I was talking about camera angles, shot elements and framing, not the circumstances of the battle. If you notice, the scene where Anakin comes in to rescue Palpatine is nearly identical to the one in RotJ where Luke confronts the Emporer. The chairs Palpatine is sitting in in both films are, if not identical, then damn close. Directly behind him, in both films are windows, through which the battles can be observed. Lucas did it to show the parallels between the two situations of Luke having to face his father and the Emporer, and Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side. (That being but one example of the simularities between the scenes, they’re really obvious if you take your eyes off Hayden Christensen, like I had to do, because I just couldn’t stand how bad his performance was.) Also, both the Millenium Falcon and Anakin’s ship take spiraling dives into the thick of the battle.
This last page of the thread has gotten way too involved. Let me just jump in here with some reasons why the first three films almost HAD to suck:
First, we know what’s going to happen, at least approximately. We know the bad guys win, because if they didn’t there’d be no Emprie to rebel against in Ep IV. So, really, the only curiousity we have is to see how things unfold.
Also, we don’t fear for either Obi-Wan or Anakin’s life, because we know they survive. So, no need for the audience to get in a sweat when either of them lands in a tight spot. For Anakin that goes double, since we know he becomes Darth Vader, we not only know he survives, but we know he is a villain. Not someone we want to be rooting for. Does this sound too simplistic? Let me remind you that the format of all this is an action serial. But this action serial has no thrills, because real thrills are impossible with these conditions!
But not only is there no tension because we know Obi-Wan survives, but he also is no hero. Noble? Sure! But in Ep IV, he is the distant mentor, and here he has to have basically the same personality. Plus, he starts out as a Jedi, which is not a great place to start for the hero. So, Obi-Wan isn’t hero, and Anakin is not the hero, because he is the villain, so really there is no hero. Again, with the action serial format, we need a real hero.
Next, due to merchanidizing, and appealing the fan-boys, old characters have to come back even when there is no reason. So, they repeatedly seem stuck in inapproriately (like the whole Wookie-planet crap in the RotS), and we’re left in the first two movies wondering why the hell C3PO doesn’t seem to remember anything in Ep IV.
Because these are prequels, and the writers have to anticipate something that wasn’t inititally meant to be Ep IV, and then spend precious story minutes dealing with future stories, instead of concentrating on the current story.
It would be better to have made Ep 7-9.
Nope, sorry. Star Wars is supposed to be a serial, like Flash Gordon and the Space Soldiers or The Phantom Empire, not a set of franchise movies, like Star Trek or Alien. The intent was always for the first “episode” to feel like you’re coming in during the middle of the action. When he wrote the original script, Lucas sketched out a backstory. Return of the Jedi was the climax. Serials don’t go on and on, they have a beginning and an end.
It would have been ideal if Lucas started with the clout to say “Look, I’m going to make a bunch of very expensive films after the fashion of cheesy 1930s serials. Pony up some cash and I’ll get right to work on the first one. It’ll be great, trust me.”
As it was, it was practically a miracle that he got people to go along with him to get one movie made, and the overall story suffered a lot because he had to put a big climax in that one.
The way it worked out from the start, there has always been enough of an unseen backstory to fill three episodes. How did the Empire overcome the Republic? How were the Jedi wiped out? What happened between Anakin and Obi-Wan?
“Episodes 7 - 9” wouldn’t have been episodes in a serial – they would have been, of necessity, a new story with new characters. The Empire was totally defeated.
Lucas wanted to tell one story. He did it. It has a beginning and an end, the way serials are supposed to. He could have decided to keep telling different stories in the Star Wars “universe,” and they might well have been interesting to some people. Personally, I’ve never found any of the “extended universe” stuff worthwhile at all, and that’s all that stuff set after the climax of Jedi would be, because there couldn’t be any decent continuity with the original story.
These films are going to be around for a long time. New generations are going to watch them in episode order, and the suspense issues won’t be a big deal for them. They won’t have the “Holy crap! Darth Vader is Luke’s father!” surprise either, but that’s not going to get in the way of the story for them.
They’re going to hold up a lot better than the original sci-fi serials, and those were still being enjoyed by folks in the '70s. It’s better that George made his decisions with an eye on posterity, rather than just saying “Okay, I’m going to make a new Star Wars trilogy.”
You must have a direct line to George Lucas’s brain, 'cause this is just one of the stories he’s told about how Star Wars came about, how much of the story he had ready when A New Hope was released, and so forth. Usually, whatever he’s been doing right then is what he “always” had in mind.
Some new characters would have been needed, same as in every one of the other movies, but the same story could have kept on. Han, Leia and Luke are still around. There’s still a job to do.
You don’t need a direct line to the man’s brain – you can check out back issues of Time magazine.
What’s one of the other stories he’s told?
Yes, there were rumours that there were going to be twelve movies, and later, nine – but that was fan speculation, not something that Lucas ever said he had in mind.
Whoops, forgot. How could the same story continue, after the death of the Emperor and Darth Vader? The story is over. Anything after that would be a new story. Sure, you could do it, if you wanted to, but you’d have to throw away any pretense to having a coherent story arc for the entire cycle of films. Like I said, it wouldn’t be a serial anymore, it would just be a franchise. If you decided to do that, do you honestly believe the hypothetical sequels would be better than the prequels? How would they work?
You think it would have been better if he recast Han, Leia, and Luke and pick up after the battle of Endor, making a movie about rebuilding the republic? Or go the EU route and “Surprise! The Emperor made clones of himself to house his liberated soul! Nothing’s really changed! There’s a new superweapon to be destroyed!” Or maybe pick up twenty years after the battle of Endor, pay Harrison Ford the gross domestic product of Switzerland to reprise his role as Solo, and show us Luke and Leia in their 50s – You think Mark Hamill’s going to make a great Jedi master, instructing his nephews and nieces in the ways of the Force, after he failed to be convincing as a “hard” Jedi in ROTJ?
Bleah. Filling in the backstory was the right thing to do. I just wish it had been done better – the first two movies were uneven, to say the least.
Larry Mudd, Heir to the empire by Zahn. I’m sure with the threat of enough voltage Mark Hamill could be convinced to do a better job at acting.
Zahn’s books are set only a few years after RotJ. Hamil, Fisher, and Ford are far too old to play their characters without some changes to the story.
Hrmmmm… I’d be willing to suspend disbelief.
I know it wouldn’t work, let me cling to my fantasy please.
Then again, they could always just say “twenty years later…”
Then again, knowing the franchise, I don’t think Lucas would be above creating totally digital copies of the RotJ cast.
Star Wars VII: a new cash cow
Look for it in theatres in 2012.
Except that I remember Flash Gordon et al actually showing episode one first, not writing and filming it 20 years later.
Lucas wanted the feeling of a serial, but he never claimed, in the beginning, to be making a serial.
I hate prequels.
But I am really amused by the name “Kit Fisto”.
Larry Mudd, I recently found my mint-condition copy of the Time magazine from May 1980 with Darth Vader on the cover that your quote came from.
Avumede, ever see Apollo 13? Anyone old enough to remember the Challenger disaster knows that the crew of Apollo 13 made it back alive (since there were tons of mentions of it in the wake of Challenger), hell, I’d read tons of stuff about the mission before I ever saw the film. Did it hold my interest even though I knew exactly what was going to happen? Damn straight, it did, and it held the interest of people who aren’t space geeks just as well. Why? Because the film was well written, well acted, and well directed. Doesn’t matter that I knew well beforehand (or hell, that I’ve even seen the flick before), when the oxygen tank blows, I still catch myself saying, “Oh shit.”
What Lucas should have done, IMHO, is what Speilberg wanted him to do, write the story, hire a screenwriter to at least do the dialoge, and then let Spielberg direct it. You could have had the exact same elements in that version, as were in this film, and it would have been a damn fine flick, IMHO. I think that Lucas’s biggest problem was that he was so focused on getting “his vision” to the screen,that he forgot what makes a film work. He’s claimed that the saga was really about Anakin all along (meaning all 6 films) and it seems to me, in rethinking the film, that Lucas probably dictated everything about how Hayden played Anakin, so the flat performance by Hayden is purely Lucas’s fault. Next, you have Ian McDairmid, who does a great job in the film up until the point he declares himself Emperor in front of the Senate. That acting is so far over the top, that even Shatner at his hammiest would have trouble equaling it, which makes me think that Lucas probably did everything but beat McDiarmid over the head to get that out of him. Meanwhile, you have Ewan McGregor, who in Lucas’s eyes, is playing a relatively minor character in the film, turning in the best performance in the film. So I think that if Lucas had turned the reigns over to someone who could view the work as something important, but not necessarily as “their baby” we might have gotten the best film out of all six. Hell, they could have even used the same script, and we might have gotten the best film, since I’m sure that Ewan had some clunker lines, but his delivery of them was good enough that I don’t remember any of them.
Mark Hamill has been quoted as saying that Lucas told him at one point it was going to be four trilogies. Of course, Mark’s had trouble finding work in the past, so that may have had something to do with it. Let’s not forget that Lucas originally said he wasn’t going to release the first trilogy on DVD until some time after RotS came out, and yet, they did come out before. The simple fact of the matter is that Lucas can’t be trusted when it comes to discussing these movies.
Objection! Hearsay! 
Although I don’t lend any credence to his assertion, it’s not for such a cynical reason. Mark Hamill is fairly well-known for his wry sense of humour and tendency to pull fans’ legs. Remember, he was answering a fan question specifically about a third trilogy. In context, it’s not too hard to see that the anecdote is just plain false:
The “official” story has plenty of documentary evidence to back it up. (The “official” story being that the first movie script was pared down from a much longer script that would have taken up about four hours of screen time, and had a vaguely-sketched back story to make it feel like a serial-in-progress. The shooting script was designed to stand alone, and after it’s success it was decided to salvage the unshot parts of the story, add enough new stuff to round it out, and then flesh out the hinted-at backstory.)
Why doesn’t Mark’s statement hold up to scrutiny? It’s a matter of record that the 1976 shoot did not go well, and the stress of supposed impending failure knocked Lucas out of action more than once. (Wuss!) It was after the success of the first movie that thoughts turned toward making other movies, and the obvious thing to do was work with what was already written, and then fill in the back-story. Lucas has never said that he planned to make even the three movies in 1976. Hamilll certainly never had any expectation of getting more work out of Star Wars at that time, since he signed a binding contract to do several seasons of Eight Is Enough, early in 1977. Lucas’ decisions about how he was going to approach additional Star Wars films didn’t come until nearly two years after Hamill says this conversation took place, and specifically mentions things that hadn’t yet been conceived, (ie; “Episodes IV, V, and VI,” “a new hope,” etc.) The idea that in 1976 Lucas casually expected to spend forty years of his life making Star Wars movies is such an outrageous idea that it’s clear that Mark Hamill was engaging in a bit of playful chain-yanking, playing with well-established fandom urban legends.
(Maybe there’s a tiny element of planting the expectation of future installments of Star Wars that feature an aged Luke Skywalker, though. Use the Force, Mark! wave “These are the sequels you’re waiting for.” “These are the sequels we’re waiting for.” “You need to go home and petition Lucasfilm to make them.” “We need to go home and petition Lucasfilm to make them.” ) 
You got a cite for that? :dubious:
Larry, I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said in this thread, and I’m a huge fan of Star Wars and Lucas in general, but I’ve gotta say something here.
Early fanclub newsletters initially reported that Star Wars was one of twelve proposed films (see Hyperspace Bantha Tracks archive). That was quickly reduced to nine. Even the press release for Return of the Jedi (see the Star Wars: Behind the Magic CD-ROM) says that it’s episode six of nine!
Lucas has never spoken in-depth about ideas for VII-IX, unlike for I-III, and I really think that he never seriously committted to making nine episode, but he must have at least talked about it.
Not handy, no. Maybe Speilberg was just yanking some chains, I dunno, but after having seen A. I., I’ve no doubt that Speilberg could have done the job. Besides, it’s not like when Lucas turned the reigns over to someone else that we got a crappy movie, since that’s how ESB was done.
Geez, Lobot, I have the BTM CD-ROM around here somewhere… I thought I’d absorbed all that stuff. I don’t subscribe to Hyperspace, so I don’t have access to backissues of Bantha Tracks, but I did a bit of digging and have found a quote from GL that mentions nine films, from a 1979 interview published in Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of The Making of The Empire Strikes Back:
So we have the mention of a third trilogy beyond what was originally planned. Three years later, he reverses that in a Time Magazine interview.
It sounds to me like he never really had a story for what happens after ROTJ except maybe “The Republic is rebuilt.”
I really can’t understand the objections to the discrepancy between Luke and Leia’s little talk on RotJ and the events of RotS.
Of course they aren’t completely congruent, Lucas only had a vague idea of the events of Episode III when Episode VI was being filmed 20 years ago. It’s clear from the dialogue that Vader knew he was Luke’s father, but didn’t know that Luke had a twin sister. We know for a fact that Leia was Luke’s twin, it is stated explicitly. Even without that statement we know that Leia can’t be older than Luke, since Vader had no idea that he had a daughter, although we are pretty sure he knew he had one child. When Luke shows up he assumes Luke is that child, and there are no others.
So…the story was as of RotJ that Anakin turns evil, Luke and Leia’s mom gives birth someplace away from Vader. Luke taken to Tatooine to be raised by his aunt and uncle (their exact relation is unclear), while Obi-Wan lurks in the background. Leia goes with her mother to Alderaan, who dies soon after so that Leia only has vague memories of her mother. And this works fine AS BACKSTORY.
But when you’re actually making the movie of these events, Lucas finds that it doesn’t make dramatic sense. Obviously, Padme has to die in childbirth. You can’t have Padme surviving the end of RotS, only to die of a broken heart a year or so later. Nope, she’s gotta die on screen, at the very end of the movie. HAS TO. And so, horror of horrors, a scrap of dialogue from the earlier movie no longer makes sense. Many other discrepancies can be explained by Obi-Wan being a lying sack of shit in IV-VI, but not this one.
Of course this is just a continuity error, not anything planned. But what exactly should have happened? Should Lucas deflate the drama of the current movie just so that the earlier movie’s dialogue is preserved intact? Or should he just shrug and claim that whenever something like this happens…midichlorians did it. It doesn’t invalidate any plot elements of RotJ to do things this way, it doesn’t change the dramatic structure of RotJ, Lucas could fix the dialogue in a new edition of RotJ in several ways and only fans would notice.
So why are so many people upset about this? Sure, I understand that you don’t like the creaky dialogue, poor acting, recycled elements, etc. But this? This isn’t a plot hole, it’s a minor continuity error caused because Lucas didn’t have the script for RotS written when he made RotJ. Honestly, why would this upset anyone?