Slashdot Mirror
Can Star Wars Episode III Be Saved?
mcwop writes "MSNBC is running a commentary asking: 'Can "Star Wars: Episode III" be saved?' It proposes changes such as ripping off Akira Kurosawa, getting the otherwise good actors to emote, and even firing Lucas. It is one year away, but is it too late to save Episode III?"
I see a bright future for the Star Wars prequels. Unfortunately, it's a more distant future than one year away.
Wait 20 years or so. The original trilogy will continue to be seen as a seminal work, and the "prequels" as a bastardized ripoff. Eventually, Lucas will die, or otherwise give up the franchise (maybe Michael Jackson can trade his Beatles songs for it).
Then, finally, someone can remake parts I through III the way they should have been done in the first place. No midchlorians, no virgin birth, no Jar Jar. Special effects that compliment the story, instead of overshadowing it.
Some future screenwriter and director will have the opportunity to give us back the thrill we had in the '70s, when we saw the original Star Wars in a non-multiplex theater, and were in awe. We who were preteens will be in our 50s... it won't be too late.
Something to look forward to! Just not in 2005.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Does Lucas know how people feel? Does he listen to the criticism?
I know that there will be 100 posts saying this exact same thing by the time I click the submit button, but to answer your questions: Yes and No. He does know how people feel. He doesn't live in a little bubble in the Arizona desert. He may even read Slashdot while hiding under the identity of Paul Rothrock. But, in the end, Star Wars is not about the movies. It isn't about the story. The Start Wars books are far more interesting story-wise than the movies. It is about the marketing. If you go way back to A New Hope and read the behind-the-scenes stuff that went on to get the movie made, you can see that Lucas was keen on marketing. Everything else was just a hobby.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Yes, it could be saved. Fire lucas, hire David Brin. His misguided/evil Yoda plot line is brilliant. He's correct when he says, "Almost the entire list of awful coincidences and silly paradoxes can be eliminated...It could even go down in history as something profoundly moral and clever."
I already told several people that I will not be seeing Ep III because Brin's conclusion to the series is so much better than anything Lucas could come up with.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Lucas will never allow anyone to do anything with Star Wars. In fact, his best buddy Steven Spielberg has already spoken about this. Lucas feels that the Star Wars saga will be his legacy and he doesn't want anyone messing with it. Spielberg practially begged Lucas for a chance to direct a Star Wars film and Lucas said no. So I can't see Lucas willingly giving up control to anyone. And with the new copyright laws, his family will be able to control Star Wars indefinitely. So you can forget about a Star Wars film ever being made by anyone with talent.
GMD
watch this
Ep. 2 WASN'T better, it was object oriented programming. He used the drag and drop approach to build a mediocrity.
Once again no one on Slashdot is talking about the truth of the situation. Lukas is getting you to pay for a paradigm shift to digital movie making. All he needs is for the movie to be good enough to cover costs. He could probably write off the cost as R&D anyway because that's what he's doing. He is doing a proof of concept for all digital filmmaking. He is not telling a story, He is not making a movie, and he is definitely not making art of any kind.
It was ruined as soon as the Midochlorians came into the picture. If that's all that matters, why didn't Yoda just give Luke a blood transfusion before facing Vader? He could have pumped up those midochlorians before Luke's encounter.
Lucas took all the magic out of Star Wars. He actually managed to go back in time and ruin the original three episodes with his pseudo-scientific explanation. And the new stuff stinks. As much as I hate the Jar-Jar character, I sympathised with him when he stepped in that pile of sh*t. That's exactly how I felt while watching Episode III.
Oh, Lucas knows that people don't like what he's done. The problem is that he thinks they are all wrong and doesn't want to hear it. In fact, CNN was refused access to Attack of the Clones based on a Connie Chung interview where she told Lucas that most people thought TPM was a disappointment. If you're going to kick the media off your property and deny them access to a major news story just because they suggested that the film didn't live up to expectations, I don't think you can honestly claim that you're open to criticism.
As far as his "reputation as a filmmaker", I think Lucas must realize now that he really isn't a filmmaker. He knows that Star Wars will be his legacy. So he really doesn't care about looking like some kind of great director because he knows he'll never direct again. That's probably one reason he's so possessive of the films -- he knows this is the last movie he'll ever direct.
GMD
watch this
Thanks for making me feel old. Episode IV was very popular among my friends and I at the time when we were 10 or so years old.
We had quite sophisticated tastes back then:
Saturday morning cartoons
Bicycles
Peterbuilt/Kenworth/MAC big-rig trucks & CB radios
Hotwheel/Matchbox car collecting
Catching insects and lizards
Tormenting the red ant nest at school
Planet of the Apes (all of them) along with SWAT/Emergency!/6 Million Dollar Man were the best of Hollywood, and KISS was the best musical band.
Is it any wonder as adults we see these films differently?
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I was 8 when it came out, and I can remember seeing the movie 9 different times. It was the first time I can remember that whenever a friend went to see it that their parents would take all the kids buddies. So my parents only took me once, but we all saw the movie multiple times... it was truly a group experience. I believe that is why it is such a cult movie.
On top of that, I clearly remember watching a documentary of the making of the movie, all the special effects, in school, in our library with all the third graders.
These are the reasons why so many people in their thirties have such a communal tie to Star Wars. Later when Empire was released, all of your friends who saw the first movie got back together to see the sequel. When Jedi came out, we were all older, and saw the Ewoks as this pandering too young kids, because we felt the movie was for us personally, those who saw the original Star Wars in the theater. We wanted Jedi to be targeted to us. When (understandably) Lucas wanted to bring more young children into the Star Wars cult, we protested. Take this to the ultimate level with Jar Jar and Phantom Menace, and we can see why so many felt the movie to be poisonous trash. It was taking our childhood youth icons and giving it away to others.
Perhaps if we could all watch Episode 3 through the eyes of an 8 or ten year old, we would enjoy the experience much better.
How much of its impact on cinematic culture was the movies themselves? and how much was that at the time, no sci-fi(in the broadest sense, Star Wars is not as sci-fi as say Blade Runner) movie explored the same themes?
i s-are-being-killed-all-over-now. But they can't really "save it" to the point of making it a better prequel movie than the movies in the IV-V-VI position. Better special effects, yes, a good enough plot? Maybe, for those who haven't seen the original movie, but not for the hardcore fans. That's the third "weakness" of this movie, it's a wide-audience movie, but with entrenched fans who have a great deal of influence, by disseminating(and tainting) information about the coming movie, interesting people with less first-hand knowledge of the series. That the last movie in the trilogy came out in theatres in 1988 means people less 21 years of age won't remember the theater version of the movie either. Another "chink" in the third movie's armor.
The question "Can it be saved?" also brings up the question: "From what?" From being overmarketed? Nothing can save it from that. From being light fluff, with low content, and being fixated on characters we know from the other movies, and yet have a darker feel to it? Not sure it can be saved from this last one, because...
because...
because that's probably the best that can be hoped for from this movie.
Read that again,
IMO Empire strikes back was the darkest of the original trilogy, and it certainly brought new elements to the trilogy the other two movies didn't. It was the most content-rich of the two, as it explored the Jedi in detail, as well as Darth Vader, and his relationship to Luke, it also fleshed out important characters, introduced new ones that would become important in the third movie, and was generally the more developed(plot/character wise) of the three. It went somewhere(to a big cliffhanger to be specific), and added a lot of "deep thinking" material(is Lando trustworthy, what's gonna happen to XYZ, etc...)
It basically left no stone unturned in the Star Wars universe. That's why Return of the Jedi could be so light on content, and had to be action-driven, the work had already been done, and it would have been redundant to develop nearly as much characters/situations/worlds. So ROTJ was a localized plot, with galaxywide repercussions.
As for the first movie, its impact was probably most measurable under the special effects category, of which Lucas could be considered "Core Developer" if not "maybe-not-so-Benevolent Dictator" to use the Linux term. Noone had really used special effects to that degree before 1977(to my knowledge) and he certainly influenced the Hollywood adoption of
1) derived products
2) sequels
He may also have created the first american Otaku (fanboys).
Can any of this be expected of the sixth movie in the series, especially since it's a "prequel" where we might not know the details, but we certainly know the ending.
It can be good entertainment, if they work at it. And the work I'm talking about isn't an ILM, it's in the script department, and hence, it might be a heck of a lot too late to "save" that particular movie, since the plot part was set in stone ages ago... They can try to avoid fluff, as much as possible in the third movie, and keep it gritty, the-real-world-is-a-bad-place-especially-that-Jed
Maybe they should have tried for the original set of sequels(it was meant as a nine-movie set, at one point), despite the fact that Anakin Skywalker was probably the most interesting, complex character in the bunch.
The character of Luke was originally supposed to be a woman. I had a portfolio of production paintings from Star Wars ("A New Hope" for you youngin's) and there are several pictures where Luke's character was painted as a woman.
And it certainly would have changed the whole love-triangle dynamic. Instead of Lucas copping out by making Luke and Leia (sp?) brother and sister, it could have been lucky Han Solo and the Skywalker Twins!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.