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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.'"
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.
I've only seen the first of the 'new' Star Trek movies, but the only thing I noticed him bring in was explosions.
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!
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.
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.
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.