effects dropping off drastically enough that he felt the need to point it out. “I know this is 25 years older than the prequels,” he said, “but it’s kind of hard to accept these special effects having just seen 1, 2, and 3.” Also, as you said, the infamous “I am your father” line did lose some of its emotional/shocking effect.
My friend who watched it 4,5,1,2,3,6 was absolutely blown away by the Darth Vader-Father reveal moment. Her jaw literally dropped as she looked at me and gasped “There’s no way Vader is telling the truth right?” She loved having a 6 hour flashback explaining not only that moment (which I think everyone can agree is one of the best plot twists in film history) but also the entire rise of the empire. Even up to the middle of episode 3, she periodically commented “I just don’t see how this democracy fell down so quick? And which one of these people ends up being the emperor?” While her reaction to discovering Sheev Palpatine was the emperor was not literally jaw-dropping as the her reaction to the DV-Father reveal was, she was still blown away by the revelation. She said she definitely thought watching it that way made ROTJ much more rewarding than if she had watched it from the beginning. It also made her much more forgiving of the original’s outdated special effects.
My parents introduced me to Star Wars, and I was 11 when Phantom Menace came out, so I saw it 4,5,6,1,2,3, but I wish I had seen it 4,5,1,2,3,6/ I’m gonna stand by the idea that the “Machete Order” as I believe they call it is the best way to watch it for someone whose never seen it, but I agree with EVERYTHING else you’ve written. Thanks for giving me some great points to defend my beloved prequels (dirty little secret of mine: The Phantom Menace is my favorite in the series) from the manchild haters!
I don’t have a reaction as verbose as other commenters, but as a big prequel fan, this was a wonderful read that gave me food for thought about Lucas, his legacy, and Disney Star Wars.
Thank you for writing this!
Bravo! I took me three sittings to finish this essay but it was worth it. It sums up all my thoughts and frustrations on the prequels vs. the originals vs. the new and the way the “vox populi internetis” reacted to the prequels.
It would also like to add that what I appreciate most about the prequels is the overall change of “literary genre” (excuse me if I don’t use the words correctly English is not my first language, or second, or third), if one can use that term in the case of movies, from a rudimentary hero journey type of folk tale, to a slightly more sophisticated tragedy type. It has all the elements of a tragedy: the lack of a clearly defined protagonist, the complicated situation, the evolution from good to worse of the characters and the overall incapacity of escaping fate.
I also feel that the use of tragedy as a narrative genre is what pushed the average moviegoer away from this movie. Lets be serious the average moviegoer in general and American ones in particular lack the sophistication to appreciate any narrative style more complicated then the first developed style, the folk tale: one young individual without any skill but with potential goes on a journey with a mentor, which may or may not die, during which he, makes friends, grows in skill, rescues a princess with which he lives happily ever after. (Except for a very strange folk tale in my country the hero is always a he and even in that folk tale she gets cursed into transforming into a he at the end of story which is not so much of a curse as a blessing because now he can marry the princess he just saved when he was still a she). Its a very familiar narrative one which is ingrained in our psyche after countless generation and one which is easy to comprehend, hero is always good and he is always right and he always fights evil which is always wrong.
But what happens what the story being told is about the fall of good or where good is not so well defined. Well then one has to use other narrative types to convey the story. When one does that in a movie the movie usually gets a cult following and its not very popular in cinemas. Almost no blockbusters attempt something more sophisticated then folk tale. And does that do, usually receive a lot of backlash. It’s not just about the prequels, think of the Matrix Sequels, Jupiter Ascending and even Avatar. If James Cameron would have had the Navi as evil terrorist and the humans slaughtering them nobody would have complained about the plot being derivative and no character growth.
This is sad. It discourages artist, which are not juggernauts, to try anything new. It discourages directors to fully explore the possibilities of the cinematic medium like George Lucas always did or like James Cameron always did or the Wachowskis (i think I misspelled that) always did. All of them see cinema as more then theater dialogue on screen, and they try to create the modern equivalent of Renaissance paintings and they get booed and critiqued by imbeciles for it.
(And before anybody tells me that DaVinci, Michelangelo, Tizzian etc. suffered for their art and died poor, please check your history, most Renaissance painters where the Hollywood directors of their time working with huge budgets, paid for by wealthy investors, kings, popes, princes, wanting to be called patrons of the the arts )
And another little thing: about the acting in the prequels. Watch the scene in Attack of the Clones where Padme is packing and Anakin first hits on her. He blushes. I didn’t notice that in the 100+ times I saw that movie but my girlfriend caught it on first view. I don’t know if that was acting or post-production CGI but either way it shows attention to detail on the part of the director (hmm we have a teenager trying for the first time to hit on a girl) or a lot of acting potential from Hayden Christensen. Either way its not the director not carrying of the dialogue, but maybe the director aware of the fact that the dialogue between two sexually inexperienced individuals courting each-other is not gonna be as polished as presented in your average teen movie, but clunky and hard to comprehend.
I agree that part of the problem people had with the prequels is that the original trilogy was the typical hero’s journey, whereas the prequels were the inversion of that. It was a much more complicated and sophisticated story, but also less accessible, and people felt it worse worse based on them having less of an ability to enjoy it. I also love Jupiter Ascending, and I think it had a very similar problem to the prequels: there was a camp element and an ironic element which people had a problem with. People can’t differentiate between self-aware camp that is deliberate, and films that are unintentionally bad due to incompetence by the filmmakers. They have problems following stylistic choices that operate on more than one level at a time. I love Jupiter Ascending because it is becoming more rare every year to see a film on that scale and that budget which still bears the authentic vision of the filmmakers. I will always have respect for George Lucas for the fact that he had the most successful franchise of all time, and then he still decided to make something intensely personal that he knew many people might have problems with.
I agree with almost everything here. I grew up with the prequels and still love them, in fact my favorite star wars movie is revenge of the sith. I didn’t realize how clever George Lucas actually was until I read this. I did not like the force awakens because I thought is was just a shitty fan service film that failed on all fronts. Rouge one was excellent, mostly because it tried to do something new.
Appreciating and making a case for the prequels is fine. Believing they are better than TFA is delusional. The acting alternates between wooden and unintentionally hilarious, the dialogue is cringe-worthy, the effects were astonishingly awful even then (who thought CG troopers were a good idea?), the plot is muddled, and just about every other aspect is a headscratcher. The score is just about the only redeeming thing about them.
They came out at the right age for me to love them, and I did love them. The problem is they didn’t hold up to scrutiny when I became an adult. I found I had to bend over backwards to find excuses for every little thing. Chiefly among the problems that snapped me out of my delusion, the acting and dialogue are just bad, and I mean baaaad. Nothing in the OT or TFA compares. If you have to argue that it is intentionally bad because it’s going for some Flash Gordon cheese, you can forgive for thinking you’re delusional. And you better believe the fault lies with the faster-and-more-intense director surrounding himself with yes men. Managing to make top talent actors look amateurish is some feat.
TFA’s problems don’t outweigh the PT’s. The script is derivative, not plagued with pacing problems and C-SPAN footage. There’s no YIPEE, no sand gripes, no killing… younglings, no Jar Jar. Green screens and green screen acting are kept to an absolute minimum. Many of the effects and sets seem real because they are real. Gone is the floating trooper head effect.
This essay smacks of persecution complex and it’s only preaching to the persecuted choir which I am no longer part of.
Incorrect.
Believing that TFA is better than the prequels shows you’re either delusional or just stupid. You think the acting in the prequels was unintentionally funny? Watch Adam Driver thrash around like a clumsy, screaming baby or John Boyega pant like a dog or screw up his eyes, open his mouth comically wide and scream “REEEEEEYYYYYY!” That was unintentional comedy. At least the acting in the prequels could be subtle.
As for being wooden, listen to Daisy Ridley sound like she’s forcing a British accent even though she’s using her own accent – I’m English myself and I can tell you that Ridley sounded forced (“What’s your hurry THIEF? The jacket. This droid says you STOLE it.”) and even if she didn’t, her accent would have been better suited to a noblewoman than a scavenger – or watch her gape like a whore when she’s not gritting her teeth, staring blankly or, on at least one occasion, jutting her lips out like an anteater. Hell, even Abrams said that she was wooden.
“REEEEEEYYYYYY!” – big mouthed panting dog
Oh, boo! His mouth is wide open when he screams too! None of the prequel cast did that! (They did. Even Ewan. Not that there’s even anything wrong with that, considering that’s how human beings tend to look when they amplify their voice.) Gosh! And Adam Driver’s tantrums are less refined than Anakin’s! How am I supposed to know he’s slaughtered or hates anyone unless he screams it!? (By the way, I’m pretty sure the Driver tantrums are intentionally humorous considering the scene with a couple of troopers doing a comical about-face. It’s a bit of an homage to grandpa Anakin’s temper anyway.)
“NOOOoooOOOoooo!” – Frankenstein’s Vader
Oh, bravo! Such exquisite subtlety! Now I know he’s upset!
No, seriously, you’d have turn your brain off to favor the acting in the prequels. Even their most ardent fanboys can admit it’s awkward. You’ve got nitpicks about the acting in TFA. It isn’t award worthy. I get that. With the prequels, I’m talking about middle school drama club acting. I don’t really fault the actors much. It’s mostly the fault of casting and directing. I mean George picked the Jingle All the Way kid and had him read some of the worst lines in the franchise with zero acting direction outside of his usual faster-more-intense mantra. You can write this shit, but you can’t say it, as Ford would say, only the shit was a thousand times worse because George wanted to do everything and nobody was brave enough to say no to him until it was too late. That’s a recurring theme in the documentaries on the prequel discs.
Still… Some of the actors manage to emote and charm. Though that category is mainly limited to Ewan and Ian (Noo, YEW WILL DIE and UNLIIIIMITED POWEEERR aside). It’s just damned near impossible to act with a director who treat actors as nothing more than props and imagine you aren’t completely surrounded by green walls and floors. Here’s your direction: sit on the couch, turn, and say your line intensely. Now I’m gonna go sit behind a wall of monitors a hundred feet away from you. Got it? Say what you will about J.J., but he at least cares about making sure his actors can get into character.
“gape like a whore”
Says more about you and where you’re coming from than you realize. Whew. It’s over. I have the high ground. Don’t try it. Unless, of course, I’m Darth Maul and I’m underestimating your paaaoowwweeeerr.
My point on Darth Maul was poorly written, I was more referring to design. Many of the problems in the acting are not just in the prequels as you seem to suggest. Having watched the whole saga many times, I find it almost pathetic the hypocrisy of some people. The acting in the OT is stunningly atrocious at some points, however I still rather enjoy it. The whole point is NOT the acting, but the story and power behind it. Maybe, I used the term cool a tad loosely, but I still do not like Kylo as a villain. His whole ark in TFA is poorly executed. He has no emotional factor at all, and even makes it hard to care about. The only feeling I got was dissapointment Han died in such a pathetic way. While on the topic, what makes Kylo such a 3d character. He hits the mark at some points, such as the tantrum scene, but otherwise he is evil to be evil. I also could care less about the special effects. However, despite this, many effects in the prequels still work, such as the podrace or space fight in the beginning of episode 3. Hell, even the effects in the OT haven’t aged all that well, but that isn’t why they are good. Acting and effects are but a mere topping on the dish that is Star Wars. The design of TFA is lacking, as is the inspiration that is still visible in every other Star Wars. A more real looking forest does NOT get me immersed in a space opera like the factories on Geonosis did. I would also like to point out that the plot of TFA is also completely ridiculous and poorly executed. The idea of finding Skywalker, fine. However, by the end of the movie, this plot point has been all but abandoned an favor of Starkiller base. The whole plot point of R2D2 waking up at the end could have happened any time, but why at the end? We are never offered an explanation. Unless this is explained later, this will be the first time in history, a major plot point makes no sense in Star Wars. Overall, the prequels are, in Laymans terms, more Star Wars than TFA.
Just so we don’t go around in circles, all I’ll say is that acting is not a “topping” on ANY film. It is the absolutely essential main course. Stage plays with minimalist or bare backgrounds can work because good acting entrances the audience into believing in that world. If you build a pretty set with a dense background, but your actors are woefully unconvincing, the whole production falls apart and the illusion fades away. Instead of a pretty background, I see an obvious clustered mess of cardboard-cutout people walking in front of green screened, video gamey CG backgrounds.
And the only stunningly atrocious acting in the OT is only on the RotJ Blu-ray. Even as kids, we understood Vader’s emotions perfectly without the need for his voice. It’s a badly delivered cliche and it cheapens the original performance. Other than that, there are some corny lines in ANH, but they were performed well and absolutely nowhere near the mess of bizarre intonations that was Hayden’s performance. The rest of the trilogy is totally fine. Attacking the OT for its acting is probably the worst way to defend the prequels.
I was not, as you seem to imply, attacking the OT. I will, however, easily admit their flaws, and the acting could be really bad at points. Yes, obviously you can understand his emotions, but that does not mean all performances were good. However, this acting is NOT what made the movies great, ever. Mark Hamill, I feel, is a good example of not being a good actor at many points, however, it still works. In the PT, just like the OT, I knew what emotion was trying to be displayed. The tone was still able to be read throughout the movies, so I was able to still enjoy it. Of course, if the acting is so bad, you lose the plot and tone, then it can ruin the whole tone, but in not one of these movies is the acting that atrocious, so a good performance then becomes a topping to an interesting story that keeps me engaged. However, with a bad story, no amount of phenomenal acting can save it. I will, once again, turn to TFA as an example of this. The scene where Kylo kills Han is one of my least favorite in the movie. However, I feel that both actors did their parts well and I could easily see the emotion painted on their faces. However, due to some bad writing, this scene is a complete disappointment void of the feeling that came with both Obi-Wan’s and Qui-Gon’s deaths. The reason this death failed, is due to a number of mistakes.
1. Kylo taking off his mask had no impact due to a baffling decision to make him take it off beforehand.
2. We are given no reason to think Kylo cares about his father. As far as I can tell they hardly knew eachother
3. Han Solo is supposed to be more realistic than this. We all saw this coming from a mile away, and Han should’ve too.
Like I said, the acting in this scene is still really good, but it simply cannot save it. That is why I have to disagree with acting being the quintessential main course. You also bring up the no at the end of the OT that Vader says when killing the emperor in RotJ. I was not referring to this, but yes it was unnecessary and even detracts from the scene, however, you also brig up that we do not need his voice to understand his emotions. This can also be said of many other moments in both the OT and PT. Some notable examples are the entire time Vader is on Mustafar in RotS, the moment when Vader reveals he is luke’s father in ESB, etc. However, all these scenes have unnecessary dialogue. When Vader says he is Luke’s father, I think it would have been better if Luke had remained in stunned silence for a bit instead of saying his actual lines. I also think the duel with Obi-Wan on Mustafar would be better with less dialogue in the mix. And while some of this dialogue was phenomenal, other not so much, none of these scenes are ruined because the mood has been set up in an amazing way that causes tension, even with some wonky performance. This is something that is not found in TFA. It has not the emotion that made many fights iconic. Yes, this is a problem in other fights in the franchise, primarily in AotC, but I did not like those ones either, and would easily call AotC a bad movie for many of the same reasons as TFA is mediocre in my opinion. I believe the biggest problem with building tension is how damned powerful Rey was. It has been established time and time again that the force is not simple to control or understand, both in the PT and OT, where characters undergo rigorous training in order to feel the force and manipulate it. However, Rey, who has scarcely just learned the force is a thing, out of nowhere, is somehow able to pull off a jedi mind trick. Previous characters strong in the force, like Anakin and Luke, were unable to control it before training, only feel it and move with it. There was no reason Rey should even know what a mind trick is at this point even. It makes her feel overly powerful to the point where it is clear that she will most likely win the duel, despite her struggling at first. This is something that breaks the mood. Even in the PT, it was never this blatantly obvious who would win in a fight. When Darth Maul knocks Obi-Wan down, there was no guarantee he would get back up and win. The only other fight I knew the victor on before it started was Mustafar, but the characters there make the scene more emotional and intense than than anything from TFA. In short, my criticisms of the OT were hardly an attack, but a way to show how trivial some aspects are in the movie and how good it is and that the story and settings are what really make a good Star Wars movie.
When I was referring to the acting being subtle in the prequels, I didn’t mean the line delivery, I meant the expressions and body language. If you read the article, you’d know that George Lucas primarily wanted the movies to operate on a visual level not a verbal one. Take the scene where Anakin finds out Padme is pregnant for example. Both Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman got across how their characters were feeling in that brief scene with only a handful of lines. And both of them knew what emotions they were supposed to be expressing and how to express them without going over-the-top. There’s also Count Dooku’s expressions of shock, confusion and fear when he’s at Anakin’s mercy. Christopher Lee had no lines after Dooku lost his hands and he still got across exactly what Dooku would have been feeling in his last moments. And if you look in Mace Windu’s eyes when he’s in Palpatine’s face or when he’s holding him at blade-point, you can clearly see he’s pissed off but he didn’t have to grit his teeth like a snarling bitch to convey it.
The problem is they do open their mouths and speak, so the visual level gets thrown out by clumsy line delivery (and clumsy directing and lazy editing). Also, that’s when Dooku SHOULD have said something considering he was just betrayed. He should have at least begun to try to convince Anakin to turn on Sidious instead of dying in shock simply because it’s convenient to the plot.
If George wanted the movies to operate visually, maybe he shouldn’t have shot his scenes like a soap opera with a boring back and forth closeup A-B camera setup. That’s what a filmmaker uses when he wants the dialogue to dictate the scene and not much else, and it’s mostly done when there isn’t time to come up with any interesting blocking. Body language and expressions? Yes, come on down to the prequels where you’ll find such visually interesting body language and expressions like cardboard cutout people looking at each other with either blank or overacting stares, sitting on couches, standing from couches, walking slowly with no rush to deal with grave threats in video game rooms, staring blankly at CG trooper markers on green screens, staring blankly and unflinchingly at the CG dangers right in front of their faces, and more!
“snarling bitch”
Again? Okay. Wome- I mean Daisy shouldn’t grit her teeth. Got it. That scene featured Sam Jackson’s worst acting of the trilogy, so that’s a terrible example. Seriously. He talks like he’s in a bad Saturday morning cartoon. HE is the traitor! AHHHH! Once again, the “visual level” is thrown out the window (literally, in that scene).
once again, I must disagree with what you claim here. Firstly, Dooku was perfectly fine saying nothing. He was in shock. He wanted his master to save him, only to be told that Anakin will kill him. I cannot imagine what lines Christopher Lee could say in such an instance that would further the emotion of the scene. I also find it makes sense for the jedi to not react to a threat, not because it is CG, but because they have no reason to react to it. However, throw a wrench in things with order 66, and you can feel the jedi’s betrayal at the hands of the Supreme Chancellor. You also say it is filmed in a way where voice and dialogue dictate the progression, but this could not be further off. At many moments, you do not need to be able to hear them clearly, everything important can be figured out from the scene itself. Having watched all of Star Wars in Spanish before, it hardly detracted from experience. The visuals may not all hold up well, but the visuals, as I have stated earlier, are not the cream of the crop, the story is.
I initially just said “Incorrect” and left it at that because I’ve had these prequel debates so many times now, I feel like I’m just repeating myself, and I touched on a lot of this in my essay above already… But I’m enjoying reading your debate about it, anyway.
A few things I did want to comment on… Generally I agree with everything positive said about the prequels in this conversation, and with everything negative said about TFA. When I wrote the essay, TFA was still pretty new, and the excitement of seeing a new Star Wars movie that had Han, Luke, and Leia in it was enough for me to enjoy it and see it three times in the theaters… As I’ve said before, though, that third time I saw it, I almost fell asleep… something about the movie was definitely not holding up. Now at this distance, I’ve tried to watch it a couple times at home, and I dislike it more the more I think about it. The fact that we got a new movie with Han, Luke, and Leia and yet the three of them never had a scene together… and then they killed of Han, so that they never WOULD have a scene together again… I mean, you have those three actors all back, playing those three characters, and you don’t write a single interaction for them? That just goes down as one of the worst decisions in film history for me. I can’t understand how nobody involved vetoed something that colossally stupid. That to me speaks of a complete lack of a sensitivity on the part of everybody involved as to what these movies should be doing. You see it in smaller things, too… Chewie getting off of the Falcon after Han has been killed, and Leia not even hugging him. The two most important people in Han’s life, they’ve known each other for decades and they knew each other because of him… and Leia goes to hug Rey? Just an absolute lack of thought put into these characters. Maybe Leia hugged Rey because Rey is her daughter and Rey just lost her father… Maybe? But if so, Rey doesn’t know that, and neither does the audience, so it’s all meaningless and has no emotional resonance. Just like Han’s death, for example. This is the big reunion of father and son… The whole station is about to blow up, but Han is willing to risk his life to go try again, to show his son that he hasn’t given up on him, that he never will give up on him… touching stuff! Except for the fact that this is the FIRST. SCENE. we have ever seen with these two characters together, so none of that history or connection has been established. I mean, just how colossally stupid and lazy can a single scene be? It’s just monumentally wrong and awful.
And what is the reason for them never having a scene with Han, Luke, and Leia together? Why did they put all the history and necessary context offscreen? The one and only reason is so that they could have the incredibly idiotic use of Luke Skywalker as a MacGuffin… They had no other story, so they hung the entire movie start to finish on the idea of, “Oh we have to find Luke, because uh reasons, and he left, because uh reasons.” That was it, that was the entire plot of the movie. And then, the third act is suddenly about a space station that has absolutely nothing to do with it, and then the movie is over, so Artoo wakes up for no reason, and he has the answer for no reason. I mean, it’s a fucking two hour class on how to NOT write a movie. It’s unbelievable.
As far as the acting, I’m not going to get into the minutia of that debate except to say that I don’t think “it’s all subjective” or “it’s all a matter of taste” or anything like that… those are cop-outs people use when they can’t defend their opinions. I do think there are such things as good acting and bad acting… But there is not only one style of acting. People at this point are so used to a particular type of “realistic” or “method” acting that they think anything that isn’t done in that way is somehow a mistake. As I talk about in my essay, the only useful way to discuss the quality of a piece of art is to judge how well the artist met their goals… So if the artists involved weren’t trying to do that type of “realistic” acting, then to fault the acting for not accomplishing that style isn’t a valid criticism. The prequels are full of very accomplished actors who have met great acclaim in all sorts of different types of other movies… But in the prequels their acting all adopts certain styles and mannerisms. It’s so pervasive and consistent, the only conclusion can be that it’s deliberate. It’s partly how they were directed on set, but a lot of it was in what takes Lucas chose, how he chose to edit them together. Whether you like the acting or not, it was a choice that he made. If you watch the documentaries about the prequels, you can see him editing parts of different takes together to achieve certain rhythms, even doing things like altering the positions of the actors’ hands to change their body language. This is something he went to great lengths to do because the visual of their body language and the things that were being communicated visually were important to him. Again, the useful way to discuss it isn’t to say, “I didn’t like it, therefor it’s bad.” Obviously Lucas DID like it, so if you want to gain any insight into the films, the useful way to discuss it is to look at what he was doing, and consider why.
I don’t think the acting in TFA is especially awful or anything- it’s bland and generic like everything else in the movie, just like the however many nearly identical forest/lake/whatever planets they did because they were afraid of doing anything too exotic due to the ignorant fanboy backlash against CGI. In fact, of course, TFA had MORE CGI shots than TPM. TPM, on the other hand, had more practical models built for it than the entire OT. Most of the ships in TPM were practical models… While people cheering the retro ships in TFA that are all derivative knockoffs of ships from the OT don’t seem to mind that they’re almost all CGI. There’s a reason the Making of TFA book that was scheduled was canceled, that there are very few behind the scenes features on the Blu-Ray… When we get good behind the scenes pictures that show how it really was on the sets, how much bluescreen and how many partial sets there were, they leak out like it’s some major secret. Part of the marketing campaign for TFA has been to actively lie to viewers about all the supposed “practical effects,” because they’re courting people who were drifting from the franchise after the prequels, and a lot of those people blamed an over-reliance on CGI for being one of the problems with the prequels.
Amid the bland acting, though, Boyega does stand out as being actively annoying. The scene where Han is gesturing to Rey and Finn keeps babbling and asking him what he’s doing rather than just turning around… this passes for comedy now? Has Finn honestly never seen another person gesture to something before in his life? This is the first time? I mean, it’s just stupid. They had no good joke for the moment in the script, so the actors were fucking around, and it ended up in the movie despite not working at all. I don’t think anything Jar Jar did was half as annoying as Boyega’s babbling.
About Dooku not saying anything… To say anything in that moment he would have had to reveal Palpatine’s identity as his master. I always read the moment as him being confused, but still loyal. He doesn’t quite believe what’s happening, he’s still wondering if Palatine would really have him killed… He believed all this time that he was valuable to Palpatine, he had no idea Palpatine was planning to replace him with Anakin. He’s still loyal in that moment, he’s not ready to betray Palpatine and reveal his identity, and he’s not quite sure yet that he’s been betrayed or if it’s all a ruse… until Palpatine says, “Do it,” in his Sith voice, at which point it’s too late. His compulsion to obey Palpatine is very strong… as Vader says later, “You don’t know the power of the Dark Side, I MUST obey my master…” Most Sith are destroyed when their apprentices become more powerful than them and kill them. The reason that Palpatine lasted so long and had so many apprentices was that he had them killed before they could become stronger than him. He always had a replacement ready. Vader stayed his apprentice for a long time because he was so badly injured on Mustafar that he wasn’t as powerful as he should have been… and still, when he had a chance, Palpatine immediately tried to have Luke kill Vader and become his new apprentice. He sensed that otherwise, together Vader and Luke would be strong enough to kill him, which is what happened. So Dooku was duped, he didn’t speak out and suddenly say who Palpatine was because he was still loyal. And Christopher Lee’s acting and the editing of the sequence beautifully shows his confusion and fear. It’s done wonderfully.
So much for me not responding to a lot of this. This is why I stop myself, because once I start talking about Star Wars it can go on for a while. As the 23 page essay above illustrates. Haha. Amazing that I have had this level of interest in these movies for my whole life, and the clusterfuck situation with the new movies has almost got me to the point where I don’t even want to go and see what they do next. I have to see TLJ- It’s Carrie Fisher’s last film as Leia, of course I’m not going to miss it! But the fact that they are bringing JJ Abrams back to fuck up Episode IX has me very nearly to the point where I might not go see the next one.
I’m not sure if you enjoyed the argument for the shallowness of the arguments, the stubbornness, because it was a genuinely good argument or something else. Mind telling me? Thanks
I enjoyed it because in the comments on my essay there have been a lot of people who agreed or disagreed, but not this much back and forth discussion. I thought most of the time people were making intelligent points, and I liked that there were people making good defenses of the prequels so that I didn’t have to do it.
Rick, I so agree with your assessment of TFA, especially the lack of the Luke, Han & Leia moment. I just got into a conversation on this today on Twitter and fans will insist “oh, it would have taken away from the new characters” and “it makes the end of Return of the Jedi better” and I despair. People are fine with it. I’m sure they’ll be fine with it if Luke is dark in TLJ. Unlike you, though, I don’t think I can see it in a theater. Maybe on TV, and only after many other people see it and tell me what happens because I NEVER want to sit in a theater again the way I did in December 2015. It wasn’t joyful or delightful or whatever happy crap Abrams claimed it was, it was pure misery. I do not understand the love for the movie to this day, especially from long time fans who were just fine with “real and relatable” destruction of what the OT accomplished and Luke, Han and Leia.
I think if there’s no Luke & Leia reunion in TLJ, maybe we’ll here more complaints. But I’m not expecting it. Especially after that horrible trailer that pushed “Reylo” to the joy of a subset of fans whose opinion on Kylo Ren would curl your hair.
In a way, I think it’s fitting Abrams is doing 9. He’s never had to finish any destruction that he caused – he ran out on Lost, he abandoned Star Trek and all the rest. Now he gets to finish and “tie up all the trilogies” – it ought to be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
Boyega’s lines were much worse than Mace Windu’s. “Did you see that! Did you see that!”, “Got a boyfriend, cute boyfriend?”, “I’m in charge now Phasma, I’m in charge” are lines that sound like they belong in Saturday morning cartoons as was Oscar Isaac’s “You talk first? I talk first?” which also made him sound like he was treating the massacre that happened in the very same scene like a minor inconvenience instead of a horrifying bloodbath.
Yes, Dooku should have spoken up but that in no way cheapens Christopher Lee’s facial acting.
The expressions and body language in TFA may be considered more entertaining than the prequels but that’s because, at least from Ridley, Boyega, Driver and Gleeson, they were either over-the-top or just staring blankly. Just look at the lack of concern, anger or desperation on Ridley’s face when she said “Don’t go” to Boyega or Driver’s bored expression as he stabbed Han Solo in what was supposed to be the most emotional scene in the movie. As for facial overacting, Gleeson contorted his face with no idea what expression to settle on during his speech and Boyega’s mouth breathing made Kristen Stewart look subtle because at least she can do it quietly. In the prequels there’s plenty of little movements or expressions which can tell anyone who’s observant enough to notice them what the character is thinking or feeling. Even the way Ridley, Boyega and Driver used their lightsabers consisted of exaggerated and clumsy slashes and stabs that anyone with real sword training, or even just using a fighting style from the prequels, could penetrate easily. At least in the prequels the combatants could move fluidly.
Incorrect.
I’ll call it quits here. You’re going down a path I can’t follow. I don’t have the time or patience to write counter-essays. I know I’m right. You know you’re right. This is where the fun ends.
The timing was right for me to fully get on board with every one of these films and I thoroughly enjoyed diving into the expanded universe and lore of the prequels. This sequel trilogy has rekindled that feeling of excitement and I’m glad it is in the right hands.
This is still one of the best eesays out giving a good defense of The Prequels, and just what was so darn wrong with TFA. I see you still have some people blinded like that Discerning Opinion guy. I come across peoole like that all the time and I kinda feel bad for them. I have yet to hear or read a good solid defense of TFA and how its better than The Prequels or even worthy of being called Star Wars. Its funny guys like that DO guy say they know they are write and can back up their claims, but always fail to do so. He claims he could write a good counter argument essay, or make a YouTube video, but I seriously doubt it.
There is one thing I live to get people on and its Rey and her being a Mary Sue character. They continue to claim she isn’t, but I always ask one thing: What are Rey’s character flaws?
And I get back silence or insults. If one can’t defend something like that, how can you defend the film? Or just the fact that it’s just a copy n paste of Ep4?
Calling Rey a Mary Sue is a touchy subject because when people use that term as a criticism they’re often being sexist and just the idea of a female character who is powerful and competent is a problem for them. However, Rey is obviously a Mary Sue. Imagine how cheap it would have been in the original movie if Luke had just been able to pick up a lightsaber and fight Vader with no training. Even in ESB after he’s trained with Yoda, he’s hacking away at Vader and Vader is mostly toying with him. How does Rey even know what a Jedi mind trick is, much less perform one? And of course she can also shoot, fly the Falcon… where did she learn any of that when she seems to have been basically living in a garbage dump? It seems like they’re going to say her and Kylo have some extraordinary powers because the Force is awakening or whatever, but if there’s some kind of reason for it it was never even hinted at in TFA, so it just cheapens all her accomplishments. Like the rest of TFA, just very badly done with none of the context necessary to allow the audience to enjoy what’s happening.
Just like most prequel haters and TFA lovers, Dissenting Opinion has no respect for art and no idea of what makes a movie special and timeless. The Force Awakens is a bland piece of garbage that’s not even worthy of being part of the Star Wars franchise. The Prequels are not perfect, but they are special and unforgettable – even the haters can’t deny that since they’ve been keeping the prequel bashing going for well over a decade (closer to two decades in the case of TPM) – because they have personality. Much like a living person, you can like, love, dislike, hate or just be indifferent to their personalities but George Lucas was able to infuse his love and passion for filmmaking into them before the “fans” (I don’t consider anyone who hates the prequels to be a real Star Wars fan and the same goes for anyone who loves TFA since that doesn’t even deserve to be called Star Wars) drove him away. Like George himself, as well as any other human being, the prequels have strengths and flaws – strengths include the combat scenes while flaws can be found in the dialogue – as well as little nuances and details that help them stand out. You can often find these little details in the characters’ body language and facial expressions. For example, when Darth Vader’s looking up at Obi-Wan after being defeated on Mustafar, his expression is that of a man begging for help, as though Anakin Skywalker briefly resurfaced and was pleading with Obi-Wan to save him before Vader takes over again and screams “I hate you”. I bet at least 95% of people have never even noticed that.
Frankly, the way you write this comment shows the blind hate that plagues the Star Wars and many other fandoms. I have watched every movie many times, and not once did I ever feel the plot was “muddied”, or “a headscratcher”. Even with all the problems you did manage truthfully, the PT is still better than TFA. TFA was a bland, uninspired movie that left a hollow feeling. Little Green Screen, good for them, but the environments are so. damn. boring. TFA failed spectacularly with developing any sort of tension. Why in the world would Kylo take off his helmet before he killed his father?! At best the script is unimaginative and bland. At worst, it is plain BAD. While many say the PT script was bad, it will always have one thing that TFA failed at in every regard. The PT captured that Star Wars magic. It felt like a new adventure. I felt like there was a massive universe. TFA could have taken place on earth and no one would bat an eye. Plus, Darth Maul, Count Dooku, and Grevious are way cooler bad guys than Kylo was.
Blind hate? Definitely not. I’ve seen every film countless times as well. To the contrary, I used to feel blind love for the prequels. I would argue and make up excuses for them despite knowing deep down they were severely flawed. I made Star Wars too much a part of my identity and wasn’t prepared to admit there was anything wrong with it.
I had the Star Wars CBS-FOX VHS tapes and had started watching those films before I could even read. I was primed and ready for the Special Editions and TPM. I told everyone I ever met that there were prequels coming and they were going to be so cool and amazing. I was just a kid, so I loved TPM. Even Jar Jar made me laugh. I just about devoured the prequels on DVD. It wasn’t until I revisited them as a young adult that I finally made note of their flaws. It took me a while to go from making excuses to admitting they were poorly conceived and executed. The OT held up in every way, the PT didn’t. C-3P0 is a funny character to all ages, Jar Jar isn’t. I realized the PT was exclusively aimed at kids and young teens.
As for TFA, it has its problems, but it stands tall above the filmmaking of the prequels. It proved to me that Star Wars is best when there’s a collaborative effort behind it, and not just one guy calling all the shots. To me, “boring” a.k.a. not “so dense” environments are just fine when they actually look real. It’s objectively more visually immersive. The characters, editing, effects, and score are executed well enough that I can forgive its flaws like the lack of exposition and derivative nature.
I’m more interested in Kylo Ren BECAUSE he isn’t a “way cooler bad guy,” as you say. I like that he’s a pathetic Vader fanboy worried about falling (rising?) to the Light Side. It’s a unique twist on a formula. He takes his helmet off and he’s just a confused, rebellious, vulnerable, young man underneath. If badass villains with little to no background or character development are all you’re looking for, that’s a low bar to set. Darth Maul has a cool design, but he’s a two-dimensional villain of the week. Something something revenge… Reveal to Jedi… Dead.
George Lucas called people who mess around with an artists work for profit or as a display of power barbarians. Do you think he feels that way about Disney for what they did with The Force Awakens? Abrams, Iger and Kennedy showed no respect for his work and I have no doubt he regrets selling Star Wars to them.
I think that he’s personal friends with Kathleen Kennedy and JJ Abrams and a lot of the people involved in the new Star Wars movies and he doesn’t want to publicly trash them or make their lives harder. I also think he’s smart enough that he understands the business reasons for why things have been happening. But I also think he obviously doesn’t like the way the new movies are going and he regrets very much that he didn’t keep control. When he talks about it at all, he’s let his true feelings slip a little bit and said that these aren’t the movies he would have made. When he first sold his company he also made several comments saying that his outlines for the next trilogy were part of the sale, and Bob Iger claimed publicly that he liked the outlines, so I think that Lucas was to some extent deceived, because he obviously believed that they would be doing his story. Apparently that was just a handshake agreement though and not binding to anybody at Lucasfilm, because we know that they definitely haven’t done it. Of course when Lucas does talk about it at all publicly, he gets such a backlash from idiots on the internet telling him to shut up and go away that he’s probably glad to be done with all the horrible, hateful “fans” of his work. He made that comment a while before the sale when somebody asked him if there would be more movies… now we know that at the time he was probably considering another trilogy, working on an outline and talking to Carrie, Mark and Harrison about returning, but when asked he said something like, Why would I want to do more when everybody hates you and tells you you’re a terrible person? He had an interest in doing more, he was coming up with another story, but it was already on his mind the way assholes would try to tear him down and he would have to fight every step of the way to do it how he wanted. So I don’t think he was glad to sell Star Wars, but he was more than happy to get rid of the Star Wars “fans.”
I don’t think George considers Abrams or Kennedy to be his friends anymore. Those two scumbags, as well as Iger, betrayed him.
While Lucas was certainly attached to the Franchise, if he lost friends over the movie they made, then he didn’t deserve them in the first place. I respect his genius, but I really hope he is not that petty.
They bought his universe and promised him they’d make the trilogy based on his treatments and keep his employees employed. Then just after the ink dried threw out his treatments and fired the Lucasarts employees. I’m impressed he’s still talking to them, I sure as hell wouldn’t. And if that makes me petty, so be it.
I don’t see that as pettiness. George spent most of his life being the “father” of Star Wars, trusted Kennedy, Iger and Abrams to look after the franchise and got stabbed in the back by them. He put his heart and soul into every Star Wars movie and they stomped all over his life’s work as if saying that everything that was accomplished in the Original Trilogy and, to a lesser extent, the Prequels (which got out of the take over mostly but not entirely unscathed since Anakin’s Chosen One destiny was apparently inconsequential in the end) was pointless. If anything, they didn’t deserve George in the first place.
I’ve just watched all the movies again, and the biggest problem with TFA is not so much the general formula that some reviews have alluded to – rather it’s the improbability of what happens:
For instance, just a couple of examples
1) TFA makes the first 6 movies pointless – in that whatever they accomplished is gone and we don’t know why.
2) Han Solo – hero of the rebellion is just smuggling octopus creatures? Really? Han Solo?
3) Luke – our hero… just…. ran away….gave up…buggered off.
It makes no sense! It doesn’t follow their characters that were built up at all. It’s out of charactor they way the story evolved in TFA – illogical.
4) Sticking to a formula doesn’t mean it has to be a carbon copy. I mean come on – let’s face it… how is the FIRST ORDER any different to the EMPIRE? Same ships, same outfits, same storm troopers… they didn’t even TRY to make it interesting…
5) Character development was very weak. I mean Poe and Fin met – and 2 minutes later they are best friends. They don’t even TRY to build up their relationship. The same with Rey and Han. 2 minutes and he’s a father figure.
6) Some reviewers say the dialogue is very good…come on – they are telling me there is great dialogue? So Fin – who was taken as a child, supposedly brainwashed – can come up with a line like, “you’re got a boyfriend? A cute boyfriend?” Um, that’s more like High School Musical than Star Wars!
7) StarKiller base. I don’t know… do I have to say more? If you’re going to use a weapon like that, at least have SOME buildup – make it a little threatening, make us care… a bit….
There are many other points, and as a movie it’s kind of enjoyable – not worst thing ever – but as part of the Star Wars story – as in episode 7, it doesn’t gel with the others.
Basically, it missed the story skills, imagination and understanding of the universe which only George Lucas could bring in a big way – and it shows. It’s the only movie that doesn’t bring ANYTHING new at all. Nada. What’s worse is that it doesn’t even TRY to do something. They had a blank canvas – and they could have done something, anything, but chose to do nothing.
The disappointing thing is that it could have been a great movie with real interest for the future – but instead let’s be honest, the story doesn’t matter so much now. It’s more a result of a studio driven picture, rather than one with a unique story.
As a star wars fan who enjoyed all the movies, including prequels very much, i will be seeing The Last Jedi. However The Force Awakens stands as the weaker in the Star Wars story.
But I think we should all recognise that George Lucas is truly a visionary and the series is that much weaker now without him.
Awesome article. Well done.
rickworley, the prequel haters are likely to rally around this video. What do you have to say about it? By the way, part of what Douglas Gabriel was saying is edited out which is cause for suspicion.
Sorry. I thought that I just posted a link to the video, not the video itself.
That guy’s a moron, he gets every single fact wrong about the production of the films that he possibly can. If anything at all that he says is true, since he seems to say he got paid by Kathleen Kennedy at some point, it sounds like he was consulted as a research assistant, which makes sense because he teaches about mythology. But him presenting them with some books and materials about the Holy Grail doesn’t mean that he invented those myths, or that he wrote the Bible. It sure as fuck doesn’t mean that he invented Indiana Jones. That’s the stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard of.
Do you think Kathleen Kennedy paid him to say this to try and turn more people against George Lucas? It sounds like something that treacherous bitch would do.
No… I would believe that Kennedy and Lucas might have some hurt feelings over how she has treated Star Wars, but I don’t see any cause for conspiracy theories about her trying to set him up…
Amazing article….i have read the whole thing multiple times and each time i just shake my head in agreement on almost every point.
I was really ready to give Episode 8 a chance (despite the lame, safe, predictable title) but then word comes out that Abrams is writing and directing. So no matter how good it is, JJ’s nonsensical storytelling will most likely undo it like he undid the entire Lucas saga.
Same. I thought that Rian Johnson is a decent filmmaker, I’ll give him a chance. Maybe it won’t be what Lucas would have done, but he could make a decent movie of his own and create something new and interesting. But Abrams coming back for IX removes any chance of the trilogy having a satisfying overall payoff.
Correction to previous post…..Abrams is writing and directing Episode 9
I’m wondering if you plan on writing a new essay with the release on The Last Jedi.
And perhaps if you are going to talk about the direction Disney is taking Star Wars vs what we could have gotten if they did something similar to what the Expanded Universe was and maybe Lucas’s ideas for his 3rd Trilogy.
I might… I hated TLJ. Honestly I’m furious that they did something so slapdash and so disrespectful to the original characters. I have plenty to say about it, but I don’t know if I want to spend the energy to write the 20 pages it would take to even begin to discuss all the problems with the movie. Haha. Just awful.
Totally agree. Just terrible. And if you look closer underneath all the supposed “subversions” of SW tropes that I am reading some reviewers talk about and praise as if he did something BOLD…..this movie is basically a re-hash of ESB and ROTJ at once.
Just a mess
I can respect that lol. But man seeing the backlash from Ep8, I really think The Prequels will definitely be seen in a better light.
After watching The Last Jedi, I’m just going to stick to the books. Just up to.Visions of the Future
LOVE THIS ARTICLE. Thank you for speaking my mind so eloquently! I’m also curious for an update of your opinion on TLJ…I was sorely disappointed.
Thank you, I’m glad you liked the article.
I hated TLJ. Honestly I’m furious that they did something so slapdash and so disrespectful to the original characters. I have plenty to say about it, but I don’t know if I want to spend the energy to write the 20 pages it would take to even begin to discuss all the problems with the movie. Haha. Just awful.
I loved this article, particularly the parts about the parallels and why the correct viewing order is prequels before originals. I grew up with the originals yet see the role that the prequels serve in expanding and enriching the story Lucas was telling.
However, I wanted to address one point you made in a comment on October 20, 2017 but I wasn’t sure how to properly format a reply. For all of TFA’s flaws in storytelling, dialogue, and action, I think Rey was actually crafted with care to explain how and why she had the abilities and skills that she had and why she is not a “Mary Sue”
Take the fight between her and Kylo on Starkiller Base. There were several important parts at play, all of which had been set up and explored prior to this moment.
So how can Rey defeat Kylo in a lightsaber battle with no training? There are several answers that all work in conjunction. First, we do not know Kylo’s level of expertise with the saber. The only time we’ve seen him fight against another lightsaber instead of deflecting blaster bolts is the preceding battle with Finn and that battle did not last very long. As an extension of that point, Snoke tells Hux to bring Kylo to him so that his training can be completed. Meaning that Kylo is not a fully trained Force User and Lightsaber Duelist. Second, Kylo suffered a serious injury from Chewbacca’s blaster, a blaster that was shown to be so powerful it knocked stormtroopers off their feet. That wound was shown to be causing Kylo pain and to be bleeding. Third, Rey knows how to fight with a melee weapon. She was a young girl abandoned on a hostile planet and needed to protect herself. We saw her use her staff to defeat the men that were sent to steal BB-8 from her. She used that same fighting style against Kylo. Fourth, Rey and Kylo were fighting to achieve different ends. Rey wanted to kill Kylo. She was letting her anger control her and she wanted him to pay for killing Han. Kylo however, was trying to capture her. He wanted to convince her to go with him and be his student, which wouldn’t work if she was dead. Fifth, Rey was losing the fight at first. She was shown as being off-balanced and beaten back. Sixth, Rey is given the exact same scene that Luke was given during the trench run in ANH to explain how she was able to channel the Force and defeat Kylo. They both were losing badly and looked to be defeated. They both were reminded of the Force (Luke through Obi-Wan and Rey through Kylo asking to be her teacher). They both took a moment to center themselves and open up to the Force. And then they both won their battles. It’s beat for beat the exact same, yet no one calls out Luke for his accomplishment. All these points are clearly shown in the film. Any one explanation would be enough to justify her win, all six paint a very clear portrait.
You can look at every other skill she shows in the film and find a corresponding scene to explain it. How does she know how to fly the Falcon? Well, she knows and works for Unkar Platt, its current owner, and she dismantles ships for a living and has her own speeder that she must do maintenance on. How does she use the Force Persuasion technique? Kylo accidentally taught it to her when he used it on her and it takes her several attempts to duplicate.
It’s also unfair to call her a Mary Sue for having no flaws when she very clearly does. Her anger is probably her biggest flaw. Just look at the way she gives into it on Starkiller Base. Her snarls as she stands over a defeated Kylo are more in line with Darth Maul than Luke Skywalker.
While the narrative did not show much care for the story or characters, Rey and her abilities was the one part where attention was given over to fleshing her out.
I hope this message doesn’t come off as rude as I greatly respect your essays and opinions and would love to see more articles like this one in the future. I look forward to a potential TLJ essay. Sorry for my own essay.
Rick,
After seeing two thirds of this (what I think is a horrible) Sequel Trilogy are you under the impression that the main players in the making of them so far have a subtle (or not so subtle, maybe) disdain of everything Lucas did after ESB? Essentially going to great length to piss on …or to put it a nicer way, ERASE, his saga without actually saying the prequels (and/or ROTJ) never happened.
I mean think about it……you consider yourself a Star Wars fanatic and actively dislike 4 of the 6 movies like so many of this group that is now in charge of Disney Wars. I never once heard in any interviews with Abrams around the time of TFA, him ever even mention the titles of any of the saga movies other than “Star Wars” and “Empire Strikes Back”. He even referred to ROTS as “the third one” in one interview.
It just annoys me to no end how the grand accomplishment that Lucas put together in Episodes 1-6, are being made to be forgotten/ invalidated.
Hell this whole sequel trilogy so far actually seems like a remake/reboot of the OT just like he Abrams did with Star Trek so he could ignore any canon he didn’t like. The only thing here is he can’t make this an “alternate” universe….although, to be honest, it really feels that way to me.
I will not ever watch Episode 9……I can guarantee you that. Not only out of some spite for Disney, but because I don’t give two shits about these new characters and don’t care one bit how this trilogy ends.
I didn’t bother to see Episode 8 or even Rogue One. I knew Disney would fuck up the sequel trilogy after seeing The Force Awakens and although Rogue One might actually be a good movie (Star Wars fans seem to at least accept it as part of canon, something I will never do for The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi) I don’t want to give those corrupt, greedy fuckers that ruined George Lucas’ franchise any of my money. And I don’t even care much about money so, like you, I guess I am somewhat motivated by spite. Walt Disney would be ashamed of what his company has become.
Are you ever going to do something on The Last Jedi? Did you know that the imbecile who wrote it received a Saturn Award for his script? I wish I was joking. The Saturn Awards have lost all credibility which ruins things for future winners because even if they’re genuinely talented, they’ll still have the indignity of being put on the same level as Rian Johnson.
I got six pages into my review of TLJ and it was just too depressing… and now we’re in the phase where because of the online harassment of Kelly Marie Tran people say you’re a bigot if you didn’t like the movie… I had so many things to say about what was wrong with the movie that I think I might still get around to it some day, but it’s a slog.
Nobody has confirmed that the online harassment of Kelly Marie Tran is true. Maybe it is but even if so, everyone gets insulted on the internet and she hasn’t said anything about it. It’s entirely possible that she just wanted to maintain her privacy. The media’s just using her to deflect criticism. It’s pathetic and shows that they are the racist ones since they’re using a Vietnamese woman as a shield.
That was amazing. I don’t think I can say anything that hasn’t been said before here. Mostly all I can think is that you brought up a lot of good points and gave observations I had never noticed before. I had made the connection between the parallel shots of Padme and Leia, but I hadn’t noticed the others and had never attached a great significance to it. Learning that Episodes 1-6 were meant to be like visual poems was a really, really cool detail to learn, so thank you for pointing it out.
Thank you!
Does anyone think that George Lucas treated his audience with too much respect? As in, he overestimated how intelligent they are? He certainly wasn’t exploiting them with the movies – maybe he was with the toy sales but not the films themselves – but because the world is full of idiots, he may have made the wrong assumption that his audience is as smart as he is.
Without a doubt. I always say that the people who want more traditional storytelling and acting in the prequels are asking for a much dumber movie than the one they got.
what do you think of this?
https://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-and-neighbours/
There’s definitely a large connection between Neighbours and Star Wars. I mention it a couple times in my Star Wars video essay I just did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueLzC1P_ePQ&feature=youtu.be