Wombat
First Post
I have a highly heretical opinion about where Star Wars went wrong that I love to promolgate.
Where did things go wrong? With The Empire Strikes Back.
Weird, right? I mean, universally this is seen as the best of all the Star Wars films. But bear with me while I explain things.
Star Wars (or A New Hope for you young whippersnappers) was a popcorn-eating, saturday matinee hero film. It had cheesy acting, whizbang special effects, Good Guys, Bad Guys, and a good amount of action; don't try to make too much sense out of it -- the Good Guys won and that is all that matters! Wheee!
And then came ESB.
This film had much better scripting, much better acting/directing, even better special effects, a darker, more serious tone, and strung in strong mythological elements. Yes, these are all the things we love, but you see none of these were really present (aside from the special effects, to a point) in ANH. ESB raised the bar to an amazingly high level! Star Wars was now a new mythology for us! People started claiming to practice The Force. This wasn't some cheezee little saturday matinee piece of fluff, this was EPIC.
And so we waited breathlessly for future enstallments to further up the ante.
Instead, we go ewoks.
If you take ESB out of the mix, what you have is a collection of questionably scripted, poorly acted/directed films with whizbang special effects that would be great for a saturday matinee and some fun for us geeks to talk about on the boards. And that would be about it. But by adding ESB to the mix people (even non-geeks) assumed there was Something Much More to the series. Since there isn't Something Much More, they are disappointed.
So, sadly, it would have been in the best interest of the series if ESB had been on the same quality level as the other four scripts to date in the series. Then it would have been a nice little franchise, but nothing amazing and people wouldn't be talking about whether Episode III (or as I call it "Episode 6") would be The One That Turns It Around. Instead Star Wars would be what it us -- fun popcorn fair, but not much more.
Where did things go wrong? With The Empire Strikes Back.
Weird, right? I mean, universally this is seen as the best of all the Star Wars films. But bear with me while I explain things.
Star Wars (or A New Hope for you young whippersnappers) was a popcorn-eating, saturday matinee hero film. It had cheesy acting, whizbang special effects, Good Guys, Bad Guys, and a good amount of action; don't try to make too much sense out of it -- the Good Guys won and that is all that matters! Wheee!
And then came ESB.
This film had much better scripting, much better acting/directing, even better special effects, a darker, more serious tone, and strung in strong mythological elements. Yes, these are all the things we love, but you see none of these were really present (aside from the special effects, to a point) in ANH. ESB raised the bar to an amazingly high level! Star Wars was now a new mythology for us! People started claiming to practice The Force. This wasn't some cheezee little saturday matinee piece of fluff, this was EPIC.
And so we waited breathlessly for future enstallments to further up the ante.
Instead, we go ewoks.
If you take ESB out of the mix, what you have is a collection of questionably scripted, poorly acted/directed films with whizbang special effects that would be great for a saturday matinee and some fun for us geeks to talk about on the boards. And that would be about it. But by adding ESB to the mix people (even non-geeks) assumed there was Something Much More to the series. Since there isn't Something Much More, they are disappointed.
So, sadly, it would have been in the best interest of the series if ESB had been on the same quality level as the other four scripts to date in the series. Then it would have been a nice little franchise, but nothing amazing and people wouldn't be talking about whether Episode III (or as I call it "Episode 6") would be The One That Turns It Around. Instead Star Wars would be what it us -- fun popcorn fair, but not much more.