Is Star Wars dead?

Cafe Society
101

To me the real irony is that Lucas COULD have told the sort of uplifiting story he loves in these prequels, simply by changing his focus. He could have told us the story of a young Jedi who in his youthful arrogance makes a terrible mistake but who doesn’t allow that mistake to crush him, instead learning from it and thus growing into wisdom.

Lucas doesn’t have it in him to tell Vader’s story - but I think he could have done a nice job telling us Obi-Wan’s. He’s just focused on the wrong character for his storytelling style.

102

I was thinking the same thing the other night, artemis. George Lucas focused on the wrong character(s). And/or gave too much focus to Anakin. In the original films, all three main characters - Luke, Leia, Han - got pretty close to equal time. Time enough for us to get to know them. Even the secondary characters - Obi-Wan, Chewbacca, Lando - were more fleshed out.

And to touch on the acting again, even though Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher may not be the greatest thespians, they at least came off very natural in their roles, IMO. (Just working with Harrison Ford may have helped a bit.) The relationship between Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, as has already been pointed out, came across as very forced and phony.

And I’m not going to get into Jake Lloyd’s performance again.

Anyhoo, here’s hoping George Lucas has an epiphany, and pulls something amazing out of his beard for Episode III. (Come on, I’m an optimist.)

103

That’s fair. I too still love the first three, and not the later ones. But I do think there is an element of nostalgia there for everyone. For many it is a nostalgia tied to their childhood, but for others it is about the arrival of a groundbreaking sci-fi franchise in a cinema very different from that of today.

Again, this is well-said. Empire is the best because it grew up a bit.

Now that I did not say.

Hmn… I’m not sure about that. Part of what led me to my hilarious, side-splitting “we grew up” comment was the success of the Phantom Menace as a kids’ movie. I’m taking this not from ticket sales, which would have been huge whatever happened, but from the way the movie got treated in playgrounds and by kids everywhere I met them. They loved it. They absolutely loved it. Maybe some kids didn’t… but it’s harder to gauge the views of those who weren’t climbing all over me and whacking me round the knees with a plastic lightsabre. For the most part, though, they were straight off into their own little world with it, and to the devil with the grown-ups. I heard serious discussions of why R2 was able to survive in outer space - from eight year-olds! That is what I remember about seeing the first films as a kid - discussing the logic of the movies, very seriously. Like, what happens if you reach out and gently grasp a lightsabre blade? We all thought for ages that you disappeared, because Obi-Wan disappeared when he got offed. He was the only person we’d ever seen hit with a lightsabre, you see. There wasn’t anyone else till Empire. Or maybe there was… but we missed it, anyway.

As much fun as these conversations are now that we’ve grown up, their true masters are eight year-olds.

104

I thought that part, where Boba cradled his father’s severed head lovingly in his hands at the end of AotC to be one of the most touching moments ever captured in a film geared towards “kids of all ages”. Indeed, why would parents bother to take their children to see callow tripe like “Babe” or “Monsters, Inc.”, when they can share with them the real emotion evoked by decapitation by light sabre, and enthusastically join in engaging debates about the “reality of fantasy”; to whit, the lack of gore following Jango’s loss-of-head could be explained, with a little imagination, when one considers the cauterizing effects of a hot laser blade. Moving! Evocative! Educational, even! Great fun for the child in all of us!

105

See, the problem is that you don’t have to be crap to adults to entertain kids. Nemo was great for everyone…so is just about every Pixar movie. There are quiet a few cartoons that are good for all ages. Good writing, acting, dialogue, etc. But Ep I-II lack these. Kids don’t notice, but do you want them growing up thinking that was good acting or plot developement?

Heck, kids can have fun with anything. Give a two year old a box, and he is entertained for hours. That doesn’t mean the box is a GOOD box. Just that kids are easily ammused.

106

Pathetically minor clarifying point:

I’m sure it’s easy to interpret my comment about the Boba Fett doll as part of what I think went wrong with the franchise, but I was actually trying to make a different point. The Boba Fett action doll was marketed at what seems to me now to be about a year and a half before any of us knew that there was to be a sequel. There certainly had not been any ads, and you could still find “Star Wars” playing everywhere.

As I mentioned, sequels were not as common then as now, and unlike today, when sequels are announced in the press as soon as production starts, “Empire” was supposed to be top secret. Apparently it was leaked and trumpeted in the industry papers, but we never knew, becuase a) we were pre-teens, and b) this was the late seventies, when (shocking as it may seem today in a world where Entertainment Tonight is one of the longest-running shows now on TV) nobody outside of the industry actually gave much of a shit about what Hollywood told itself.

So, to us, the Boba Fett action figure represented a complete mystery, the subject of lunchtime conversation for weeks if not months. Who was this character? Those who had seen the film a dozen times knew he was not in the film at all, certainly not as “the villain”. That was Darth Vader. *

At the time, my friends and I assumed it was a cynical ploy on the part of the toy company (was it Kenner? I forget). Not content with the riches so many kids had shelled out to them for facsimiles of every made-up-and-costumed extra that appeared in the film** , they were now making up characters out of the blue and declaring them to be from Star Wars in order to squeeze every last dime out of us, assuming we were too dumb to notice the fake, those corporate bastards.

Then the previews for “Empire” began to appear, and we all freaked.

*(Actually, those of us who had only seen it a few times also knew he was not there, every single image from the movie having been burnt permanently onto our retinae.)

**(although I don’t think there was ever a doll of the guy wearing a standard issue American spacesuit that can be glimpsed in the background just as our heroes enter the cantina. Tolja, permanently burned)

107

:raises eyebrow:

Really?

:wink:

108

As I told my friends back in pre-school, you forgot about that guy who lost an arm in the cantina. Everyone always forgot about that guy in the “what does a lightsaber do to you?” discussions.

Anyway, like someone else said, it’s not all that hard to please an audience of children. When I was a kid, my second-favorite movie after Star Wars was Krull. And Krull sucked. It was a bad, bad movie. As an adult, I still can enjoy Star Wars on an wholly non-ironic level. It’s still a good movie, it’s still a movie I like. Krull is not enjoyable except as camp. The stuff that I thought was cool about it when I was a kid, turned out to not actually be all that cool, and is, in fact, so un-cool it’s pretty funny. I think the prequels are going to suffer that same fate: they’ll be fondly remembered by the kids of today, but in a guilty pleasure, “I can’t believe I used to like something this bad” sort of way.

109

Blasphemer! Krull rocked! And so did Willow, goddammit!

110

Don’t be absurd. Battlefield Earth lost 51 million dollars. That’s an unusually grave accomplishment, by any standard. This is exactly the kind of extremist criticism I was talking about. Because the other films were so good, any negative remarks about these films must describe them as being so bad. Somehow, it can’t be enough to find Phantom Menace disappointing, we must make a direct comparison to one of cinema’s all-time empirically greatest disasters. Please.

It doesn’t take much anymore to justify filming a sequel, if the original turns a profit at all. If Phantom Menace had been a starter, it would likely have at least broken even, expecially since it would certainly have had a smaller budget to earn back (and the restraint that goes with that would probably have made it a better film). No guarantee of a sequel, but not an improbable scenario, either.

Conjecture it pointless, of course. We’ll never know. As a general rule, though, average outcomes are significantly more likely than extreme ones. Speculating that this film would have tanked its way into the record books is about as persuasive as claiming it would have made twice as much money without the shadow of the older films holding it back.