Or Moorcock’s ‘Starship Stormtroopers’ from Anarchist Review.
Luke crashing his X-wing on Dagobah a couple hundred yards from Yoda’s house makes way less sense than the Luke/Obi-Wan/Leia/Tattooine thing.
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You mean devolved. Especially the movies. The story lines of the Classic Trek and even much of the TNG were thoughful, provocative, and was one of those things where you use Sci-Fi to talk about problems relevant today.
The movies have devolved into action films staring people who would never actually be cast in an action film.
[quote=“Scurra, post:41, topic:68935, full:true”]
Lucas deliberately chose to make his second set of films a prequel series because he only wanted to tell that one story - he wasn’t interested in making the tapestry any broader than it already was. [/quote]
Yeah, Lucas completely bumbled the Prequels, starting with the shit story. Yes he too often made unnecessary ties to the earlier films. There is a quote in one of my favorite reviews where he is explaining, “It’s like a poem, it rhymes.” But it is lazy story telling. Yes, it is sort of fun and interesting when you link story lines together. But when it is over used it becomes stupid and blase. Re: Indiana Jones Chronicles.
If by expand you mean same shit, different crew? But again, earlier you took out the expanded universe - which makes any of your comparisons unfair. Yeah, the 6 movies have a clear link and in a way some sameness. The Clone Wars, Rebels, Comic books, and video games expanded that universe greatly to include characters who lived thousands of years ago in the Old Republic. But of course 6 movies (half of them sub par on all levels) is going to be less open and interesting than something that has over a dozen movies, 6 tv series, as well as comics, novels, etc.
Sorry your GM was short sighted. I had my group recruited by special forces, which meant they had access to cool gadgets, got put on high risk missions to exotic locals, and other than limiting how many could have force powers, I didn’t restrict anyone on what they wanted to be. We even ended up mashing up genres with an adventure in the middle of an Alien vs Predator battle (and walked away with clone tech).
I’m pretty sure that happened because otherwise the film would have been a bit rubbish. And because Lucas was making it up as he went along, the family relationships didn’t even exist in Star Wars.
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Actually, it’s not really just Star Wars. All melodrama works this way, all the way back to Sophocles’ Oedipus. You just happened to bump into whom?
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Again, I think we may have to agree to disagree on this. There’s a level of sophistication in the, yes, poetry of Lucas’ construction that very few stories aspire to, let alone reach. Oh, believe me, I don’t think his scripting is remotely up to the level of his story structure - it certainly never sounds like “real” people speaking (and he wasn’t helped by having actors who often seemed to be merely reading off an autocue), but the sheer audacity of some of the patterns he incorporated is extraordinary. It’s not lazy story-telling in the slightest; it’s entirely the opposite. Which is why I agree with the original argument - that Star Wars is “fairy tale”. (For all my love of Star Trek, it’s never come close to the same level of myth that Lucas was aiming for - even DS9 struggled with that aspect and it was the only one that really tried.)
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And as for the rest: congratulations, you caught all the stuff a lot of the rest of us caught years ago. We still like it. Liking it despite being a dystopia is, imho, not all that different from feminists who like Game of Thrones: we like it despite the problems.
I fault George Lucas for not being able to tell the story properly, though. The novelizations more or less spell it out that hey, the Jedi and the Galactic Republic fell for a reason. I also never quite got how it was that Palpatine managed to order both a droid army and a clone army to fight against each other, and when the Republic found out a Jedi had ordered a clone army, the response was more or less, well, okay, that’s cool, we could use an army.
I did like that Luke is portrayed as not 100% caring for the master-slave relationship between droids and humans. All the other humans treat C3P0 like shit. Luke treats him, and R2D2, like friends.
Jeez, that was freaking awesome. You win my internet today.
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They expand on that in the EU. Han says that he can make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, and at another point, C3P0 makes a comment that they’ll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel or smashed into who knows what. In some of the EU novels, they made spice into a substance that is similar to melange in Dune, where use of the pure stuff can make a person prescient. It’s mined by prisoners and on occasion, crime lords run the stuff and hire smugglers like Han. He has a price on his head because he dropped a load of spice to get away from Imperials. They also retconned in an explanation for the “12 parsecs” bit as Kessel being near a cluster of black holes. The Falcon being able to do the run in 12 parsecs meant his ship was fast enough to fly close to the cluster without being pulled in.
tl;dr Han is a drug runner.
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Hint: “The rest” is what I was talking about.
That’s one of the things that Lucas did a GOOD job of showing.
In the great days of the British Empire, it used to be said that if you stood in Piccadilly Circus, sooner or later everybody of any importance in the British Empire would tread on your toes.
You could argue that events only happen in history because of unlikely coincidences, so if this sort of thing didn’t happen there wouldn’t be a plot.
…no, it’s just the space opera effect.
In the days of Sophokles, it was the machinations of the gods. In a magical world view, there are no coincidences.
Why did the gods do it? There’s the circularity; because they could not avoid the decisions of the Fates but they could affect the way they came to pass, in the interests of a better story. In those days, consistency was unheard of.
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I think “dead mentor returns from the afterlife multiple times to guide you towards goals pre-ordained by the force” is sufficient to explain that one 
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Well said. The prequels are annoying to watch not because they’re really that bad, but because they’re almost good.
There’s the makings of some brilliant story in them, and the production design was really well done, it’s movies that are bad through the makers being overambitious given their skillset, rather than out and out lazy.
Think like Star Trek:The Motion Picture: pretty, but they tried to turn a 45 minute story into 2001: A Space Odyssey and it just doesn’t work pacing-wise.
At least the UN doesn’t have quite as many psionic kill-teams at its disposal(or they are very, very, quiet. Possibly they are what the black helicopters transport?)
‘Regulatory arbitrage entrepreneur’, please.
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This is why I hate the prequels–because so much of what people now “know” about the Jedi’s history came from those awful films. When I was a kid and first watched the original trilogy, all I ever knew about the Jedi were Kenobi’s brief tales and a few cryptic lines on the Empire side of things. It was wide open, and because the Jedi were being painted as the heroes of the tale, I could imagine them as heroic, in the best of all possible intergalactic worlds.
But then the prequels were made, and suddenly that dream-like bygone age of the Jedi was painted, clumsily and disturbingly, by Lucas. If you go by those films, yes, this article makes perfect sense. The Jedi are terrible.
And that is also why the prequel movies don’t exist for me. They’re somebody’s bad dream.
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Love that scene!
“Sovereign is a word in the dictionary between ‘sober’ and ‘sozzled’” – Robert A. Heinlein
Like ‘states rights’, national (or planetary) sovereignty is treated as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
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Star Trek:The Motion Picture was essentially a rough cut. Director Robert Wise - an Oscar winner for film editing - showed the initial rough cut to the studio, before editing it for pacing, finishing the special effects, etc. The studio said “We want a Christmas release”, and sent to theaters as is.
The home video/TV network was even worse, adding another 12 minutes of largely unfinished scenes.
In 2001 Wise was given the opportunity to finally finish the movie, with a “director’s cut” DVD. More than just editing the movie, they were able to finish the planned special effects and scenes. While this was done digitally, they made a point of replicating only what was in the original script and storyboards. They even made sure to digitally replicate the grain of the original film stock.
The result is a MUCH better movie, with much better pacing.
Naturally, the Blu-Ray releases - and therefor any HD version you might find on a streaming service - are the rough theatrical cut, not the finished cut. Really.
“The Abyss” is another movie where the director’s cut is a MUCH better movie. The theatrical and original home video cut left out much of the ending including the entire point of the movie.
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