I do keep it in a different brain compartment than my appreciation of the works themselves. It's just too delicious to ignore entirely.
Well, yes.
That's about the only way to manage it when you know the craft. At the same time, while a first pass or three to just enjoy it is nice, I like to be able to switch it over to my analytical brain at
somepoint. Movies that require you to not think ever in order to enjoy them kinda **** me off. I'm looking at you, Michael Bay.
It sounds like [George] asked all of his circle to direct the movies repeatedly over the years. While it may have resulted in a slightly more well-rounded sheen, I think he was still fairly successful at getting his ideas across, despite his reluctance. It's also a unique slice of film history to see a truly independent series of high budget films from the perspective of one person. The polish absolutely could have been brighter, but I still applaud the ambition and many of the ideas on display.
Quite. If I step back and look at all the filmic catalogue of Lucas-era Star Wars -- including animated, and yes, that means including the Holiday Special and the Ewok movies -- I think there's more good than bad, and even the bad is usually not
bad-bad, just... Well, it tends to be something that might have been better had the actors felt free to alter the dialogue the way Harrison did (to George's great frustration), or had the actors had a director who was better at directing people... In a few cases, it's a matter of great scenes that shouldn't have been in for narrative reasons, like showing the audience Anakin becoming Vader, or Yoda during the Republic, thus ruining the deliberate surprises in Empire, if viewed in the order George says they should be viewed...
I've always acknowledged and respected George as a
wonderful idea guy and visionary. He just has always needed someone with the technical skills to wrangle everything that emerges from George's brain into a consistent, coherent, and dramatically-sound plot. What Mark Twain called "good stories, well told."
My deep, unabiding love for STAR WARS '77 makes me bristle at the thought, but it certainly would have been a radical experiment. I suspect he would have encountered even more resistance than he already did putting together his miracle movie. Like all the entries, however, we can only react to the version that was released. (I also suspect that the multi-part "vision" was a lot less formulated than even his earliest interviews imply, but who really knows -- we don't have the equivalent of he Raiders story session transcript.)
Thing is, it wouldn't be The Phantom Menace as we got it in '99. It would have been something closer to his first-draft notes of the time, not colored by the OT or the books and such. And, while I haven't seen all of those notes, I've seen enough bits and pieces and first-hand accounts from people who'd flipped through them (since George kept them) to know there were some things that were the same as what we ended up getting, and many things that were changed for the worse over the course of the '80s and '90s. Even keeping things at his original six-episode arcs (instead of the nine I'd prefer), that would have still allowed a lot of breathing room for the story. Anakin wasn't the central character until Rick McCallum came onboard in the '90s and tweaked George around to that viewpoint. One of my gripes about the Prequels is that Obi-Wan was supposed to be the Hero. Anakin is a strong supporting character, but only a supporting character -- he didn't have enough depth, or complexity to his arc, to be the Hero, especially because he ends up failing for a long time.
As I said elsewhere, a lot was obviously inspired by sitting through boring Ancient History lectures in high school and/or college. The Clone Wars were a bit like the Punic Wars -- a series of related conflicts lumped together in hindsight and lasting over a decade. Palpatine's rise to and consolidation of power was a mashup of Julius and Augustus. Anakin was about five years older than Obi-Wan, there was no "forbidden love" BS to give him inner conflict, Leia was Bail's biological daughter, and was born a few years after the twins. Bail's wife and Luke's mom were sisters, making Luke and Leia cousins. Which, that relationship would still squick people born under a Catholic-and-derivative culture, but the Consanguinity Taboo was only ever enacted for political reasons anyway. As Yoda said, "You must unlearn what you have learned..."
One thing I like about Solo is the glimpse into Imperial consolidation, a bit like Rome pushing into Barbarian lands.
It's a whole era I was tremendously looking forward to seeing, even as George decided there was only enough material in his Obi-Wan-era notes for three films, not six, and suddenly his saga went from twelve films to nine in interviews without anyone noticing. And then Empire was such an ordeal, he cut off Luke's arc, foreshortened everything, and tied it up in a neat little bow called Return of the Jedi and went off to make Howard the Duck and Willow.
I didn't love THE FORCE AWAKENS. Still reconciling my problems with that one. (Also didn't love ROGUE or SOLO, but that's for another thread.)
I've stopped trying, It's all too interwoven. The Force Awakens really needed to start about where Bloodline (the novel) does -- five years or so earlier, so we can see that the New Normal established at the end of Return of the Jedi has lasted, more or less, a good quarter century. Luke has his training center, Han and Leia are still together, the First Order hasn't shown up yet.
Then have things go to hell. I would have liked Rogue One better if they had recognized Cassian was the one on the Hero's Journey, but I go into that elsewhere. The total-party-kill felt forced, and the ending on Scarif felt like a bad video-game level. Never mind continuity problems.
I really can't believe the heights Rian was able to soar to given the setup he was handed. I think this speaks to his abilities as both a craftsman as an artist. Making the compelling precise from noncommittal vagueness. Adding depth to merely aesthetic prompt.
Which makes it all the more frustrating to me that it wasn't two episodes. The only thing that utterly
didn't work for me was the chase. I agree with those arguing it doesn't make sense. When you have to make excuses for why the First Order doesn't just jump into their path, surround them, swarm them with fighters... Who cares about
them saving fuel. The Republic Navy has been wiped out, the capitol is rubble, and the Resistance would be gone, too. They'd have all the time they needed to acquire more resources. Having the Resistance realize they're being tracked through hyperspace and do a strategic dispersal would have worked much better, for a variety of reasons. Each ship jumps out on a different vector, only to drop out, reorient, jump again, repeat, until they re-congregate at a pre-appointed place at a pre-appointed time, and carry out the next step of the plan. Maybe the
Supremacy could only track one ship at a time, and have to choose. Maybe there would be disagreement about dividing the First Order's task force or keeping it together.
In any event, having an episode split would let us not have to keep jumping back and forth between story threads. The most jarring one was where the emotial gravitas of Luke registering that they arrived on the
Falcon, seeing Chewie, and the way he says "Where's Han?" then gets the moment cut short and we ump to a completely different mood with Finn and Rose and DJ and it feels like a needle-scratch across a record each time.
Interestingly, and perhaps appropriately, I think JJ inhabits eerily similar predilections to George's -- and seems to be moved by very similar energies. Needless to say, I believe the series -- for the sake of its continuing mythological relevance -- needs to move past both. I really love most of JJs non-Star-Wars flicks, so I remain cautiously concerned about the next one.
Adore Super 8, even though JJ managed to get lensflare off dirt.
But at this point, we can only look forward, and scratch our collective head at the past.
I prefer to be a bit more proactive. For me, it's the only way I can accept everything we have as it is, is to treat it as a grab bin to put together a
solid story out of. One of my scriptwriting professors told us, about learning the craft, to watch all the movies and TV we could to see what others had done, but, as he put it, "There's a lot of [crap] out there, too. So if you find yourself watching something and get kicked out of the experience, don't just sit there bitching about it -- get a copy of the script and see if you can do better." This was right between Episodes I and II, so that advice was well-timed for me.
I've rolled back a lot of Lucas' revisions -- like shoehorning Leia into the role of Luke's sister, making the Wookiees into Ewoks, making Anakin a whiny teenager rather than a disaffected twenty-something, and definitely not having Palpatine become Emperor, Anakin become Vader, the Jedi get wiped out, the twins get born, and Padmé die all within the same day.