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George Lucas's Terrible Idea for Star Wars Episodes 7-9 (indiewire.com)
In an interview with James Cameron, George Lucas reveals what he'd planed for the final three Star Wars films:
"[The next three 'Star Wars' films] were going to get into a microbiotic world," he told Cameron. "There's this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force...." In terms of his storytelling, Lucas regarded individuals as "vehicles for the Whills to travel around in... And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force."
Lucas is confident that had he kept his company, the Whills-focused films "would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did 'Phantom Menace' and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told."
Lucas acknowledges in the interview that "Everybody hated it in 'Phantom Menace' [when] we started talking about midi-chlorians," prompting one Ars Technica editor to add "Because it was a really dumb idea." He speculates that if the final three Star Wars movies followed Lucas's original plan, "Imagine, if you can, our heroes shrinking down like the Fantastic Voyage to go meet some midi-chlorians."
Knowing Lucas's plans for the franchise "should make every Star Wars fan send a note of gratitude to whoever at Disney decided to buy the franchise and take it away and out from under Lucas' control."
Lucas is confident that had he kept his company, the Whills-focused films "would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did 'Phantom Menace' and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told."
Lucas acknowledges in the interview that "Everybody hated it in 'Phantom Menace' [when] we started talking about midi-chlorians," prompting one Ars Technica editor to add "Because it was a really dumb idea." He speculates that if the final three Star Wars movies followed Lucas's original plan, "Imagine, if you can, our heroes shrinking down like the Fantastic Voyage to go meet some midi-chlorians."
Knowing Lucas's plans for the franchise "should make every Star Wars fan send a note of gratitude to whoever at Disney decided to buy the franchise and take it away and out from under Lucas' control."
To be sure, it's a pretty stupid idea. But one can almost understand where he was coming from. Anything else, including the Extended Universe, would just have been variations on the pre-existing themes. New dark lord and/or war lord rises, picks up where Palpatine and Vader left off, and a ragtag band of rebels goes to war again.
You know, just like what's actually happening in the main Episode films.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The first two were made with passion. The rest are chasing dollars and it shows.
Call me crazy, but I have a (morbid?) fascination of giving George Lucas a budget, isolating him from the fan community and press, and simply leaving him to his own devices to produce the Star Wars movies he visions.
Judging by the changes he's made to them already, I wouldn't expect them to be good, but nonetheless, it would certainly be interesting to see.
subtle dig at the boring natural of the new movies, or just bad editing...
Everything since then has been total crap.
It's dumb in the same way the ending to Mass Effect 3 was dumb - introducing new elements into the storyline, right at the end, and shoehorning them in as some great answer to the conflict you created, without actually resolving the conflicts themselves - just dissolving them behind this lame new scrappy-do thought you just had.
The question is though... why did they commit the same error several times over with the NEW sequels also? Turning the tables upside down over and over, never actually explaining the philosophies, but just shaming any previous understanding and flippantly killing characters for drama. The premadonna Mary Sue character suddenly inventing lightspeed warfare, out of all the galaxy. Malus ex machina at every turn.
Listen - I understand that Star Wars isn't high cinema. I know it comes inspired from cheesy serial films, and pulpy hammy sci-fi hero stories. But for a film series worth THAT many billions of dollars, you'd think they'd at least want to hold to the odd integrity of the characters at least a little.
But for some reason, every writer that picks up the series wants to mind-swap the characters with some passion play for their favorite philosophical idea - make Luke and Han REALLY be talking about economic theory, or transcendence or whatever.
I definitely empathize with Mark Hamill leaving the role in open disgust. There were an endless number of ways any of this could have played out - it's just annoying to never see any sense of the original characters playing out, just their image used as crude tools to give a feeling, then switch message.
That's kind of how things roll out in big business though. Those that best posturing about being able to produce a thing are usually going to outmaneuver those that have a better plan, but are posturing less.
That's show business.
Ryan Fenton
Episode VII: The Whills To Power
Episode VIII: Triumph of the Whills
Episode IX: The Last Whills and Testaments
To be sure, it's a pretty stupid idea. But one can almost understand where he was coming from. Anything else, including the Extended Universe, would just have been variations on the pre-existing themes.
I dunno about the "anything else" part.
I read a story somewhere about a hypothetical origin of the Sith, being a temple on a long-abandoned planet somewhere that still held a sort of sentient psychic malevolence. A story revolving around finding this out (the origins of the Sith), tracking down the planet, and the subsequent battle to destroy it might be pretty interesting. The original Sith don't need to be even remotely human, and could make for some creative backstory.
Part of good storytelling is creativity and color - things that are simply interesting to find out. Add a little surprise and unexpected development, enforce interior logic, and you've got the makings of a good movie.
Like *that's* never been done before...
The guy comes up with some great ideas and should be paid to create storyboards - the concept of the pod race on Tatooine (stressing concept here, not necessary what was in TPM), the sabre duel between Kenobi/Jinn and Maul.
But - those ideas should be handed over to a competent writer to be used or discarded as need be. So midiclorians would have been nipped in the bud, and the Ewoks would have been limited to being the cuddly native teddy bears of Endor. Said screenwriter could have then gone with the first idea for VI, where it was escaped Wookie slaves that defeated "an entire legion" of the Emperor's best troops.
Same goes for Peter Jackson, who's Lucas complex metastasized after the LOTR trilogy. Every time I hear Guillermo del Toro's name I cry inside that he wasn't able to direct The Hobbit, instead of PJ.
I have a feeling that a movie about this would be shit.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Which is why after they separate everything Star Wars goes to shit. Lucas is a hack, an needed someone to control him and give him direction. Without it what you get is Jedi onward: garbage.
Science Fiction was badly damaged by the space cowboy shit that Lucas and his gang brought. The new wave SF of the 70s was awesome: Ellison, Pohl, Ballard, Sturgeon, LeGuin, etc.
The Star Wars crap sucked the oxygen out of the SF subculture. It took decades to recover (Meiville, Vandermeer, etc.)
Sorry, but I'm a Jar Jar fan. The Force channels power through his clumsiness. That's rare in cinema. (Scooby Doo & Shaggy don't count because not backed by supernatural powers.)
Table-ized A.I.
Oh dear. And here you are, all out of tissue. Not to worry, I'm sure they can patch you up in your next cognitive therapy session.
I dunno - It really is a different tack, with Disney expounding on Lando's pansexuality. i mean, whatever two consenting adults do is cool, but I really can't get into a character that wants too have sex with my little girl or my mailbox or my lawnmower.
Disney trying to branch off into where characters want to stick their pecker or fig is an annoying and irrelevant side trip that wrecks their story line.
Mostly because it turns the movies into clumsy propaganda pieces. "The Last Jedi" was exactly that Apparently Solo wasn't actually too bad, but in the aftermath of TLJ, Kennedy et al told the old fans they were not needed, and called them misogynists. and other derogatory names.So it tanked
Perhaps when dealing with people who give you their discretionary money for entertainment, you shouldn't tell them you don't need them. https://screenrant.com/star-wa...
And make no mistake - The Last Jedi has a specific third wave feminst agenda "Offers the harsh condemnation of mansplaining we need in 2017" https://www.vanityfair.com/hol...
No problem if you want to make political films catering to third wave feminists. But so far, they are happy that the films are becoming openly misandryic. But t appears the ladies they now consider their target audience neither watch the films, nor do they buy the promotional mechandise.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The Force Awakens showed that Disney has the ability to make a movie that looks and feels like a Star Wars movie ought to. Its plot wasn't the best, but I cut them a lot of slack, figuring that movie had a crushing load to carry (it had to not fail, and it had to not have all the fans hate it) so it made sense that the plot was loaded up with things that we'd seen before.
I was looking forward to the next one... and then it was The Last Jedi which is just a bleak mess. Oh well.
Disney can manage the look and the feel. They just need to get a good story and let it play out properly on screen and we could yet get watchable Star Wars movies.
So now we find out that George Lucas's big vision was to do a new trilogy about mystical creatures being the power source for The Force? He still thinks midichlorians was a good idea, and he wants to use that for the new trilogy? That actually sounds worse than The Last Jedi to me.
George Lucas seems to be getting worse over time. I thought ewoks were kind of annoying... then, Jar Jar Binks... now "Whills"? I'm glad that didn't happen.
The original Star Wars movie was actually pretty terrible in its rough cut. Deft editing saved it, and Lucas had three people helping him sort out the edit. Then Empire Strikes Back he handed off script and directing to other people, who did a great job. Then in the prequel trilogy, he wrote and directed and what we got was exactly what he intended... and it wasn't great. He needed other people pushing back on his bad ideas and helping him in the areas where he is weak, and he didn't get that. His first idea went straight to screen and he was never forced to rework and improve. Lazy directing went straight to the screen. Nobody had the power to say "no" to him. Too bad.
P.S. If you haven't seen this, and you're a Star Wars fan, this is totally worth 20 minutes of your time: How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit
P.P.S. Oh wow, "Journal of the Whills" was part of George Lucas's original name for the movie! If you watch that video linked above, you can spot it on the picture of the first page of the script.
But even if George Lucas insists that this Whills/midiclorians thing was his original plan, I don't buy it. He was making things up as he went along. I'm certain that the plot point of Luke and Leia being siblings wasn't invented in time for the first movie, or else they would have probably skipped her giving him a peck on the cheek for luck; original concept art had everyone armed with glowing swords, not just a few characters; etc. A lot of what we love was added during the process of making the movies, and much of it came from creative contributions from people who were not George Lucas.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm tired of people saying this would've been horrible. Bad ideas are turned into good stories just as easily as good ideas are turned into bad stories. Hppens all the time. It's all about the writing & ability to make something enjoyable. A good director and screenwriter can make any idea work for a large audience. Personally I would like to have seen how this would've played out. Would've taken Star Wars in a fresh new direction, even if it didn't seem like Star Wars. Couldn't have been worse than The Last Jedi.
George Lucas continues to prove, no, INSISTS upon proving, that he is the worst person to handle his own properties. He comes up with kickass ideas, but, left too long in his hands, he finds incredible ways to completely screw them up. At a certain point, you have to stop painting, otherwise, it just looks like a mess.
Is it just me that find Star Wars tedious, badly-written shite?
I mean, I wasn't around when the first came out. Maybe I missed the cult-train on that, but it was never anything more than a poor sci-fi movie to me. Not even "comparing the technology", it still had tons more CGI etc. in it than anything else for years afterwards, but I never found anything about the movie compelling. The "classic" sequels were just more of the same dross. People in teddy-bear costumes. It was like a very bad episode of Star Trek, after the budget had run out, but then tacked on with expensive CGI.
Then a lapse in time, in which possibly the "best parts" of the whole thing came out - the video games. The old DOS X-Wing / Tie-Fighter games were great. Because it was the cool bit of the films put into your hands with the sound effects.
I literally haven't even seen any of the "prequels" all the way through. I couldn't stand them. It was more of the same but with some decent-quality camera work and costuming, but stuck alongside the old dross.
I honestly can't fathom what's interesting about the storyline at all. It's a Star-Trek episode at best, in terms of concept. The early films remind me of poor 80's things like Flash Gordon. Fabulous and cultish but if you watch with anything approaching a modern critical eye, they are utter trash with a soundtrack
And it died off. In the 90's, Star Wars died and was just history, and became unpopular. Then it revamped and everyone went mad for it again.
I'm a geek and I'm often assumed to be both a Trekkie and a Star Wars guy and I honestly can't stand either. I can suffer watching an episode but I'm smirking to myself the whole time (and Patrick Stewart face-palming too).
I honestly don't get why. The acting is poor. The CGI is ruined by the crap (whether that's CGI characters or the complete lack of consistency by using CGI and bear-suits in the same scene). The storyline is quite literally "good versus evil". The dialogue is either twee or literally so dull I switch off (reminds me of parts of the Matrix sequels).
I don't get what's there to make a multi-million-dollar franchise. I certainly don't get what's in the plotline to actually get upset about.
I would honestly rather watch Spaceballs on loop.
"New Star wars are too similar" vs "Prequels aren't similar enough"
Friggin' pick one already.
And if you think there's a third route, "make them just similar enough", enjoy another twenty Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
If you think you can write a better Star Wars, hurry up and do it already.
I dunno - It really is a different tack, with Disney expounding on Lando's pansexuality. i mean, whatever two consenting adults do is cool, but I really can't get into a character that wants too have sex with my little girl or my mailbox or my lawnmower. ...
Disney trying to branch off into where characters want to stick their pecker or fig is an annoying and irrelevant side trip that wrecks their story line.
Apparently Solo wasn't actually too bad
You admit to not seeing Solo, so I'll educate rather than berate: At no point in the movie does Lando even seem to be pansexual. His malfunctioning copilot droid thinks Lando loves "her", but that's it.