Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Oh.

He wins.

*looks back to Hansen*

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Hey, don't look at me! It's not my job to explain this movie!

But actually, having just reviewed the scene in question, I have to retract my proposed explanation.

He's right, I'm wrong. Vader is obviously referring to the fact that they just failed to retrieve the plans.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

FireFighter214 wrote:

He sets it up as the very first thing you see in the movie.  "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." He was saying this takes place in a universe that you are completely unfamiliar with, so almost anything is fair game.

Exactly - it's just another way of saying "Once Upon A Time..." in hopes of setting the audience up properly to receive a fairy tale, and thus not question the magical bits when they happen.  Because in a fairy tale we accept that magic is everywhere, it's a given.

That's all Star Wars really is - a fairy tale about a hero who rescues a princess from an evil sorceror and saves the kingdom, just with a Buck Rogers gloss laid on top of it.   

The real genius of Lucas was in coming up with the idea of doing a movie like that, smack dab in the middle of the cynical post-Nam American '70's.  The idea of a good ol' fashioned fantasy movie of heroes and villains was so old, it was new again.     

It was a crazy idea, but it worked out and then he lived happily ever after. 

The end.  Now go to bed.

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I cracked up when I saw the title:  Star Wars.  Dammit. 

        I’ve listened to your Star Wars’ (plural) commentaries and have noticed one or two instances of Lucas bashing in there.  I agree with it.  Mostly because of what ended up on screen when he had full control of the process, and a document titled “The Secret History of Star Wars” that examines the saga using early interviews and scripts that contradict the more published and official history of Lucas writing the saga.  There’s a pdf of the book around, and it was eventually published.

    That text lays the successes of the first two films (I haven’t seen ROTJ in many years, and don’t think much of it) at the feet of the few capable people that happened to be around and told George to stuff it.  Any thoughts? Agree/Disagree?  Is the Secret History just a better written version of Supershadow (well worth googling if you’re not familiar with the name)?  Does Lucas have any talents/strengths or was he just lucky to have some competent friends?

Discuss.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Oh, and I appreciate the love for Brian Daley's Han Solo adventures. They are some of my favorite fun reads. I had gotten so far as to plotting a sequel to the series, but then all these star wars books started coming out and somebody else wrote one.  Oh well.

He also wrote the radio drama of the trilogy; A New Hope runs almost six hours.  They provide more of a back story for Luke and Leia, and fill in a few other storytelling gaps, such as the one Trey mentioned.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Fadhmir wrote:

Brian Daley...also wrote the radio drama of the trilogy; A New Hope runs almost six hours.  They provide more of a back story for Luke and Leia, and fill in a few other storytelling gaps, such as the one Trey mentioned.

The radio dramas fill in quite a bit of background, particularly ANH; well worth obtaininghttp://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=dowinfromovco-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1565111656 a copy.

I actually made edited versions of each, so that the whole thing plays at once; e.g., ANH now runs just under 5 hours as an Audiobook file.  It's simple enough to do in iTunes and/or Audacity.

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I wanna adress the idea that there's somehow this missing scene where Luke comes to believe that he even has the force. Sure, he blocks a couple of laser blasts on the Falcon, but Han sits right there watching and justifiably calls it luck.

From that point on, what does Luke ever really do with the force? At the end, he presses a button at exactly the right time, so accurately that even a computer couldn't get it right, and he only does that because he believes the disembodied voice of a dead crazy old man enough to "let go" in that one moment.

The whole story is Luke coming to believe what this mentor character was trying to tell him all along. It's not a moment they skipped. That's the movie.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I'm getting to this one late 'cause I just now this very minute discovered you can do an RSS thing with the forum (hi, I'm an idiot).

I think it's fair to call out the whole "Luke has magical powers" thing. Tim's right, that his tapping into those powers is the whole arc of the movie, but at the same time, it's never given more than a handwave. Some people can use the Force, and some can't, and that's just an axiom of the universe. It's not much of a stretch to say it's hereditary, given Luke's parentage, but if I remember right that's only hinted at in the movies, and only by Luke himself in Jedi. "The Force is strong in my family," he says, or something like that.

It's far easier to point and laugh at Han's line that he's never seen anything to make him believe in the Force, given that he would have been a teenager during the Clone Wars when armies of Jedi Knights swept across the galaxy. But hey, maybe he was just especially cynical. A flock of angels could sweep down from the sky and give everybody free cupcakes and lattes right now, and a lot of people (myself probably included) would declare the whole thing a viral marketing hoax by Starbucks, so who knows.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Jeffery Harrell wrote:

It's far easier to point and laugh at Han's line that he's never seen anything to make him believe in the Force, given that he would have been a teenager during the Clone Wars when armies of Jedi Knights swept across the galaxy.

Not to mention Admiral Motti, who mouthed off about the sad and useless Jedi religion TO DARTH VADER'S FRICKIN FACE and then seemed surprised that Vader tried to choke a bitch.    He was certainly old enough to know better, too, if all that Jedi backstory were true.     

Of course, when the OT was made, all the hooey about the Jedi being the UN of the galaxy a few years earlier hadn't been thought up yet.

Which is why Jedi were far more interesting in the original trilogy, when they were set up as rare and mysterious practitioners of a secretive sect that the average Han in the street believed was just a fairytale.   

But then the prequels tried to get us to buy that only a few years before the events in the original trilogy, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a damn Jedi because they were more or less in charge of the whole galaxy.  Uhhh, what?    That doesn't make any sense AT ALL.

So the prequels were already in trouble before they ever shot a frame, because the very concept didn't match with what the original trilogy had set up.   Shoot, Luke doesn't even know what a lightsaber IS when Ben first hands him one.  If Jedi were that big a deal and then they got wiped out in a galaxy-wide massacre the year Luke was born... you'd think somebody would have mentioned that to him already.  I know Tattooine is supposed to be a backward planet, but goddam.

As with many things, the more detail we got about Jedi, the less interesting they became.  The rare and mysterious hermits in the original trilogy who could do - well, who knew what they could do?   Maybe anything! - were revealed as stodgy Vatican Police who settled trade disputes.   Seriously?

That'd be MY rewrite of the prequels - well, it's where I would start anyway.   I'd have left the Jedi the way they were originally designed. Instead of traffic cops, I'd have kept them in the shadows, assassin/priests who did the government's dirty work mostly unseen, unless you were unlucky enough to see one.

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

When I first saw eps 1 and 2, I thought they were setting up the Jedi as a decadent and proud order so lost in their own navel-gazing that they were headed for a tragic fall. And past all the awkward writing and overpowering VFX, I thought that was a bold move, to make them flawed and arrogant rather than god-like.

Except they never got their comeuppance in part 3. There's a sort of head-fake toward Palpatine blaming the Jedi for a coup that never happened, but that's all we got. I would rather the Jedi HAD tried to assassinate the chancellor, doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and being galactically discredited because of it. Some historical allegories would have been uncomfortably fun too, maybe throwing in a little dialogue to allege that the Jedi use the blood of human children as part of their dark rituals inside that mysterious temple.

Not sure how that would have worked in a movie, though. It might be great in a novel, but too expository for a film. I dunno.

(Pre-coffee edit for clarity: Yes, I remember the whole Mace Windu fight thing, much as I've tried to put it behind me. I guess what I meant was that I wish the Jedi had spent two movies smug and overconfident, only to realize what was up and be driven to the point of desperation by it. And that they'd decided not to try to arrest the chancellor or play by the rules, but that he just had to be flat-out murdered for the good of the galaxy. Plan backfires, Jedi discredited, blah blah blah.)

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2010-03-20 13:07:34)

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Trey wrote:

But then the prequels tried to get us to buy that only a few years before the events in the original trilogy, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a damn Jedi because they were more or less in charge of the whole galaxy.  Uhhh, what?    That doesn't make any sense AT ALL.

I can almost buy it if we assume there's only a few hundred Jedi in a universe of hundreds of inhabited worlds, if in fact that one building is really all the Jedi have so they are legend for most people. We the viewer spend every minute of all three films with a Jedi on screen so naturally our take is going to be Jedi centric. All that was needed was some outside context, which we didn't get from Lucas.

I write stories! With words!
http://www.asstr.org/~Invid_Fan/

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Yeah, that's the missing piece - the prequels certainly seem to suggest that everybody knows about Jedi, they've got their own office building downtown in the capital of the Galaxy.

If the prequels had only suggested the Jedi were a secret to the general public, the basic plot could have stayed exactly the same.     QuiGon and ObiWan could have done everything they do, just not openly as Jedi...     

"Hey, there are two guys in the lobby, they're kinda creepy and calm and they're freaking me out."
"Crap, maybe they're Jedi."
"Oh come on, Jedi aren't even real.  Are they?"

If it had been established that the Jedi did their thing in secret, and then were just as secretly exterminated, it would have been perfectly understandable that twenty years later folks like Han and Motti would believe Jedi weren't that big a deal and maybe never existed at all.

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

FixedR6 wrote:

It's like watching films with angry, cynical chipmunks in my head.

I'd watch that.

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

BrianFinifter wrote:
FixedR6 wrote:

It's like watching films with angry, cynical chipmunks in my head.

I'd watch that.

Wrong thread?

Posted from my iPad
http://trek.fm

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Uh, yeah. How the hell did that happen?

Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

BrianFinifter wrote:

Uh, yeah. How the hell did that happen?

The Force is strong with you...

I write stories! With words!
http://www.asstr.org/~Invid_Fan/

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Invid wrote:
BrianFinifter wrote:

Uh, yeah. How the hell did that happen?

The Force is strong with you...

"I got a bad feeling about this."

"Back to the Future is great, and if you disagree then you're Hitler." -Dorkman
"You sucking is canon!" -Brian

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

a interesting note on the alumium falcon, part of that oddness of the design that was not used was that it was supposed to rotate once out of orbit to a sun fish like position so the cockpit would ride at the top and the guns would cover the sides rather then top bottom. but like star treks TNG original romulan ships, aliens 4, planet of the apes they realized that vertical large ships didn't work too well. But this is still part of the design and influenced the B wings.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I waited aaaaaaall the way thru the stinking prequels to see that toy ship luke plays with in the garage. The one his "father" flew in the clone wars! Where the hell did it go?

You'de think they would at least watch just one frame of the original, but then it had graffiti all over it and maybe they couldn't bring themselves to look at the defication...

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Obi-Wan said that the Jedi were the "guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic". They couldn't be that unless they were prevalent. I always saw them as being a large force.
The reason that Motti mouthed off was probably because the Jedi were supposed to have been completely wiped out by then and he figured Vader was overrated. As far as he was concerned the Stormtroopers easily took the Jedi out despite their "sorcerer ways". Han probably felt the same way. No one had seen a Force user (except Vader)  in around 18 years.
Also, The Jedi weren't an army. They mostly led the Clones as Generals and were seen in groups of two for the most part. They were more like warrior ambassadors.

And to 3pointedit. When did Luke say that the model was what his father fought in?

Last edited by fardawg (2010-07-07 22:17:40)

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I am not a Lucas apologist in the least, but I find it slightly less unbelievable than I used to that Lucas had at least the thought that Vader might be Luke's father by the time they shot ANH.
In the old scripts, "Annikin" Starkiller's father was mostly machine and sacrificed himself for his son. The character that became Vader turned to the good side by the end of the script and helped the Luke character. It seems likely that Lucas combined these ideas when he made Vader part machine and got rid of the father.

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Someone said in he commentary that Luke fighting Vader to avenge his father was the hero's journey and implied that Vader being his father wasn't part of the hero's journey. Well... Actually Campbell said the following regarding the step known as the "Atonement with the Father".
"The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands – and the two are atoned."
Vader as Luke's father perfectly fits the Journey.

And Lucas didn't meet Campbell until after the Trilogy was complete.
Here is what Lucas said about Campbell's influence.
(from Campbell's authorized biography. quoted from Wiki)
"...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"

Last edited by fardawg (2010-07-11 06:16:48)

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

This is more a comment on the Episode 1-3 commentaries, but the idea of a "Chosen One" goes back to the early drafts of Star Wars. There was a prophecy quoted at the beginning about the "Son of the Suns". Lucas just went back to that idea for the prequels.
I like the idea that by the time of ANH Yoda and Ben figure they should keep the prophecy from Luke because that last one didn't go so well wink

Last edited by fardawg (2010-07-07 20:51:23)

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

Hmm... read the 'Secret History of Star Wars', that will lay to rest any doubts that Vader was never even dreamt as being Luke's father until ESB was being written.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. - Carl Sagan

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Re: Star Wars (Not-so-special edition.)

I have read some of Secret History. I don't see it "laying to rest" anything more than that Vader wasn't Luke's father the whole time and that Darth Vader = Dark Father was BS. I have no problem with the idea that Lucas didn't want anyone to know that he was toying with the idea.
Notice I said, "THOUGHT that Vader MIGHT be Luke's father by the time they shot ANH." I don't know that he had decided that it was the case by then.

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