This reminds me of perhaps the funniest segment of the Plinkett reviews.
The whole problem is that Lucas never had a real vision of it.
He started out with the idea of making a fun, good-old-fashioned, Saturday-afternoon-B-movie kind of film. Somehow everything worked out a lot better than he ever expected, and he had this huge hit on his hands.
So he started improvising, without ever really knowing where he was going with it, or what would work. He never had an overall vision. He never seemed to understand his own creation.
Now with Disney it’s even worse. There are numbers of Disney executives, writers, and directors all trying to work out the best way to milk the franchise for the best box-office returns. They also don’t have any unified or coherent vision.
Don’t forget Jar Jar Binks! 
The sinking isn’t the plot, it’s the setting. I mean, you know how WWII ended, does that mean that Saving Private Ryan isn’t worth seeing?
I HAD forgotten Jar Jar. Now I remember all over again.Thanks a lot.
Except for the first 20 minutes…pretty much.
How dare you‽
Also, you know how the Normandy landing ended, so it still proves my point. 
that’s not how I interpreted it at all. The end of Return of the Jedi was not the end of the Empire. The Empire was huge. Taking out a few capital ships doesn’t make everything just disappear. There were still tons of ships, officers, stormtroopers, etc. around the galaxy. Sure, there would have been a power struggle to fill the vacuum left by the loss of Vader, the Emperor, and the Death star but someone would have eventually taken charge and they’d have continued to go after the Rebellion. In fact, I’d wager they’d intensify their pursuit out of revenge.
So my read is that the Rebellion/Resistance was reduced to what it was during the time BETWEEN RotJ and TFA.
You know, if you didn’t like it, that’s fine. But insulting the intelligence of anyone who did isn’t going to win anyone over to your point of view, and just makes you look like yet another unhinged fanboy.
That should be the motto of anyone who does any writing for any future iterations, whatever they may be, so as not to make that mistake again!
//i\\
Nerd furor…
He did say “compelling viewing,” and I think the history of cinematic adaptations of Dune supports him.
What you interpreted is neither here nor there. This info is available in the new canon. The Empire WAS gone after the Battle of Jakku. The New Republic WAS in total control everywhere but the Outer Reaches. There was no power vacuum. Mon Mothma becomes Chancellor and pushes the Military Disarmament Act. The First Order hid, regrouped, and refitted in the short span of 30 years while the New Republic totally and stupidly disarmed. This ridiculous backstory is an affront to common sense. As @RickJay correctly points out, it was an intentional reboot which literally moots the entire OT.
I enjoyed VII a lot, it felt like they were going back to the original aesthetic of Star Wars - lots of ‘70s high tech’ equipment (like the targetting computer for the cannons) and a lived-in looking galaxy with battered ships and the like. VIII was a mess (a ‘tense’ chase where people can casually hop out of and back into the chase for days?) that messed with a bunch of the universe stuff (notably hyperspace ramming). IX was about as good as could be done to follow up VIII, I enjoyed watching it but wasn’t in love with it. My big problem (aside from the is that the backstory doesn’t make a lot of sense and isn’t conveyed will - we don’t really have a feeling of who the First Order and Resistance really are or how they fit into the galaxy. While the OT didn’t go deep into the world, there was a pretty clear picture of how the Galaxy was run and what was going on.
I really doubt Disney is going to disclaim any of their movies. The movies weren’t a flop (unlike the DC universe’s attempt to make Batman v Superman and Justice League work), so they’ll probably build off of them. I do find it bizarre that people call for more EU stuff and complain about the clone of the Emperor in IX; there were a bunch of Palpatine clones and secret superweapons in the EU.
I do wonder, assuming this is false, when they are going to make another Rey/Poe/Finn movie.
This is lazy and not strictly true. Yes, Lucas had no grand vision in 1971 when he first started pitching it. In '73 when the story outline started taking shape, it had several elements that would make their way into the prequels, notably Mace Windu’s character. But it was not yet a sprawling legendarium and there was no grand 9-movie arc. He DID propose the sequel trilogy as early as 1976 and started suggesting a 9 movie arc after the smash success of ANH in 1977-78. In the intervening 20 years between RoTJ and TPM Lucas most certainly was building his world and devising a plan. He gave many interviews and read and commented on many of the EU stories. To suggest that he was just winging it when he made the prequels basically assumes that Lucas was either an idiot or totally and completely disinterested in the Star Wars legend for 2 decades and consumed with what, Howard the Duck?
Unfortunately we didn’t get Lucas’ version of the Sequels. Lucas has been consistent that in his mind the Sequel story was to be about Anakin’s grandchildren. The only one of which that survived Disney’s silliness was Ben Solo. It DEFINTELY wasn’t intended to be about an elderly Han, Luke and Leia and it definitely wasn’t intended to be a retread of the OT with a new Empire by a different name.
Sadly Lucas failed badly when it came to the script and direction of the Prequels, being on the bench for 20 years clearly dulled his moviemaking skills, but there’s a real, legitimate original story under there. Complain all you want about the minutiae of trade policy, he clearly built a largely coherent and interesting political drama about the weaknesses of democracy and capitalism and tells a plausible story of how fascism might rise from it.
Even the fall of Anakin makes logical sense. It felt rushed and a bit of a heel turn because of the poor scripting, but when you pick it apart it makes sense. Yoda from the beginning warns that he’s too old to be trained and that his emotions are dangerous and have darkness in them. He’s raised a slave and experiences cruelty regularly. The Jedi separate him from his mother which leads to her death, their strict rules are what kept him from rescuing her for a decade. It makes sense that he’d really develop a hatred for the Jedi. In the end he becomes jealous and distrustful of Obi-Wan leading to the accidental killing of Padme, and he believes, his unborn children. Rage and emotion leading to a irrevocable act that leaves him only one choice, darkness and subservience to Palpatine. Basically penance.
Compare the circumstances of Anakin turning on Obi-Wan to those of Ben Solo turning on Luke. Which one makes more sense? Which one was actually built up with something resembling a justification?
The big difference between the prequels and the sequels, is at least George has a basic plot arc to go off over the course. By the end, we knew certain things had to happen.
This did not happen in the sequels, it is extremely obvious, and extremely unfortunate. I don’t care how great you think Rian Johnson is, you don’t make a movie, hand it off to him (writing and all), and say “do whatever you want.” That’s just stupid.
Again gonna point out to everyone that back in the '70s there wasn’t a movie called “A New Hope.” That’s the name of the modified version re-release.
I don’t know why anyone would complain about the minutiae of trade policy in the prequels because there wasn’t any. At the beginning of The Phantom Menace, and a few times after, the audience is told it’s a trade dispute, and later than it’s a dispute over “the taxation of trade routes.” What the dispute is is never explained; we’re never told why, if it started in the Senate, the war is being fought on Naboo. We are never told why Naboo is the planet the Trade Federation is angry at, or why they want to go past a blockade and occupy it, or what goods are being traded, or who does or doesn’t want to pay taxes, or what the taxes are on, or why Naboo can’t survive a blockade that only went on for a week, or really anything. You might figure Palpatine wanted them to invade Naboo because he was from there, but how that was justified, or why it would give him any sort of benefit, was also not explained, and Palpatine doesn’t consistently act in a way that makes sense for such plans as we know he has.
I don’t recall the story being at all interesting and it was only partially coherent. It’s extremely clumsy, superficial, and inconsistent.
That’s not in the movies. It’s never explained why he didn’t go back to rescue his mother (who had escaped slavery without him anyway) and he never expresses anger at the Jedi Order for it. We could guess that those things happened, but they are - stupidly - not shown.
This is needlessly pedantic. People have been using ANH as shorthand for that movie for decades. If you want to litigate it, the ANH tagline was added in 1981 and was planned once Empire was greenlit. It is not an artifact of any of the bemoaned re-edits that happened in the 90’s and 00s, it’s not some new construct.
Perhaps a poor word choice on my part, but one of the more common complaints about the prequels from casual fans and some bloggers is that Lucas hinged the main conflict on something as bureaucratic as taxes and trade federations. It wasn’t the white hats versus the black hats of the OT. It wasn’t a space western or a space fantasy series with knights and lords and and plucky rebels, it was politics and commerce. The pre-Empire world was a more complicated and nuanced world than the one in the OT. This for some reason was a problem for people.
Yes, the Prequels did not go deep into the details of the motivations of the trade federation and the economic impacts of embargoes, tariffs and blockades (nor should it have), but it gave a more nuanced reason for the bad guys to be bad guys.
Similarly there are complaints that the scenes in the Senate where factions are voting for the Chancellor’s emergency powers are a boring bit of procedure that would better have been handled offscreen. Maybe that’s true, but it represents a real bit of actual plot and story that makes sense in the world.
Not explicitly but it’s implied. The Jedi Code forbade attachments to family and the reason Padawans are taken to the temple as toddlers is to prevent them from developing a bond with their parents. This is the entire reason why Yoda and the council are so opposed to Anakin training because he’s “too old”, he’s developed an attachment to his mother which contradicts the code. Padawans are also governed entirely by their masters so unless Obi-Wan allowed it he would have been unable to even visit her. And he certainly expresses anger at the Counsel regularly. It’s sort of the defining fact of his apprenticeship and delayed promotion. It’s also a big part of his moaning when he and Padme are having their clunky romantic interludes in AoTC.
I concede that this plotline doesn’t get enough attention in the script and had they cut out the entire Jar-Jar/Gungan subplot they might have been able to make more room for explaining Anakin’s resentment and ultimate heel turn. Everyone would agree that there’s massive issues with the script and dialogue which undermined the main arc of the plot.