I don’t totally disagree with this. RotJ is fairly disposable, while ESB is great, so it’s a bit of a wash. If RotJ had stuck the landing better, I would be more comfortable in saying you are incorrect. On balance, however, I think it’s better that the entire OT exists.
But I agree with your point about Lucas not having a concrete plan beyond the original movie. He said from the beginning he was inspired by old sci-fi serials, among other things, so the idea that there could be other movies seems implicit in that.
I don’t buy any claim by Lucas that he had a full plan for 9 movies. If he did, it was a pretty shitty plan. You have Obi-Wan’s force ghost having to make excuses in RotJ as to why he hadn’t told Luke the truth about Vader, etc. (which is lame as hell). It just doesn’t wash in my view.
I think Vader being Luke’s father hasn’t actually held up that well over the years. Yeah, it blew our frickin’ minds back in 1980. But even in terms of the actions of the OT characters (without dragging in info from the Prequels, etc.), it makes no sense at all. Vader would have known where Luke was (his own home planet!) and by extension would have known where Obi-Wan was. He would have protected and managed the former and captured or killed the latter.
True, and the EU material had already dealt with this and turned it into a bunch of material (which I haven’t consumed, but it seems coherent enough on the surface).
The “crapping on” is not from that. It is turning the old characters (at least Luke and Han) into losers and not showing any positive fruit of the defeat of the Emperor in RotJ.
Saying the Lucas had nine film planned is a very nebulous claim. Obviously, he didn’t have full scripts to the prequels locked in a safe, like the last chapter of Harry Potter. It could be as simple as he had a nine film outline written down in a note book, with each movie getting no more than a couple sentences of description, and he picked one from somewhere in the middle that had the strongest potential as a standalone story to turn into Star Wars.
I don’t think the claim that Lucas had a plan for nine movies necessarily suggests that anything from that original plan survived to the big screen. We know how much Star Wars changed from when Lucas first started working on it, to what eventually ended up in the film. Hell, we know how much he changed it after it has been out for twenty years! The idea that, at some point prior to 1977, George Lucas had an idea for a second series of films about how Luke Starkiller’s dad was stabbed in the back by his good friend Darth Vader isn’t that outrageous.
This is almost certainly it. I think it is true that once he finally settled on what his myth was, he chopped it up into a trilogy, rearranged things a bit to make the first Star Wars a stand-alone if it all failed, and while doing so he formulated where all the characters came from, with a general concept of a storyline for them that might be potentially fleshed out into another trilogy. What his plans for a sequel story were back then would likely have been a vague scribble.
I would say there are a lot of authors who start out their first novel in the same way - hope for success and a way to tell more and expand the story as they go, but also hedge their bets and try not to get too ambitious out of the gate.
James Bond is a continuation of detective fiction which already had numerous characters (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes) portrayed on film serially by different actors, before Ian Fleming even wrote the first Bond novel. So there was precedent for it, within the genre that it belonged to. The Bond movies just sort of tweaked the setting from dark noir to futuristic exotica.
There is NO contemporaneous evidence Lucas had any sort of nine-movie story in mind when he made “Star Wars.” For one thing, “Star Wars” wasn’t called “Episode IV.” That was added later. For another, he never mentioned it until after Star Wars made all the money in the world. Even Starlog’s story can’t be established to have been true prior to Star Wars coming out and, anyway, a guy saying “I have a whole buncha stories” doesn’t mean he really does.
Perhaps more pertinently, it is extraordinarily clear, in retrospect, that the story wasn’t planned out ahead of time. There really isn’t much connection between “Star Wars” and “Empire” - you could have taken the story in many different directions just as easily. “Return of the Jedi” is not a well conceived movie at all, and returns to blowing up a Death Star, which would be a remarkably weird thing to plan out if you’d had it planned all along. Of the prequels, the first two are an incoherent jumble of seizures despite fourteen years passing between “Jedi” and “Phantom Menace,” and “Revenge of the Sith” isn’t a lot better. The last three were fun movies and I liked them but had nothing to do with Lucas anyway, and didn’t strike me as being carefully plotted.
Might have had something to do with the multiple books in the series by Ian Fleming. By the time they ran out of that material, a “Bond movie” had become almost a specific genre that people enjoyed seeing, even if it was formulaic.
I don’t really care if a movie is a “good movie” or not. As long as I walk out with a smile on my face and feeling entertained, that’s good enough for me. A vast majority of SW movies have pulled that off for me. The can have plot holes galore and ridiculous coincidences and it doesn’t phase me a bit.
The fact is, that I don’t get the same level of excitement when “A long time ago…” comes on the screen as I used to. That’s not because what’s come before it was crap, it’s because it’s not a precious commodity anymore. I know they will periodically make more Star Wars movies and shows on a semi-regular basis now for the rest of my life, so if I can “afford” to be a little more critical of them (and I adore critiques thrashing them on YouTube as long as the critique is funny), that’s why. When the prequels came out I felt like I was watching a once in a lifetime event. They could be real bad. I think it’s a damn shame that Lucas was basically driven out of town by the “fandom.”
Yes Disney, you’re going to have to start planning shit out if you’re going to do a Trilogy. We know there’s going to be movies forever now so there really should be no excuse to have basic outlines and ideas set in stone from the beginning.
IMO they should find someone that knows their shit, and knows Star Wars, and knows the fandom, and that person should approve/disapprove anything coming out the chute that’s going to be “canon”. Yes, even the cartoons. That person is NOT Kathleen Kennedy (who I think should take a big paycheck and retire). I could get on board with Filoni, but I’d prefer a collaboration between Filoni and Favreau. They’ve proven themselves.
The 2 GOT creators/showrunners were going to do the next 3 SW movies but that is not happening now. Might be related to the large number of unhappy people about GOT’s last season.
Just saw Filoni’s favorite character is from the prequels!
First smart decision in a little for these guys. If they thought criticism of the later seasons of GoT was bad, imagine what fucking up a star wars movie would bring. Star Wars fans are absolute savages. One thing I do admire about JJ is is bravery for even trying. I bet he’s gotten death threats!
The Empire Strikes Back was a fantastic film. The battle of Hoth still looks great today and the cliffhanger at the end still gets referenced today.
I enjoyed all of the other SW films on their own to varying degrees. The Phantom Menace’s pod race saved it for me. The “dropping bombs in space” and “running out of gas in space” makes me want to slap the writer but I still enjoyed The Last Jedi.
SW really isn’t a great story from start to finish though. After seeing the Jar-Jar force jump for myself I suspect he was originally supposed to be the big-baddie for the entire series (Darth Sidious’ master?) but the idea was scrapped. It would have been a fantastic reveal to have the sugar-sweet mascot whip out a red light saber and start killing Jedi in Episode 3.
With Jar-Jar gone they have no real villain in mind for 7-9 so they invent a few but ultimately end it by copying Episode 6. A shame.
