Quote:Original post by stimarco

What the hell-? Are you _deaf_ or something?

Both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of The Jedi" were co-written with Lawrence Kasdan. Hell, Lucas didn't even _direct_ ESB, let alone write the screen play.

Now go watch it again. Properly. With your brain switched on. To suggest that ESB is even remotely as poorly written as Eps 1 and 2 is... well, you'd have to be nuts to seriously believe that. Sure, it's not literary SF, but it's still entire orders of magnitude better scripted and better acted than the first two prequels.

(Again, I must stress that I have not yet seen Ep.3.)

From a purely technical perspective, the original films are way above the current set.

Why?

Because they don't start off with long tracts of exposition about bloody _taxes_. They're straightforward good-versus-evil stories. Flash Gordon in Panavision and Technicolor. They never pretended to be great literature, and they were all the better for it.

The prequels made the mistake of missing the point. Lucas tried to make the storyline much deeper and more complex -- political intrigue, trade wars and all that crap -- when all the alleged target audience really gives a shit about is seeing loads of serious ass-whoopin' and CGI pyrotechnics. A simple "OMG! The Evil Empire has built a Big Fucking Gun and is pointing it at my homeworld/rebel base/whatever" worked fine in the original trilogy. Granted, some variation would have been nice, but the fact that Lucas got away with ending each film in much the same way -- by blowing up a Death Star -- clearly proves the point.

Star Wars is a high-octane FPS, not an RPG. "Doom" didn't have the world's deepest plot, but it had just enough story to provide the motivation you needed to go in with all guns blazing.

The _why_ was never all that important in Star Wars. It's the _what_ and the _how_ that made the originals so much fun. Lucas forgot this and the prequels just don't work anywhere near as well because of it. The pants story keeps getting in the way of the action.

Nicely said. But I would say that people were genuinely interested in Luke Skywalker farm boy, Princess Leia cinnamon roll hair do, Han Solo swashbuckler et al. And there were a lot of memorable one liners - wise cracks basically - that quickly made their way into the culture. "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.", "Use the Force, Luke!", and so on. Campy but effective nevertheless.

Quote:http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=286686
This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right: it's better than "Star Wars." "Revenge of the Sith" ranks with "The Empire Strikes Back" (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle.

Ok, there's gotta be some dirty dealing going on in here.

Quote:Original post by LessBread

Quote:Original post by stimarco

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Quote:
Later that same post...

Nicely said. But I would say that people were genuinely interested in Luke Skywalker farm boy, Princess Leia cinnamon roll hair do, Han Solo swashbuckler et al. And there were a lot of memorable one liners - wise cracks basically - that quickly made their way into the culture. "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.", "Use the Force, Luke!", and so on. Campy but effective nevertheless.

Indeed, but there's a very good reason for that. Partly, this is because "Star Wars: A New Hope" is ultimately a retelling of an Akira Kurosawa flick called "The Hidden Fortress". (Read the synopsis here. As the website points out, it does seem suspiciously familiar as storylines go.)

But the core of the film is The Campbellian Mythic Structure.

(Incidentally, Lucas has admitted to both of these himself.)


Back in the 1960s, Joseph Campbell went on a research binge and wrote a series of weighty tomes on the world's myths and legends.

And then he wrote "The Hero With A Thousand Faces". This book was the culmination of his research and it basically picks out the common factors in all those myths and legends -- the 'key ingredients' if you will -- and, using Jungian psychology as the basis for his analysis, he proceeds to describe the common "Archetypes" and "Events" that can be found in almost every story that has stood the test of time.

Now, Campbell writes books that read like a doctoral thesis: they're dry, academic and not really aimed at the casual reader. So, while his book was an important work, it took Christopher Vogler to read it and convert it into 'English For Hollywood'.

Vogler's "The Hero's Journey" is the book you want to read. And when you do, you'll never be able to watch the original "Star Wars" in quite the same way again.

Why? Because Vogler's first iteration of his book -- it was initially a long memo that got circulated through the industry -- appeared shortly before Lucas began work on Star Wars. Lucas admitted that Campbell's research was a starting point for his screenplay.

And this is why, when I watch "Star Wars: A New Hope", I sit there and mentally tick each box on my list.

The opening act doesn't even try to change the *order* of the key events from Vogler's original book: You get the Challenge, the Refusal, the turning point when Luke finally Crosses The Threshold, and so on. Obi Wan Kenobi practically screams "Mentor Archetype" at the camera. It is *literally* textbook stuff. All the Archetypes are there too. I actually find the film hard to watch now because of this. I can 'see the strings', so to speak. (I'm a writer myself.)

The film is good because Lucas followed a formula and used Kurosawa (and John Ford's "The Searchers") as the basis for the core story. It works. It has that 'mythic' quality. Because, ultimately, it _is_ a myth for the cinema age.

The problem with the prequels is that Lucas just sucks at dialogue. For all the mythic qualities of the original movie, the fact is that the dialogue is just plain dire. It has its moments, but you'd expect the occasional good line just on the basis of statistical chance. But it's the breakneck pacing that really made the film, because it prevents us from thinking too hard about the characterisation. Such rapid-fire editing and pace was innovative at the time.

Lucas isn't a truly bad director. Ed Wood was far, far worse. But, compared to someone like Spielberg, who plays an audience's emotions like a piano virtuoso, he's not a _great_ director. What he is is a great showman -- a great _producer_.

--
Sean Timarco Baggaley

Quote:Original post by Nemesis2k2
My personal opinion: the emperor wasn't pretending. I really think Mace would've beaten him if Anakin hadn't been there. After Anakin "disarmed" him, the emperor had a free shot, and he threw everything he had left at him. Of course, that indicates that Mace might have been more powerful than Yoda, which not a lot of people would accept. Of course, yoda could stop the lightning with nothing but his hands, while Mace required his lightsaber.

Mace Windu is not the most powerful , but his saber techniques , the "Vaapad " is the deadliest that coupled with his force gift made him at least disarm the emperor. To Quote Mace himself

Quote:I can see shatterpoints.

The sense is not sight, but 'see' is the closest word Basic has for it: it is a perception, a feel of how what I look upon fits into the Force, and how the Force binds it to itself and to everything else . . . . The Force shows me strengths and weaknesses, hidden flaws and unexpected uses. It shows me vectors of stress that squeeze or stretch, torque or shear; it shows me how patterns of these vectors intersect to form the matrix of reality.

Put simply: when I look at you through the Force, I can see where you break.

From the clone wars book "Shatterpoints"

Kind of brilliant how, Mace "Shatterpoint" Windu shatters the window right before he disarms Palpatine

Quote:Original post by boolean
Just went back and watched Episode four and five again tonight. It's amazing just how much Luke is like Anakin, in the way they always feel like they are being held back, they never listen to anyone and think they have everything under control. One of the other many things that made me go 'ooh!' when watching them again was how Darth Vader tries to convince Luke to join him so they can overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy together, just like he tried to convince Padame.

I thought that was pretty nifty [smile]

I don’t think that Vader was ever trying to tell Luke that they should overthrow the Emperor. I think he was just saying that he has the potential, so either he must join the dark side or die. In Return of the Jedi, Vader still seemed loyal to Emperor. He told Luke that he must obey and he prevented Luke from hitting the Emperor with the saber.

Quote:Original post by ManaStone
I don’t think that Vader was ever trying to tell Luke that they should overthrow the Emperor. I think he was just saying that he has the potential, so either he must join the dark side or die. In Return of the Jedi, Vader still seemed loyal to Emperor. He told Luke that he must obey and he prevented Luke from hitting the Emperor with the saber.

That was what I thought at first, too. His 'together we can rule the galaxy as father and son' sounded like he was just trying to trick Luke into giving up, but GL's commentary on the TESB DVD is very specific about this. Vader was loyal to the emperor, until he had a way to destroy him. I believe it's during the carbon freezing chamber scenes that Lucas mentions Vader wanting to overthrow the emperor, which he could've done hadn't he been debilitated. (I was reminded of that commentary during ROTS when even Palpatine himself mentioned Vader being more powerful than anyone.)

Quote:GL commentaryLuke is Vader's hope. His motives at this point are purely evil. He simply wants to continue what he's been doing before, which is to get rid of the Emperor, and make himself Emperor. He only sees his son as a mechanism to further that ambition.

You can also tell during the scene with the Emperor's hologram: the Emperor mentions the son of Anakin Skywalker. Vader acts suprised to hear that he has a son, even though he already knows this (he says "I'm sure Skywalker is with them." earlier on). He had been looking for Luke the whole time so that they could team up and destroy the Emperor according to the "always two" rule. When the Emperor 'reveals' that Vader has a son, Vader doesn't fess up because then the Emperor would know Vader had been hiding something from him. Then, the Emperor wants Luke dead, but because Vader needs him, he suggests turning Luke to the Dark Side instead, supposedly as 'a powerful ally', but in secret so that the two younger Siths can overthrow the older.

Quote:Original post by MasterWorks

Quote:Which are all set in the same time frame, so of course they're the same fighters, etc.

Not true...

True, in a way. The old trilogy spanned far less time than the new one. And even during that short time, new ships started popping up. And comparing 80's planes to 2000 planes makes little sense. This isn't happening here on earth, it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Who knows how much evolution goes on in vehicles there.