I still want to know whether the rumor is true – that the plan had been to put the final film on the Wookies’ home planet, but that somewhere along the line they decided to cut the budget in half and reduce them to Ewoks.
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The rumor that I’ve always heard is that the change was made to allow them to market more toys.
“Look at the cute little warrior teddy bears! Daddy, I must have one!”
As to Abrams’ involvement, I fully expect a lot of Star Wars nerds to have the same reaction to VII as I had to Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek movie. Namely disappointment mixed with just a hint of betrayal to the bit of Trek that in my view was the best, The Next Generation as a TV series, which because of the time travel element, never happened. Neither did TOS, DS9, or Voyager either. In all previous Trek, when timetravel played a part, it was resolved back to the original universe at the end. Abrams changed that for the worse.
Star Wars fans aren’t considering how much he could reinterpret or even outright ret-con events from the previous movies, and I seriously doubt that he’ll have any respect for the Expanded Universe that I tire of hearing about. We could find a love-triangle between Solo, Leia, and Calrissian. We could have more Gungans. We could have a new Fett character for no good reason. We could deviate off into politics and democracy like the prequels did.
I do not expect good things.
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I heard it was because Lucas had children of his own at that point, so he turned the Wookies into teddy bears for the children. and then, after receiving flak over that, he still gave us Jar-Jar. Chris Rock was right: “Man, fuck ‘the kids’!”
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What pisses me off the most about JJ Abrams is that he’s forcing me to believe in a timeline where Romulus is destroyed, or a timeline where Vulcan is destroyed. I would say that’s the stupidest fucking thing he did to Star Trek, but then I saw his Star Trek 2. (Don’t even try hang that turd on only Lindelhof. They worked together, and we know their track record.) JJ Abrams has quite a long list of work that is almost exclusive filled with potential to be great, but is ultimately disappointing. He is this generation’s crappy Spielberg knock off. (You ca not watch Super 8, and not see the ghost of Spielberg.)
There has been only one person that made Star Wars watchable recently, and that was Gennedy Tartakovsky. He made a dacron purse out of the sow’s ear of the prequels.
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Amen, my sibling. And having Nimoy along as Spock made the betrayal even worse. 726 television episodes (counting the cartoon) and 10 feature films’ worth of history, shitcanned by careless time travel. And old Spock is the only lifeform in the universe to remember. It would have been kinder to reboot the damned thing without him.
For what it’s worth, Abrams was never a Trekkie (or Trekker or Trek-fan or whatever) before he made his Trek movie, but he’s always been a SW fan. This universe is near and dear to him in a way the Trek universe never was, and we shouldn’t discount that. Also, by now Disney and Lucasfilm and Abrams himself are all very, very aware of the pressure they’re working under. They know what people liked and what they didn’t in previous SW movies. It’s safe to assume that they’ve read the Internet a time or two. And certainly Disney knows the box office story. Adjusted for inflation, the first movie is the second biggest moneymaker in Hollywood history after Gone With The Wind. ESB and ROTJ are #12 and #15, respectively. Phantom Menace is #17, largely because we didn’t know what we were in for. As Wikipedia notes,
The film’s premiere was accompanied by considerable hype, extensive media coverage and great anticipation, due to the large cultural following its predecessors had created. Despite mixed to positive reviews by critics, who tended to praise the visuals and action sequences but criticize the writing, characterization and acting, it grossed more than $924.3 million worldwide during its initial run in theaters, making it the second highest-grossing film at the time (behind Titanic), the highest-grossing film of 1999, the highest grossing Star Wars film, and the fifth highest-grossing film in North America (unadjusted for inflation).
But we learned. Revenge of the Sith is #60 on the list (two spots lower than Animal House), and Attack of the Clones languishes in the basement at #87, tucked between Temple of Doom and Mrs Doubtfire. All six movies made buckets of money, but Disney has long practice of reading and interpreting this kind of data, and they can definitely see the costs of pissing off the Faithful when it comes to a property like Star Wars. The corporate mandate, for once, should work in our favor.
That said, I pretty solidly hate Abrams’ work as a director. I have no doubt he’ll get better performances out of his actors than Lucas could (honestly, a great deal of the first Star Wars was salvaged by the impeccable professionalism of Cushing, Guinness, Daniels, and Jones, as much as the energy of his three young leads), but I despair of being able to see any of it through all the damned lens flare.
Really, the elephant in the room should be obvious to everyone concerned: if they begin with a genuinely good script, everything else will take care of itself. The visual effects will be state-of-the-art, the production values will be lush, the Williams score will be appropriately Williamsesque, and really any actor who doesn’t shit the bed in public could pull off a Star Wars role. It ain’t Ibsen, after all. But the script makes all the difference in the world. If Abrams and Kasdan are forced to begin with a Lucas-penned outline (which was my understanding of the situation), then they’re already operating at a steep disadvantage. But if they put in anything like the effort that Kasdan and Brackett put into the ESB script, or that Timothy Zahn put into his Thrawn trilogy… hell, everything we hated about anything in the prequels came from bad writing. Fix the writing, and the SW universe rights itself.
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I’m not going to let them hurt me again.
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Disney stalwart MILEY CYRUS playing the long-lost,
hot tongue-wagging cousin of JAR JAR BINKS. Just sayin’
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You are on point dude!
Star Wars VII: Kill Dicks of Necrophilia.
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Please accept more “like” than this forum officially allows me to give.
Note that the Magnificent Seven was a remake of Seven Samurai, so it is definitely a movie that can cross cultures
I don’t much care if the movies are good or bad, but it’s irritating that Lucas et al indicated they’re going to ignore the decades’ worth of novels set in the post-RotJ era
I saw it as a parallel universe. I thought that was explained in the film to be honest. The original universe still exists (fictionally), the new films are in a parallel universe. Presumably the old Spock was from another parallel universe, since Romulus wasn’t destroyed anywhere in the originals…
Not so much a remake as a cultural adaptation, but your point still applies.
Star Trek Online takes place years after Romulus got blowed up. 2409, 30 years after Nemesis. There was also talk about possibly making another Star Trek TV show with Worf as the captain of a ship. That seems to be dead though.
I just hope that whoever writes the new Star Wars movie scripts can do it without having giant gaping plot holes like Into Darkness had.
My dim view is that giant gaping plot holes are a natural outcome of the money-oriented creative process
And Kurosawa’s film was actually based on the stage play Ye Olde Ballade of Ye Seven Merrie Knights, which in turn was an adaptation of the folk tale Ug, Dug, Grugg, Skug, Thag, Gak and Steven Throw Rocks at Bear.
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And they were all just riffing on A Bug’s Life (not the Pixar version, mind you, but the original version, handed down through many millions of generations of prehistoric insects through communicative dance).
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I´d say at least where Abrams´ brainless action approach to sci-fi is downright painful when applied to Star Trek it will be merely annoying when applied to Star Wars.
If you haven´t seen them, and haven´t got anything else planned for the evening, this is an appropriate time to recommend Plinkett´s goddamn brilliant reviews of all three Star Wars prequels, starting here:
I promise, you will be entertained far beyond anything you woud have thought possible in connection with the name “Phantom Menace”.
While I haven´t seen any of the prequels more than once, I´m sure I have re-watched these reviews at least three times each by now, even though they´re almost feature-length.
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