@redeemer6666: Indeed, the "Noooooooooo" was completely unnecessary, and adding in the "new" Jabba scene in Ep. IV Special Edition just confused people because the gangster was made to look like a moron. Not at all like the scum we saw in Return of the Jedi. That and the Greedo shooting first nonsense were black eyes on what were otherwise very good remasters of the original trilogy.
Funny. No one thought Han was a cold-blooded killer in all the years before the Episode IV special edition. Just a survivor. People actually LIKED that quality about him.
There was absolutely NOTHING wrong with the way the scene was originally shot, and I am not saying that as a purist. Han and Greedo are at point blank range sitting at a table. It makes no sense to wait for a known enemy to shoot first under those conditions. That Greedo missed his shot in the remastered version is a subject for laughter, and not the good kind. Even Stormtroopers don't shoot that bad.
@virtuasega: Tell me about it. That should have been one of the most emotional scenes in the entire prequel trilogy, and Natalie Portman is certainly a good enough actress to have made the scene memorable with the right script. It was a huge missed opportunity, and the only really bad thing about Revenge of the Sith.
@OldDirtyCR: Wow. I wish I had read the comments yesterday so I could have responded sooner. It's kind of funny getting a lecture about writing, but I can excuse that since you have no idea who I am or the project I have been working on for years. Here's a “little” sample (hopefully the links are fixed) : https://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php?topic=10162.0
So, yes. I have some grasp on the art of writing fiction. And no, I do not think you have to have every last detail planned out in advance to write an effective story. (That can actually be a good thing since unexpected opportunities can and do come up in the telling of your story that are far removed from your initial outlines. That happened often in the writing of my Chrono Trigger novelization, and it turned out the better for it.) But where I take issue with Lucas isn't that he didn't have the details planned out, it's that he didn't even have a grasp of some of the important concepts and how the characters related to one another even deep into the production process. It's kind of important to know these things from the start so you don't end up trapping yourself later. You say that writing fiction is a constantly changing process that involves you getting new ideas as you go along and changing old ideas to fit the new ones, and this is true. But the time for this kind of exploration of ideas is in pre-production, not full production when you have committed yourself and are actually shooting scenes. It's possible to end up with a decent film while having extensive rewrites in the middle of production, but I don't think you'll find many great ones.
Anyway, I don't claim to be an expert on film, but I do know a few things about storytelling. An example of where a production can suffer from not having a clear idea of where you are going is the 2004-2009 Battlestar Galactica series, where the early seasons were among the best on television at the time, but the later seasons were widely panned for having a nonsensical story-arc. It was a good show, but it could have been a great show if the producers had taken the overall plot a little more seriously. And before you say that planning plots in advance doesn't work for television since you don't know how many seasons you'll actually be on the air, I point you to the example of Babylon 5, which was on the verge of cancellation for most of its five-year run and yet is considered one of the best science-fiction series ever produced because it was designed from the outset to have a five season story-arc. The producer wasn't willing to compromise on that vision even knowing the risks, and I greatly admire him for that.
@sapienecks: Watch the video attached to this article. It explains everything quite well. In short, the studio was already committed to begin production on a certain date, and Jackson was forced to make due with the ideas he had. He was not in a good position. All things considered, it's remarkable that the Hobbit films turned out as well as they did. Most films with this kind of behind-the-scenes drama turn into complete trainwrecks.
#1: That there will be a way to play the movie with future-tech.
#2: That it will be legal to view media that is 100 years old.
That last may sound ridiculous, but who can say what the relationship between media and government will be a century from now? There are plenty on both the conservative and progressive sides of the political fence that would like to censor the media for their own purposes. I can easily see a future in which the media is so tightly controlled that even viewing a piece of media from this era would be dangerous.
@cboye18: I grew up with the original trilogy, and I appreciate what Lucas tried to do with the prequels. He just believed his own hype and took on too much control. Lucas has obvious talent in art direction and many other aspects of filmmaking, but he is a terrible writer, and, unfortunately, the prequels are defined most by this inadequacy. They are by no means terrible films, but they could have been so much better than they were.
@ck02623: The actors aren't to blame. Ewan McGreggor in particular deserves a lot of credit for making his character memorable in spite of the terrible script he had to work with. Natalie Portman later got an Oscar, so you can't say she is a bad actress. She went through the prequels like a trooper. Even Hayden Christensen gets a bad rap, but he was the main character of the story, so he got the lion's share of the blame when the dialogue was (rightly) panned by critics. (Unlike the others, his acting career never recovered. It's sad. Who knows where he might be now if he had had great scripts to work with and a director who knew how to direct his actors?)
The more I hear from George Lucas, the more I think that he doesn't understand his own franchise - if he ever understood it. Looking back, it seems as though Lucas was just making things up as he went and didn't have a clear vision from the outset of the kind of story he wanted to tell. For example, the original title of the first Star Wars film was: “Adventures of Luke Starkiller, As Taken From the Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars”. Note that the title says "Saga 1". There is no indication that this was meant to be a follow-up to a previous unwritten saga. It was supposed to be the beginning of a new mythology. Also, the original title for Return of the Jedi was "Revenge of the Jedi", and George Lucas changed it late in production when he realized that revenge is not a Jedi concept. I find it strange that the author of the entire Star Wars saga did not consider this obvious contradiction to his own story from the beginning, and he already had two films under his belt.
Lucas also loses credibility when he claims that Star Wars is a soap opera while the opening crawl of Episode I (which he had full creative control of) speaks of galactic taxation disputes. That doesn't sound like a "soap opera about family problems" to me. We didn't even see Anakin Skywalker until a good way into the film, and the part he plays in the overall plot of Phantom Menace isn't that significant. Lucas was clearly trying to create a larger world for the Star Wars universe in response to the Expanded Universe, which exploded into popularity in the 1990's. George Lucas is nothing if not a master of marketing, and he saw a golden opportunity to bring Corusant (a staple of the early EU novels, but never once mentioned in the original trilogy) to the big screen. Fans wanted to see that, so he gave it to them. NOW he claims that it's not about making something for the fans, as Disney wants, but "All I wanted to do was tell a story of what happened--it started here and it went there"? Which is it, George?
It seems to me that everything that George Lucas says about Star Wars these days is meant to distract us from a fundamental truth: He had no idea what he was doing from a storytelling perspective. Making the Star Wars universe bigger in scope from the original trilogy was the right move, Lucas just didn't have the writing chops to pull it off. It took The Clone Wars TV series (which Lucas had little direct involvement in) to make sense and do justice to the era of Anakin Skywalker.
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