Slashdot Mirror
An Animated, Open Letter To J.J. Abrams About Star Wars
juliangamble writes "Designer Prescott Harvey has written and animated an open letter to J.J. Abrams about the plans for the next Star Wars movie. He says, 'Like so many people, I've spent most of my recent years wondering why the original Star Wars trilogy was so awesome, and the new movies were so terrible. What are the factors that make Star Wars Star Wars? I took an empirical approach, determining what elements were in the original movies that differed from the prequels. My first major epiphany was that, in the originals, the characters are always outside somewhere very remote. The environment and the wildlife are as much a threat as the empire. All three movies had this bushwacky, exploratory feel. Contrast that with the prequels, where the characters are often in cities, or in the galactic senate. In order for Star Wars to feel like a true adventure, the setting has to be the frontier, and this became my first rule.'"
If you wanna know why the original trilogy worked, read about Joseph Campbell's book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces "George Lucas' deliberate use of Campbell's theory of the monomyth in the making of the Star Wars movies is well documented. On the DVD release of the famous colloquy between Campbell and Bill Moyers, filmed at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch and broadcast in 1988 on PBS as The Power of Myth, Campbell and Moyers discussed Lucas's use of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in making his films.[11] Lucas himself discussed how Campbell's work affected his approach to storytelling and film-making." "I [Lucas] came to the conclusion after American Graffiti that what's valuable for me is to set standards, not to show people the world the way it is...around the period of this realization...it came to me that there really was no modern use of mythology...The Western was possibly the last generically American fairy tale, telling us about our values. And once the Western disappeared, nothing has ever taken its place. In literature we were going off into science fiction...so that's when I started doing more strenuous research on fairy tales, folklore, and mythology, and I started reading Joe's books. Before that I hadn't read any of Joe's books...It was very eerie because in reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs...so I modified my next draft [of Star Wars] according to what I'd been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent...I went on to read 'The Masks of God' and many other books." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Which brings me to rule #4. Have characters.
The key seems to be that nobody would say no to Lucas. Yesa sir Jar jar be a good character that peoples will loves. So has JJ Abrams reached that point where he is surrounded by Yes men? Or is there someone who will say, "That sucks." Not necessarily someone who can order him around but simply someone who isn't a simpering fool and has good taste.
I recently read about LucasArts and all the bizarre choices that were made there. Basically they jumped from whim to whim. Hopefully those people are left by the doorstep by Disney. I suspect that they will weasel their way into the "creative" process and ruin everything anyway.
Yeah, I hated how he brought in decent writing, exciting setpieces, and competent directing. What an asshole. What I really wanted was two hours about an autistic robot learning to cry.
He already turned Star Trek into a battle-oriented space opera. If anything that shows he has a decent handle of what Star Wars is. More than he has on Star Trek at least.
He was never into Star Trek. At one point in an interview he stated that he never 'got' Star Trek, which is why the new Star Trek movies don't feel like Star Trek at all. There was always more of an audience (unfortunately) for space action rather than the hardcore sci-fi and intense Socratic dialogue that Star Trek is famous for. On the other-hand, he has stated multiple times that he was always a Star Wars fan, so theirs something to be said for that. Being a fan himself, he would probably be better equipped to make a movie about it.
Star wars is no better or worse than any other story, except that it had the potential to be told over a number of movies.
Movies are also pressured to maximize the use of technology to tell a story. This can work, but with episodes i,ii,and iii I think the advanced technology worked against the story, and in any future movies will be a fx tour de force, rather than story telling.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I've only seen the first of the 'new' Star Trek movies, but the only thing I noticed him bring in was explosions.
1. The setting must be gritty. Star Wars needs to happen in the "frontier," and city settings and government intrigue are an anathema. (Apparently no one's ever set foot on the Death Star or Cloud City.)
2. Technology must be old. Shiny things are right out. (Again, apparently neither the Death Star nor Cloud City exist.)
3. The Force must remain mysterious. Ooh, mystery.
4. Cute things are bad. Gungans are right out. As is Anakin Skywalker. (Ewoks are okay though?)
...Basically, it's a load of nostalgia and action-flick obsession, and the letter's authors will be perfectly fine if the new Star Wars movies are indistinguishable from JJ Abrams's cookie-cutter take on Star Trek. Importantly, the authors completely failed to touch on any of the prequel trilogy's technical flaws—y'know, the incoherent plot, the stilted dialogue, the terrible directing, the miserable editing, the textbook cinematography. For anyone actually interested in understanding what's wrong with the prequel films, watch the Plinkett reviews of the three movies; there's some remarkable footage buried in there of the exact moment when George Lucas realized he had produced a heap of garbage called Episode I.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Dear JJ Abrams,
We heard you're making the next Star Wars movie. Please don't fuck it up like George Lucas did with the first two prequels.
Thanks,
Star Wars fans everywhere
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
The original Star Wars trilogy wasn't great by any objective measure I can think of, it was just a good product of its time with people involved in its production willing to share the characters and stories and build on the world.
What objective measures of art, or even film specifically, can you think of? If you say, "Amalgamation of movie critic and audience reviews" then I'll say "No, by those measures, the first Star Wars trilogy, and "The Empire Strikes Back" in particular, were great. Check out Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, or whatever if you like. They compare favorably with Casablanca, what do you want, Citizen Kane*?"
But I don't think that's what you meant. I believe that you just hoped we'd accept what you'd said, "The original Star Wars trilogy wasn't great by any objective measure," without thinking WTF an "objective measure" might mean in this case.
*Despite the fact that Citizen Kane is often called something like "best movie ever" and similar, it's actually entertaining -- you should watch it sometime.
I am not a crackpot.
Oh man! You could have least put {SPOILER ALERT] in the subject of your post.
Star Wars, when you see it when you're young, looks cool. A later analysis of the text shows that the writing is crap. People that were young when they saw the first films are not anymore, they see the second set of films after having developed a sense of taste, and realize that the writing was crap -- but just the new ones, the original ones that they loved for so many years must be perfect after all!
My wife and I just last week did a marathon watching of all six. She hasn't historically been a Sci Fi fan, and she thinks she saw ANH as a child but didn't really remember it. Overall, she enjoyed all six fine. She recognized some of the stilted handling of the romance and such, but in general she liked it fine. She had no preconceived notions or expectations going in.
She'll admit the original trilogy are better movies, but she liked them all fine. As a lifelong Star Trek/Star Wars fan myself, it's interesting seeing her perspective on it all since for her, they're just more movies. She doesn't have a lifetime of expectations or fandom or anything.
Are you fucking kidding me? The first one had it's plot holes but it was okay and some stuff only struck you after you walked out of the theater.
The second one was pathetic for anyone with half a brain during viewing. The beginning started well enough until the attack/secret mission, then it was all swiss cheese. Just for example: the head admiral is building a ship 3x the size of anything they have with next to no crew needed, and Scotty can fly to the shipyard from earth in a couple hours, and get in a construction patrol with no big problem.... but it's super secret? And this same admiral secretly puts Khan's men in missiles as some type of ransome rather than holding onto them himself?
And a million WTFs!
It was eyecandy, it was your typical (for the last 10-15 years) epic movie in the vein of Iron Man, etc with Star Trek simply as the setting. Pretty, glitzy, and uninspiring. It sucked to think about.
It made Avatar seem like a written masterpiece, because in reality man going native was a much older theme than Dances with Wolves and it held up under it's own weight.
Was the big problem with Star Wars that it didn't have enough action or glitz and glamor? I don't think so.
ST:2009 was the best film by Academy Awards, inflation-adjusted box office, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDB. Abrams blew it with ST:ID. While ST:2009 had great special effects, Abrams was so overly focused on special effects with his Trek-unprecedented $190m ST:ID budget that he forgot about the plot.
Lucas suffered a similar problem. Oh, Lucas didn't forget about the plot in the prequel trilogy -- in fact it was richer in the prequels. Lucas was so focused on special effects in the prequels that he left all the character development on the cutting room floor. The prequels would have been much better with the cut scenes that are available on the DVDs. Couldn't let the special effects budget go to waste on the cutting room floor, you know.
Resource constraints increase creativity. Thus, I sadly have little hope for Abrams Wars.
I was hoping someone would mention that...but your link didn't work for me.
try this 7 parter on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
The missile thing was indeed a plot hole, but all the rest is unfair critic, sorry.
Yes it is possible to heavily automate a ship whose sole purpose is to fight by Star Trek cannon. It is usually not done because most Federation ships are multi-role exploration ships.
And it is trivial to go from Earth to Jupiter in a couple hours by the same cannon as long as you have a warp capable ship.
Last but not least, the best way to make something secret is to make it in a hiding place few people know about, and you do that by heavily automating the dock too, which makes it a nice target for a genius engineer that is informed where it is.
All in all it was a very good movie with great actors and just a few plot roles (less than the average Star Trek movie for sure, and much less than the average Sci-fi movie)
Agreed. I saw the original Star Wars in theaters. I saw of the original trilogy in theaters, and then the special edition re-releases in theaters when I was in college. I still enjoyed the movies then just as I had before, then again, I had an absolutely cool Rocky Horror Picture Show type crowd in the audience. The movie could have been Manos: The Hands of Fate, and everyone would have been just as awesome.
Looking back, Star Wars really wasn't good except for the special effects. He is right about the frontier aspect, but more importantly, Star Wars was a combination of swashbuckling Errol Flynnn and Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns wrapped up in a WW2 war movie. There was a universality to the stories in the original trilogy. The conspiracy aspect of the new trilogy is very black helicopters and tin foil hat in nature, and seems to naturally fit in our era today. Whereas the original trilogy was largely a light heroic high fantasy adventure, the new trilogy was a dark tale about corrupt governments, secret alliances, and a shakespearean tragic hero. Darkness isn't bad; it is the standard now, but the dark serious aspect of the new trilogy is greatly hampered by the cuteness that appeared in Return of the Jedi and was turned up to 10. All the jokes C3P0 made during the first film was unbearable to me, more so than Jar Jar Binks.
But looking again at the original trilogy; the acting was largely cookie-cutter. The dialogue was intentionally comic bookish in order to make the film fit within its heritage. That's fine. There were a lot of sci-fi fantasy movies you could have watched then, and the acting was pretty much on par. The original trilogy's greatness comes in the nostalgia. I actually know adults who have never seen the originals, and upon watching them, thought "Meh, that was fun." And that's it. Star Wars was fun. And it was made more fun by the fact that we were kids when we saw it.
1. The setting must be gritty. Star Wars needs to happen in the "frontier," and city settings and government intrigue are an anathema. (Apparently no one's ever set foot on the Death Star or Cloud City.)
Both the Death Star and the Cloud City seem, to my mind, are outside the usual milieu for Star Wars action and development. The Death Star was hyper-polished and space-age minimalist, unlike the maximally baroque surfaces of the Millennium Falcon or the claptrap hulls of the rebel alliance X-Wings. In a sense, the Death Star was the home of the Other, the mirror world of the Empire that (arguably) was one part of a two-chambered narrative setting that was "A New Hope".
The Cloud City seemed even more a "respite" from the action of the Star Wars narrative. It was a political and environmental paradise and the Star Wars narrative resumed the moment Calrissian revealed he had purchased the safety and sovereignty of his city by selling Jabba Solo.
tl;dr: The Death Star and the Cloud City in some ways are exceptions that prove the rule that Star Wars "happens" on the frontier.
blog
I actually agree with your perspective on those matters as well, and was mostly just trying to be flippant. Certainly they're key to the tone of what makes Firefl—I mean, Star Wars—what it is.
However, the prequels committed much worse crimes than merely not being Star Wars-y, as Plinkett thoroughly demonstrates, and that's a much more important consideration. If the prequel trilogy had been made with a competent and coherent artistic vision, it wouldn't have caused such a nostalgia-hugging cringe response. I bet these same people would now be accepting Star Wars as a bigger universe than just the operatic romp encoded in episodes IV–VI. The Expanded Universe covers a ton of subject matter (admittedly, I haven't read any), not just gritty frontiersing, and yet it's still been successful as a book series. This is despite having Spooky Space Mitochondria and Senate debates for decades. Perhaps most surprisingly, Midi-chlorians have been Star Wars canon since 1977, before The Empire Strikes Back was even written.
That's not to say it wasn't good sense on Lucas's part to keep such exposition out of the actual films (especially the embarrassingly bad names—seriously? Darth Plagueis? You couldn't even remove the "e" so it would look like you were at least trying? Thank god he didn't get a shout-out or we'd never stop laughing), but they're not really barriers to competent or captivating cinema on their own. These other elements could most certainly have been put together into good pictures that could mesh naturally with the original trilogy, and they'd still feel like meaningful parts of the Star Wars world, despite the different tone, as demonstrated by the contrast between Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
My biggest plot hole is the damned "transwarp beaming" (especially to Kronos, quite a distance). I mean, seriously, what's the fucking point of a spaceship when I can just beam anything I like across the galaxy!? Oh, they're attacking us, okay let's just beam a torpedo to their home planet and see what happens...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
How hard does it have to be to see this?
They were all likable and they argued and sniped and competed with each other bitterly while also being friends.
Meanwhile, the next set of movies had essentially no character conflict at all except Jar Jar.
Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon
They fight.. then they sit.
And they sit.
And they sit.
And then they fight and Darth Maul wins.
We don't learn a thing about either of them.
meanwhile Jar Jar.. spearfishing Fruit irritates the hell out of the otherwise completely stoic Qui-Gon. "STOP!"
In fact, some of the only character building banter (such as the whether the welded door will hold or not between Anakin and Kenobi) are CUT from the film-- giving us more scenes of people not saying anything and being pulled up the sides of buildings on magic ropes.
Give us characters.
Have those characters say things.
Give them points of view.
Have them show ordinary emotions like...
Romantic Interest
Foolishness
Excitement
Overconfidence
Lust
Depression
Happiness
Enjoyment of food and drink.
Snarkiness
Rude statements they regret.
Make them believe they are the best and then throw them in with each other and see which ones are best and how they react to finding out they are not quite so good- or that they are good (confident? humble?)
One of the great things about Admiral Thrawn was that he was brilliant-- he kept figuring out every move the rebels made-- and then he made an error-- a reasonable error but he was so smart he couldn't believe he could make an error. Fantastic! The plot flowed FROM the character's traits. A very strong villain makes the hero's seem even stronger.
Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters
It's not about the scenary. Good writing with good characters can take place in a one room set and be fully engaging-- because we care.
The original 3 insulted each other. Almost constantly. And they also liked each other.
And the actors found ways to make the characters likable-- that's what actors do.
But actors need good writing to start with. Then they put little twists on the words or in the way those words or delivered-- the subtext.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Um ... no. We're still having trouble with automated docking :)
However since we're obviously discussing fiction the problem here is that it is inconsistent and a jarring change to the story, not whether it can be brought into the story with a bucketload of offscreen technobabble to excuse it after the credits have rolled.
It's just as bad as the teleport to Klingon homeworld thing, Klingons being seen as a pushover the first time they fight, starships landing on planets when they never did before - a plot that is full of pretty well nothing but twists on the viewers expectations until they have no fucking idea what the setting is supposed to be, which is a massive weakness because the only reason people are lining up to get tickets is because it is a well know setting.
Suspending belief is one thing. Having a story that goes in all directions where only the names are the same as what people remember is another and is just a cash grab on brand recognition for what should have been something original (or never made at all). Galaxy Quest is far more consistent even though in that setting all the Trek stuff is fictional.
Personally I just sat there hoping that Spock would cut the top off somebodies head or Khan would solve crimes - neither actor had anything to work with in Star Trek: The Franchise - vanishing into oblivion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHqjmlM3kxs
Funny little lens flare bit
Honest trailer for JJ's Star Trek..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTfBH-XFdSc
Funny star wars comparison at 2:09.
And ..... lens flare at 2:55
And... even more lens flares....
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Star Wars, when you see it when you're young, looks cool. A later analysis of the text shows that the writing is crap.
Well, the first one (IV: A New Hope) is strongest because he based it on a film from a master film maker: Akira Kurosawa. He loved the old movie serials, but he never intended it to be more than a one-off. (The 3rd draft title was: "The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller." It was originally released just titled "Star Wars." It didn't get the 'serialized' title until its re-release in "81, after the release of "Empire Strikes Back" in "80.)
Unfortunately, after the success of the first one (IV) he proceeded to make more - but he didn't have any more high quality story to steal from.
Of course - the film he based "Star Wars" on was Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress;" stealing everything from the two wacky robots/Japanese peasants telling the story, to the wipe transitions.
"Star Wars" was so close to "Hidden Fortress" that Lucas actually considered buying the rights to the film.
I only saw the second star trek movie and I noticed him bring in 15 minute warp trip back to earth from Klingon home planet, a space mobile phone capable of calling said earth-klingon distance, a rehashed plot but still manages to fuck even that up, a borderline joke call to spock, a fucking earth-klingon teleportation device(rendering all warp and spaceship technology obsolete)... making total tally for earth space forces something like 4 ships(which I suppose makes sense if everyone with any sensibility was using teleportation).
the other stuff in the movie that took you out of the star trek spirit were so fucked up that one barely remembers the opening scene with underwater enterprise and their grand plan to freeze a fucking volcano. at least breaking the prime directive was done straight at the beginning so that was out of the way and the rest of the plot didn't need to involve any aliens(except klingon, who appear just to provide a far away place of warriors, a company of who get shot in the eye by a single super human so not much of warriors and since it's fucking 15 minutes of a trip away from earth it doesn't matter that much. oh well at least we had some battle IN WARP SPACE).
fuck jj. really. fuck him in the ass with a chainsaw. and I'm not even a trek fan but fuck if you do a joke scifi why don't you add jokes and then why the fuck pay for star trek license... where the fuck did all the money go?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Put up new-khan next to old-khan and it all doesn't seem that bad really. Much like with STAR WARS, a lot of us have forgotten how genuinely cheesey and flawed the original source material is. In some ways, reboots can be more genuine because they interrupt whatever slow and steady distortion of the source material that may have occured in recent memory.
Young minds, fresh ideas...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I know, right? When we saw it in theater, and they panned across the models on the Admiral's desk, I said "That's a Dreadnought!" Daughter whispered "Ok, dad. Calm down."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.