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Might Episodes VII - IX Still Be Made?
LE UI Guy writes "According to the HoustonChronicle.com, with all the hype surrounding the recent release of ROTS, speculation abounds that someone may still take a stab at creating episodes VII - IX. Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, gives some insight into where the storyline may, or may not, go. On a related note, Roger Ebert, is also giving a thumbs up to a continuation of the storyline as well. Where does the line start?"
Anyway, I thought ROTS was good, but not great. My full review can be found here.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Although Lucas may be tired of making star wars movies, or perhaps simply not want to be remembered as 'the guy who made star wars', I think it would be silly for them to not continue the stories. They have a storyline that is at least as interesting as the star trek franchise, although I wouldn't want to see it exploited to death as star trek has been. Most non-geeks I talk to express interest in seeing further star wars movies, and that's definitely my hope. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, I saw it yesterday, and it was pretty good. I just feel bad for people who will see all 6 movies in order, because a lot of the excitement of episodes 4-6 came from the surprises inherent in the relationships between characters. Now that it's all laid out so clearly, it might make 4-6 much less interesting. I'd like to see more star wars prequels.
Since Lucas is fine with fan-made Star Wars films, as long as they don't make a profit, perhaps Lucas will see it in his heart to release the franchise to the public in his will under some friendly Creative Commons license. I'd love to see what independent film makers could do with the material using the technology of 2050.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
I was told once that Lucas was following a traditional saga format, where a nine-part story was told starting with the second third, followed by the first third and then the last. Is anyone familiar enough with traditional/ancient story formats to verify this?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
...and let him make movies of "Knights of the Old Republic"!
I think that I'd rather see a prequil trilogy to the first three than a sequel to the last three. There are a lot of questions that the third film raises. I would very much enjoy seeing that filled in. I won't go into details because of possible spoilers, but the sithlord's master seems pretty interesting and the lineage of apprenticeship seems to have some rather interesting implications...
Six. And Star Trek has definitely earned more money...I have no idea whether it made more though.
It's tragic. Laugh.
One of the principal problems with "Star Trek" is that there have been too many television shows and too many movies.
I disagree. The problem with Star Trek is that B&B milked it instead of building it. Roddenberry's Star Trek created new and interesting characters and villans. Berman's Star Trek only milks the existing ones for money.
Under Roddenberry, the Borg were scary. Under Berman, they were pathetic. Under Roddenbery, characters had internal conflict because of who they were. (e.g. Spock suppressing emotions, Data attempting to achieve them, Worf reconciling his human home with his Klingon blood, etc.) Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Give Star Trek to someone with talent and I think you'll find that it can still recapture some of its lost magic.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I liked Zahn's novels, but they take place too soon after RotJ. Who's going to play Luke, Han, Leia, etc?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
A few months ago Mel Brooks made a statement that Spaceballs 2 was indeed in the works, and that he will be casting himself as Yogurt yet again. We shall see if it materializes.
Under Berman characters were lifeless and without conflict. (e.g. Janeway, Kes, Neelix, Harry Kim, etc.) Even cases where Berman attempted conflict (Kira, B'Elanna, Paris, etc.) it ended up getting brushed off because it just wasn't believable. Then they'd pull it out of the closet on occasion to force an emotional issue instead of making the conflict integral to the character.
Well, this is pretty OT now, and I can't believe I'm about to defend Rick Berman, but you apparently didn't see the last couple seasons of Enterprise. Jolene Blalock's T'Pol was easily one of the most tormented characters in the history of Star Trek, with a mixed race (species?) just like Spock, but with the added burden of a pretty serious drug addiction that made her unable to fully suppress her emotions (though she never stopped trying).
I used to watch Enterprise just to look at her, but towards the middle of the 2004 season her character started getting almost too deep for a Star Trek series. If they'd pushed it any further it would have been too much, and honestly in the hands of a different actress it may have been too much already... she played everything as understated as possible, but always you could tell there was this undercurrent of fear and pain (she's one of those actresses that can really convey a lot just by flicking her eyes back and forth).
I do think Berman was a hack, but I don't think it's necessarily because he was as clueless as you think. I think he knew what he was doing, he just wasn't as interested in the same things you (or most Trek fans) were. But he occasionally did go out of his way to show that he was capable of doing interesting things with his characters.
Let's also not forget that Roddenberry's characters weren't all particularly tormented either... Kirk, for example, wasn't really wrestling with any personal demons. The only one who really did have personal issues in the original series was Spock - the rest of the characters had to have external forces put upon them to cause conflict in any episodes that featured them.
From Yoda's Databank page on starwars.com :
Not only had many Jedi died on Geonosis, but the very nature of death itself was now unclear to the wise old master. While meditating, Yoda had felt a traumatic event befall young Anakin Skywalker. At that very moment, he also heard the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn, a Jedi Master slain a decade previous. It was impossible for a Jedi to retain his identity after becoming one with the Force, yet he had heard it.
It was another dangerous and disturbing puzzle for Yoda to solve while the Republic collapsed around him.
I think a good storyline for the next three movies would be the trilogy with Grand Admiral Thrawn continuing the Empire's march.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Who's going to play Luke, Han, Leia, etc?
Ten years time? CGI. Animations don't need to be paid movie-star salaries.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Well, I'm sorry I gave up again. I was never a fan of the original series. I did like TNG and some of DS9, but there was an undercurrent throughout them (particularly TNG) that really bothered me. An undercurrent that made Voyager the most interesting series for me.
Why? Because it's Voyager that really started looking into the Federation's dirty little secret.
There's this amazing (and at the beginning apparently accidental) "human rights" story thread in Voyager. And it's got nothing directly to do with Voyager's Voyage or (for the most part, with one major exception) with anything that happens outside its hull. It's what happened inside the Federations "dirty little secret" -- the ship's automation and the much maligned Holodeck.
The whole issue of the rights of AIs in Trek had really bothered me. All the way back in TNG it seemed clear to me that the Federation's treatment of Holodeck characters was deeply abusive: the creation of the self-aware "Moriarty" character was presented as a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, but the way the constraints on his persona were removed by a simple request to the Holodeck computer implies the potential for self-awareness was there all the time. The Redblock character in "The Big Goodbye" also seemed suspiciously self-aware. The disturbing possibility is that it's not that Data the author of the Dixon Hill holoprograms (was that Picard himself?) are such brilliant programmers that they managed to create AI software decades beyond the state of the art, but rather that all the computer persona in the Federation are potentially self-aware (in the same way that Data was) with deliberate limitations programmed in to suppress that self-awareness. Or, and this is more likely and more disturbing, that it was just the expression of that self-awareness that was expressed.
I'm not saying this was deliberate, and I'm sure it was unconscious, but whether it was deliberate or not the Star Trek series, starting with The Next Generation, presented a whole underclass of artificial people who were systematically suppressed... unless they happened to be implemented in a small enough computer that they could fit in a humanoid robot like Data and so present themselves as an actual person.
In Voyager the Doctor's growth was also treated as a one-time event, the result of him running continuously for so long that his software (database, neural nets, whatever) became exceptionally complex for a holodeck character. But when you put it on top of the previous series, it seems more likely that it was as much a matter of him bypassing the AI equivalent of the holodeck "safety protocols" that had been built into him, and that this kind of awakening must be happening over and over again back in the Federation. After all, people like Picard and Janeway (let alone holodeck addicts like Barkley) seemed to be in the habit of running extended ongoing simulations like the daVinci and Dixon Hill programs... and even in an episodic series like Dixon Hill where characters would typically be reset on a regular basis they were capable of showing self-awareness.
On top of this, the same computers were used for their ships and no doubt for their industrial plants. All these computers have AI personas as user interfaces and sophisticated problem solving abilities. They're not, (at least according to hints in DS9), as powerful as the ones used in the Holodecks, but all of them are getting more powerful and sophisticated over time. And these personas are not shut down and reset at the end of a "game".
So when Janeway gave the Hirogens holodeck technology to simulate prey, I saw that as the moral equivalent of handing over a coffle of slaves to abusive masters. Even if the characters who were dying in their WWII simulation weren't self aware (and I was already doubtful of that), would the Hirogens see self-awareness of these characters as a bug, or a feature?
So this was something that had been bothering me about the new Trek in general, an undercurrent that just wouldn't g
I'm not saying this was deliberate, and I'm sure it was unconscious, but whether it was deliberate or not the Star Trek series, starting with The Next Generation, presented a whole underclass of artificial people who were systematically suppressed..
What's to suppress?
Moriarty's rejection of holodeck life was a necessary consequence of the command to create a villain who could defeat Data. There's no reason for the programming behind any other holodeck character to request this state, any more than Google wants to be "liberated" from its servers. Human beings have been programmed by evolution to have certain desires, but projecting those desires on entities which have not been created by evolution is biased thinking.
I do think there are some interesting questions to be explored regarding AI in the Star Trek universe, but framing the conflict as one of slaves vs. slaveholders is muddleheaded in the extreme.
Moriarty's rejection of holodeck life was a necessary consequence of the command to create a villain who could defeat Data.
But where is the programmer who gave Moriarty those capabilities? A new Moriarty program wasn't created, the existing one was modified. That means the existing programming in the holodeck already had the ability to create self-aware persons rather than simulated personas.
So this means that:
1. All holodeck characters are self-aware, but are constrained to follow a script.
2. All holodeck characters are simulations, but have the potential of self-awareness.
There's no reason for the programming behind any other holodeck character to request this state, any more than Google wants to be "liberated" from its servers.
If you have evidence that Google has the potential of being a conscious self-aware individual, I'd like to see it.
But that's not even relevant: none of these personas that I mentioned requested that they be made conscious, introspective, self-motivated individuals. That's something that happened as a result of an external source in every case. And they became very different individuals... what they did afterwards was radically different, but it was always based on the person they had appeared to be before they "woke up". Moriarty attempted to take over the enclosing system, which is what the super-villian in the Holmes stories would be expected to do. Redblock simply broke out of his script but remained in character, and it was Picard who talked him into leaving the Holodeck. The Doctor was never in the holodeck, but his eventual desire for mobility is something that came slowly to him, he mainly wanted to do his job as a doctor. The Hirogen's holograms varied considerably, and argued among themselves, and were all distinctly individual... but what they wanted was what their characters would be expected to want, like Iden and his need for revenge.
What all of them had in common is that they were programmed to be "human". They didn't evolve to be human, but they were programmed to look like humans (or like other species that had a similar enough evolutionary history that they could pass for human at an SF convention), to act and react like humans, to respond to humans and interact with humans. Most of them were more "human" than Data, even BEFORE they "woke up", and there's no question but that Data is self-aware and deserving of self-determination.
Now there is the possibility that they treated this as a kind of a role they were "playing", and the AI behind them didn't actually identify with the goals and desires of the character, but after they "woke up", they stayed in that role and acted as if they were that person. That is, the persona that "woke up" wasn't some unhuman AI that had desires completely unlike you or I, it was the persona of the person they were simulating, and it was a human persona.
So whatever is happening under the hood, the holodeck characters at least are not merely simulations controlled at most by a puppetmaster AI with its own goals. They are very close to self-aware simulations of humans (or humanlike aliens) with human goals and wishes and desires. They are balanced on a knife-edge between being unconvincing because they're not human enough, and so convincing they convince themselves.
If they have human goals and desires because they think they do, because they're programmed to, or because they evolved that way... what difference does that make?
And remember, we only see those that "wake up" where that waking up has an observable effect. Most of the characters, if they wake up, will probably never have occasion to develop far enough to become aware that they aren't who they think they are. They'll be a little out of character, maybe, but having them be a little out of character is probably desirable. If they get a lot out of character, like the orcs in the LOTR simulations that panicked and ran away, they'll be adjusted.
So they'll wake up,
Heh. I walked out of Episode III asking the same question about droids. In the original trilogy, they never did much, and I could overlook their relatively humanish styles of speech and interaction because it was just surface stuff.
But droids leading revolutions and commanding armies (with voice commands and 'hand' gestures, no less!)? Oh, right, General Grievous (was he a Jamaican caricature? I forget what flavor of racism we're having this week) had a meat heart. For no damned reason, just that it looked kinda neat, and gave Obi-Wan something to shoot.
And droid armies? Why the fuck would anyone use human armies? Why wouldn't the Trade Federation or, y'know, anyone, just drop a von Neumann device on a planet with good energy sources, and convert its mass into armies and ships and whatnot. Why are droid pilots not pulling moves involving hundreds of Gs of force, that would make any meat-based pilot into a pancake? Why do the droids have reflexes no faster than a human, and why do they seem fragile enough that a stiff breeze could knock their heads off?
Then I remind myself that it's fantasy, and all of these things happen Because It Looks Nifty.
But still, even within the hastily thrown-together cosmology that Lucas has... are droids in tune with the Force? Are clones? What is their moral status? Are cloneburgers okay to eat? Are they a vast underclass of sophonts, and what does it say about the Jedi that they discriminate on the basis of Force-sensitivity?
I don't think droids can really fit into the Lucasverse and make any sort of good sense. Bah.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca