So I finally got around to watching Star Wars... I regret that decision.

[Peremensoe]

Hey, pepperlandgirl turned up in her Pit thread. In the midst of a bunch of other stuff (see there if interested in non-movie content) she managed to lay out why she hates Star Wars–in other words, what she should have put here in the first place.

@pepperlandgirl

George Lucas is a fucking hack. His movies are unoriginal, boring, and repetitive. He relies on special effects and computer generated showcases in order to hide the fact that he can’t write decent dialogue, he can’t direct good or bad actors, and he has no concept of how humans operate or why people behave the way they do. He doesn’t understand how to pace drama (thus six pointless movies), he doesn’t understand how to write romance, he doesn’t understand how to build character motivation. Why did Ani cross to the dark side? nobody fucking knows, and he took three movies to explain. We were just told that it was going to happen, we knew it would happen, and so Lucas’s complete inability to demonstrate a believable character arc could be glossed over. The third prequel was so disgustingly emotionally manipulative that I felt mind raped by the time I was done. (Well, and amused. “NOOOOOOOO!” I never talk in theaters, but at that point I couldn’t help but yell “Are you shitting me with that?”). We needed to be horrifed by what Ani’s fall and so we had to watch him slaughter children? I believe that scene showed the real depths of Lucas’s sociopathy. He needed us to see how evil this boy apparently was, and so he just randomly threw in THE MOST EVIL THING HE COULD EVER THINK OF. That’s terrible story telling, and unnecessary to boot if he could have made Ani’s downfall mean something and his love story with Panda Bear significant. Most of Star Wars is framed in terms of politics because it’s something Lucas can understand, something clinical, something detached and governed by rules and straightforward motivations. He can’t handle anything more than that, but instead of being honest about it, he blunders through in the most painful way possible.

By the way, Panda Bear’s death almost gave me a stroke. Why not have her bleed out? Why not actually have her die in child birth? That’s far, far less insulting than “She took one look at her kids and died of a broken heart because of Ani.” In order for that to work, we’d have to get something more than “you’re nicer than sand in my underwear” and running through fields. This relationship was supposed to be the driving force of his downfall–I asked my sister for some details with that and she can’t remember either. That’s how paper thin this shit is–if you’re caught up in the movie, you may be able to ignore the fact that nothing makes sense, but when you try to think about it afterwards, it becomes clear there’s nothing to think about. Regardless, she is why he crossed over, we’re to believe. But there’s no emotional connection between them, and nothing he’s supposed to be afraid of is ever really even hinted at. Of course, the real tragedy is that she probably would have been his dark queen. I mean, let’s face it, she fell in love with him because he slaughtered a bunch of people, and she was so fucking selfish she couldn’t even survive long enough to take care of her babies.

But hey, I don’t have to have emotions, drama, character motivation, or an interesting plot in my movies. Really, I don’t. Not a lot of that going on in Mega Shark movies, right? As long as there’s decent eyecandy and the dialogue is a sincere cheesy, I can live. Except, the eyecandy was as cold and soulless as the acting, the characters, the writing, and the directing. Each scene in the prequels went on a good 10 minutes longer than it needed to, and we could never forget that we were staring at computer graphics with people cut in–and we could never forget that if Lucas had his way, he’d get rid of the actors entirely. I don’t think he says that because he loves his special effects so much, but because he literally doesn’t know how to interact with people. They’re a mystery to him, their loves, their desires, their hatreds, even their fears. There’s a reason the actors hate him, and I’m sure it’s because he hates them. He does his best to give a good approximation of what he sees, but it’s all one-dimensional. Everything about those goddamned movies are so one-dimensional.

[Dave_Hartwick]

@Lobot

No, but we’re talking about genre. If you set Richard III… IN SPACE!, you have changed genres. It certainly wouldn’t be a historical drama any more.

Story is only one element of genre. Star Wars, IMHO, is a mythological epic set in space using the tropes of science fiction. For that last reason alone, therefore, it qualifies as science fiction, albeit of the “soft” variety.

So, by that reasoning, I could write a hardboiled detective story simply by making the protagonist a wise-cracking cynic and setting it in 1940s Los Angeles, despite the fact that the hero isn’t a detective but an unemployed palaeontologist. I mean, if you can have a science fiction movie without any science, you can have a hardboiled detective story without any detectives, simply by invoking a few tropes and a particular setting. While I’m at it, I’ll just go ahead and set my remake of Debbie Does Dallas in Elizabethan England and call it a Shakespearian tragedy.

It may be that Heinlein’s definition is too restrictive, but only because the wider term, “speculative fiction” didn’t become accepted. Still, you have to draw the line somewhere (or why even bother with definitions), and whether you separate Star Wars from 2001 by saying one is “soft sci-fi” and the other “hard” or by simply counting Star Wars as fantasy, the gulf is wide, despite the years of marketing that has left people thinking science fiction = Star Wars.

[MsWhatsit]

I don’t really want to address pepperlandgirl’s points in detail because based on her Pit thread she probably won’t be around to reply, but I will say that I notice that all of her specific examples relate to the prequels, and not the original trilogy.

[Peremensoe]

I don’t care if she’s around to reply or not. The point is the ideas, not their authors. Also I wanted to support the point that she wasn’t Pitted for not liking the movies.

@MsWhatsit

…I notice that all of her specific examples relate to the prequels, and not the original trilogy.

Yes. And I agree with her, almost entirely, about the prequels. She didn’t say what time frame she saw them over, but it sounds like being pushed and dragged to all six, by undiscriminating fans, kind of compressed them all together in her mind.

The prequels are unredeemed shit, and the original suffers tremendously by being conflated with them.

[Raguleader]

@Dave_Hartwick

So, by that reasoning, I could write a hardboiled detective story simply by making the protagonist a wise-cracking cynic and setting it in 1940s Los Angeles, despite the fact that the hero isn’t a detective but an unemployed palaeontologist. I mean, if you can have a science fiction movie without any science, you can have a hardboiled detective story without any detectives, simply by invoking a few tropes and a particular setting. While I’m at it, I’ll just go ahead and set my remake of Debbie Does Dallas in Elizabethan England and call it a Shakespearian tragedy.

I just want to say, both of those sound entertaining for various reasons.

[Lobot]

@Dave_Hartwick

So, by that reasoning, I could write a hardboiled detective story simply by making the protagonist a wise-cracking cynic and setting it in 1940s Los Angeles, despite the fact that the hero isn’t a detective but an unemployed palaeontologist. I mean, if you can have a science fiction movie without any science, you can have a hardboiled detective story without any detectives, simply by invoking a few tropes and a particular setting. While I’m at it, I’ll just go ahead and set my remake of Debbie Does Dallas in Elizabethan England and call it a Shakespearian tragedy.

Fair points. But at least “hardboiled detective story” has something you can nail-down: the protagonist has to be a detective investigating a crime or mystery, with a cynical or “gritty” bent to the story. A detective, an investigation and violence and/or sex are elements that you can point to; an intent by the author to ponder the implications of science and technology (which is how science fiction seem to defined) is a lot harder to grab onto.

Technology (which is abundant in Star Wars) implies there is scientific investigation in that universe, so I’m not suggesting you can have science fiction without science. However, the science needn’t be a centrepiece to the story. In the 1930s, Flash Gordon serials were almost certainly considered science fiction, but again, the science played no central role in the stories.

[Lobot]

I don’t see the relevance of Lucas’ supposed “sociopathy”. I can, however, say that he’s been both kind and generous to me in the past. His artistic choices may at times be questionable, but it’s not like he’s raping babies in his spare time.

Also, the OP watched the original trilogy, which is what I thought we were discussing.

[Measure_for_Measure]

Star Wars had groundbreaking special effects: without those it would have been universally derided as a clunker. I can cite this: during production, Lucas showed the film to various movie execs without the special effects and they were almost universally aghast. All that money! Down the toilet! This quote is from a New Yorker piece that ran in 1997:

When a rough cut of “Star Wars” had been edited together, George arranged a screening of the film at his house. The party travelling up from Los Angeles included Spielberg, Ladd, De Palma, a few other friends of George’s, and some Fox executives. …

Here, at this first screening of “Star Wars,” a group of writers, directors, and executives, all with ambitions to make more or less artistically accomplished Hollywood films, were confronting the template of the future–the film that would in one way or another determine everyone’s career. Not surprisingly, almost every one of them hated it. Polite applause in the screening room, no cheers–a “real sweaty-palm time,” Jay Cocks, who was also there, said. It’s possible that, just this once, before the tsunami of marketing and megatude closed over “Star Wars” forever, these people were seeing the movie for what it really was–a film with comic-book characters, an unbelievable story, no political or social commentary, lousy acting, preposterous dialogue, and a ridiculously simplistic morality. In other words, a bad movie.

A bad movie. An awful movie. A horribly painfully awfully bitterly ruinously horribly bad movie. At least without the special effects.

“So we watch the movie,” Huyck said, “and the crawl went on forever, there was tons of back story, and then we’re in this spaceship, and then here’s Darth Vader. Part of the problem was that almost none of the effects were finished, and in their place George had inserted World War Two dogfight footage, so one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in ‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri.’ It was like, George, what-is-going-on?”

“When the film ended, people were aghast,” Katz said. "Marcia was really upset–she was saying, 'Oh my God, it’s “At Long Last Love,” ’ which was the Bogdanovich picture that was such a disaster the year before. We said, ‘Marcia, fake it, fake it. Laddie is watching.’ "

Interestingly Spielberg was the exception: he was the only guy who could see the film’s potential:

Huyck: “Then we all got into these cars to go someplace for lunch, and in our car everyone is saying, ‘My God, what a disaster!’ All except Steven, who said, ‘No, that movie is going to make a hundred million dollars, and I’ll tell you why–it has a marvellous innocence and naïveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.’ And that impressed us, that he would think that, but of course no one believed him.”

Katz: “We sat down to eat, and Brian started making fun of the movie. He was very acerbic and funny.”

“Which is the way Brian is,” Huyck said. “You know, ‘Hey George, what were those Danish rolls doing in the princess’s ears?’ We all sat there very nervously while Brian let George have it, and George just sort of sank deeper into his chair. Brian was pretty rough. I don’t know if Marcia ever forgave Brian for that.”

Lucas was stunned at the reception:

When the movie opened, Huyck and Katz went with George and Marcia to hide out in Hawaii. On their second day there, Huyck told me, “Laddie called on the phone and said, ‘Turn on the evening news.’ Why? ‘Just watch the evening news,’ he said. So we turned it on, and Walter Cronkite was on saying, 'There’s something extraordinary happening out there, and it’s all the result of a new movie called “Star Wars.” ’ Cut to lines around the block in Manhattan. It was absolutely amazing. We were all stunned. Now, of course, the studios can tell you what a movie is going to do–they have it down to a science, and they can literally predict how a movie is going to open. But in those days they didn’t know.”

http://www.booknoise.net/johnseabrook/stories/culture/force/index.html

[ralph124c]

I really like Star wars because it juxtaposed ultra modern technology (star ships, faster than light travel, antigravity, sentient robots) with medieval clothing styles and obsolete social conventions (royal families, emperors, kighthood,etc.).
If yoy try to imagine a future without some old stuff in it, you have a situation that nobody can relate to. Why would Luke’s family struggle to farm on a desert planet (if synthesisized food is available)?
Why would humans need sex if 3-D computerized pornography is available?
And humans coexisting with monstrously deformed aliens-no way would that happen.

[Fear_Itself]

@ralph124c

Why would Luke’s family struggle to farm on a desert planet (if synthesisized food is available)?

They were not food farmers, they were moisture farmers. Water is a valuable commodity on a desert planet.

[enomaj]

How about if lightsabers were ever to exist, they would require a a scientific discovery. But since they do not exist currently, they are fiction.

[Drunky_Smurf]

@enomaj

How about if lightsabers were ever to exist, they would require a a scientific discovery. But since they do not exist currently, they are fiction.

Well it looks like some scientists need to get off their lazy asses and do something about this travesty.