Re: Star Wars Episode VII
I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of you just hate ANY SW that isn't the OT. You hate the Prequels, and then go nuts any time the EU is mentioned. A LOT of the EU is better than the Prequels. Your movie isn't going to be ruined if they keep some locations, vehicles, characters, etc. (NOT stories) from the EU. A lot of people even admit they haven't read any of it, but somehow it's going to potentially ruin the movie if they use it.
Not so. But I'll explain more below.
I reckon a good 60% of the entire SW fan base just can never, ever be happy, no matter what. It's a pointless debate. We just need to learn to accept it.
To a certain extent, I think that's true for a lot of people, but it doesn't HAVE to be.
what little EU I did read I thought was drivel. I'm sure I missed the good stuff. But what I did read turned me off of EU and knowing that Luke went to the dark side in some of it just made me roll my eyes so that is my problem with it. I'm sure there is some good in it... but I will never join EU (get it?
I will never join you?) I made a SW EU pun!!!! :lol
Never been much for the EU but What I have read wasn't that bad.
:lol
I soaked up the Thrawn trilogy back in the early 90s and I was... back in the land of SW... for a bit. And that was it. As much as I've chastised GL and his errant ways in the last decade or so, there's no replacement for his mind for SW. The EU tried to one-up the Empire with newer, and bigger, and badder villains and so forth, but...:unsure
The Thrawn Trilogy from the early 90s stands on its own, head and shoulders above the other books in the EU. That stuff felt like true sequels to me. It captured the feel of the originals, the scope of the events, and it did some clever, new things. We now take for granted how ingrained most of the stuff in the Thrawn Trilogy has become. But remember -- back in the early 90s, the bulk of it was new to plenty of people. Talon Karrde, for example, was a new and interesting character, as was Mara Jade, C'Baoth, Thrawn himself, the Noghri, etc., etc., etc. Luke wasn't some all-powerful Jedi demi-god, the Jedi were still largely extinct, etc.
I thought the Kevin J. Anderson Jedi Academy series that followed was...ok. It had some good stuff, had some weak stuff. But on the whole it was ok. A few of the X-wing novels were cool, too (although, for fans of the X-wing games, there were some bits that never made sense, like locking a proton torpedo on to anything other than a TIE bomber flying without jinking, but whatever). I didn't get all that far in them, though. Maybe up to the 4th book.
The rest of the EU, though, at least when I was reading (which took me up through the Black Fleet Crisis and the late 90s), was crap. I gather it got even dumber the further along you went, particularly when they introduced the Borg/Vong/whatever.
But the key things to ask are why they were dreck? I'd say it was a mixture of three things, usually. The first was some very very tired plot beats. Superweapons, the Imperial remnant, dark Jedi, blah blah blah. All that stuff felt the "same" but in a tired, hackneyed way. You'd seen all of it before and none of it was interesting. The second was that the stories themselves were just...dull. Children of the Jedi? Darksaber? Crystal Star? I don't even remember a bunch of the others like The New Rebellion or even the aforementioned Black Fleet Crisis. They were boring and entirely generic. If you stripped out the Star Wars IP from the stories, they'd just be crappy pulp sci-fi. Lastly, when they DID try to stray from the "formula," they did so in lousy ways. I vaguely remember some story about Luke Skywalker finding a girlfriend who was a Jedi ghost, who wound up in some robotic body or something. Yeah. No kidding.
So, what's my point? Well, if you look at the Thrawn stuff, most people who've read them agree that they captured the FEEL of the original trilogy quite well. But they also did a LOT of then-new stuff. To me, this proves that you CAN make a film (or book series, or game, or whatever) that has the feel of the originals, but which does fresh, interesting things.
To do that, though, it has to first be a genuinely good story ON ITS OWN. As in, if you took away everything Star Wars from it, the story would STILL work and just be a damn good story. Too often, sequels, prequels, remakes, etc. use the IP on which they're based as a crutch, to excuse or gloss over otherwise crappy storytelling. Any sequel needs to be a good story in its OWN right, not because it's a Star Wars sequel.
When I see stories about how all the old cast is coming back, my initial reaction is "Well, that's gonna be crappy." Why? It's not just because i don't want to see aging heroes trying to recapture faded glory. It's because every time you see "And Luke's coming back! And Han's coming back! And Lando's coming back!" it suggests, to me, that they think they don't have to try to make the film good otherwise. They're relying on the "branding" to sell the film. They're relying on the fact that you've heard Harrison Ford is a curmudgeonly Han Solo in this one -- and don't worry, he still has a bad feeling about this -- to sell tickets, rather than focusing on the story. The more they touch back to the originals in an obvious, "Hey, remember this?! Wasn't this stuff great?!" way, the more I'm gonna think "Yeah, I remember it....and it was way cooler then. Now it just looks sad."
I absolutely think that the Star Wars universe is rich and interesting enough to tell fantastic stories. I just don't trust that anyone in Hollywood will do that when they're busy signing Ford, Hamill, et al. on to the project. They'll just go through the motions and it will suck. It'll be like bad EU novels where they did the exact same thing. Trot out a superweapon, do all the crap you've seen 'em do before, and keep Star Wars on a hamster wheel instead of running wild in people's imaginations.
I expect fans to think "Inside the box." Mostly I expect this because I don't think fans are all that creative in the first place. There's a reason that fanfiction is generally viewed with disdain. It poorly apes what came before and did it better. the problem is, when I hear stuff about how Ford has been signed, I'm thinking "Great. Fan fiction on the screen. Just what we ****ing needed." Same when I hear "And then..." followed some stupid recycled idea about the imperial remnant and a superweapon and a dark Jedi or Sith.
SEEN IT.
There's so much more that could be done. There's a whole underworld out there. There are Jedi in training now, being trained by a guy who DIDN'T grow up learning stupid crap about midichlorians and "A Jedi shall not know love" and all that other BS from the prequels. There's a new government on the scene. There's TONS of places you can take stories in such a universe, and they can all do new and interesting stuff while still keeping the FEEL of the originals. Is it an easy task to do that? Obviously not, or people wouldn't be so disdainful of the EU. but it IS doable and the fact that it's difficult shouldn't make us -- or Disney -- lower standards.
