How would you change the new Star Wars trilogy
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
ccs
41st lv DM
Yeah, I know how the real story goes. Saw it in the theater & read that book way back then. Got the Marvel comics too.
And yes, I'm aware that my tampering with various scenes to adjust the narrative wouldn't be any better than when Lucus did it with this one.
That's why I need more than just special edition editing powers.
ccs
41st lv DM
Pfft. Kylo had more of a redemption arc than Vader did.
Vader just chucked Palpatine down a shaft in order to save Luke - whom he'd still have gladly ruled the galaxy beside if he'd survived & swayed.
But no, "Poof" all of Vader's evil actions just washed away & he gets to party as a good force ghost....
Imaculata
Hero
But that just proves my point doesn't it? What is there in the Mandalorian that is actually new?
The Mandalorian also recycles old ideas from the original trilogy. You've got your Stormtroopers, Tie Fighters, Sand People, Jawa's, Mandalorians (obviously) and Baby Yoda. Heck, they even revisit Tatooine. That is the problem with Star Wars. You can't do something actually new, or it no longer resembles Star Wars. So they will keep recycling the same old ideas till we're all bored of it.
Oh, I know it all too well, which is why I disagree. It is not a vast universe. There's a lot of written material for sure. But that is not what I mean when I say it is a small universe. There's not a whole lot you can do with it as a property that is actually new. You have to keep recycling Jedi, Stormtroopers, Tie Fighters, X-wings, etc. And even though I put an "etc" at the end there, I think we all know that the list is really quite small.
Last edited:
Celebrim
Legend
You realize that there are like 20 different force using cults other than the Jedi and the Sith, right?
All of that stuff is part of one era, the familiar one known to people in the movies. Yes, the movies kept using Tie Fighters and X-Wings and all that stuff, but notice, when I say "the movies" I mostly mean "Disney". Lucas, for all the faults he had in the writing of the prequels, introduced a ton of new stuff, and no Tie-Fighters or X-Wings to be seen. And while "Clone Wars" was just a cartoon and not ground breaking television, it did do a lot of cool things to make the Clone Troopers more than just faceless fodder.
Imaculata
Hero
None of which the general public are familiar with, and none of which we'll probably ever see in any of the movies.
Not entirely true, since we did see proto x-wings in Revenge of the Sith, but I get what you're saying. The prequels for all their faults, at least tried to do some new stuff.... and people hated it. But I should also point out that the prequels lean entirely on trying to explain minor plot points from the original trilogy that did not need explaining. Such as Vader's backstory, Luke and Leia and the rise of the empire. Its the same problem. It seems there's not a whole lot of new stuff you can do in the Star Wars universe while still keeping it feeling like Star Wars.
The entire end battle of Rise of Skywalker is an incoherent mess. The premise makes no sense what so ever, and the audience feels that, and so it feels like nothing is at stake. A massive fleet of Star Destroyers (and presumably the huge crew required to operate each one) are conjured out of nothing, and yet for some reason they cannot be deployed without a communication array, even though all they would need to do is fly away from the planet. Also, a huge fleet of rebel ships also appears out of nothing and all ships know how to find the emperor's secret planet simultaneously and they also all arrive at the exact same time. Then on top of that there is a bizarre scene with space horses running across the surface of a Star Destroyer that takes you right out of the film. Then we have the emperor shooting lightning up at the entire rebel fleet, with apparently no real consequences. The battle operates by no rules what so ever and so there is no suspense.
In comparison the scene from the Mandalorian is painfully simple and a thousand times more engaging. Its not high art, because the plot of that particular episode was a bit of a mess, but at least you could follow what was going on.
Heck, even the end battle of Rogue One was better, because at least there was a clear premise... even though none of its cardboard cutouts of characters were likable, and it was followed with a cringe-fest bit of fan service.
Rise of Skywalker feels like a million different ideas by a million different people, all thrown into a giant corporate pit, and it strongly smells of studio meddling. I highly doubt JJ Abrams is happy with the final theatrical cut of the film.
Last edited:
Most of the public didn't know much about marvel either. Over many films they introduced new characters and plots. Disney had the knights of ren, something new, and they threw it away. They could have been introducing lots of things in the background of Solo or Rogue One setting up new groups and ideas. But unlike marvel, Star wars has no plans.... How is that possible?
Celebrim
Legend
No, they didn't. They loved it. It wasn't the new stuff that people rejected - it was the old stuff.
Let me back up. You are repeating a very common Hollywood excuse. You first really need to understand that Hollywood is bad at making movies, and they don't really understand why this movie succeeds or this movie fails. So they tell themselves convenient excuses about formulas and marketing and timing and what have you. Hollywood told themselves that the reason the prequels didn't succeed was that they were too different from the formula that made Star Wars successful. But it wasn't a formula that made Star Wars successful, at least not in the sense that they think. What made the original trilogy successful was a combination of things, but they all come down to quality craftsmanship. Quality special effects work. Quality writing. Quality musical score. Quality art direction. But most especially, quality writing that deftly introduced compelling characters, deftly moved forward the plot, and deftly mixed faster scenes of action with slower scenes of character development.
The prequels didn't fail because they were novel. In fact, the novelty of them was the main thing that the fan community accepted, and the main thing that makes them somewhat rewatchable. It's a completely different style of story than the first trilogy, involving a grand political stage with a tragic hero at its center and a love story. And it's got all sorts of great settings, costumes, cultures, and sci-fi gizmos, plus absolute the best fight choreography of any Star Wars movies and a great sound track with Williams doing something really original (for him) and bringing it choral voices. Even people who hate the movies love the novelty of 'Duel of the Fates'. All the new stuff (with the notable exception of the Gunguns and their mascot Jar-Jar) is great.
What people hated was the old stuff, and the reason that they hated it was that it simply was not well done.
People knew coming into the prequels that there were three main story beats that had to happen in the prequels. Anakin had to befriend Obi-Wan and form a great friendship with him. Akakin had to fall in love with the mother of Luke. And then Anakin had to turn to the dark side and betray the Jedi. And the problem the prequels have is that although Lucas knew those were the story beats, he really had no good idea how that had happened. He didn't have the writing chops to make any part of that story engrossing or to make the motivations of the characters believable. That's what kills the prequels.
When you think about what people really hate about the prequels it's the absence of a really believable friendship between Obi-Wan and Anakin. We don't have a lot of that great banter that we have between Han and Luke, and we don't get really sold on the fact that the two care for each other. The lines between the two are often awful, and although each man is a good actor they just can't do anything with the material. It's too didactic. It's too forced. It's too obvious. Likewise, there is a plot hoop that has to be jumped through where Padme falls in love with Anakin, but again the dialogue that is supposed to set this up is just awful, and it doesn't convincingly sell the romance. There chemistry in the scenes. There is no believable motivation on Padme's part. It comes off as corny and stupid, and is inadvertently funny when we should be moved. It fails to make the viewer want to, as my daughter would say, "'ship the characters". Likewise, we aren't given a compelling reason for Anakin's fall. It's sudden. It's poorly motivated. There are some ideas that are supposed to be driving Anakin's fall, but Lucas lacks the vision and the writing chops to really explore them well.
So it was actually the 'old' stuff that turned people off to the prequels - not the new stuff.
And what's interesting is that though the writing was weak, there are enough good ideas in the overall plot, that when you hand over these ideas to another team of writers, you get something like "The Clone Wars", which despite it's limited ambitions, and it's format, manages to do a better job of making the friendship between Anakin and Obi-Wan believable, "ship" the two star-crossed lovers, and address the stress and conflict that leads up to Anakin deciding that from his point of view the Jedi are evil. Now, it's not great, but the fan community just ate it up. In fact there are a lot of fans that feel that the characters in "The Clone Wars", like Ahsoka Tano are some of the most compelling characters in all of Star Wars.
Sure, there are always going to be people who dislike when Star Wars deviates from the tone of the original trilogy, although I'd argue that those people tend to overlook how dark the original trilogy was because they are just so used to it and still look at it with child-like eyes that they don't really think about it. So you have people who didn't like Rogue One exploring ideas like there is no such thing as a perfectly clean war. But a ton of the fans think Rogue One is at least the equal of the original trilogy precisely because while it stayed true to the setting, it introduced a lot of new things. Plus, one of the greatest 'Star Wars' fandom scenes is the scene in 'Clerks' where the protagonists debate whether the victory at Endor was clean, since the unfinished battle station almost certainly still had civilian contractors working on it. So this is not an idea that the fandom hasn't thought about.
This is incidentally the same sort of thing that happens to the Matrix trilogy. The first movie was a good movie, but it was filled with plot holes. It's one of the few movies I watched in the cinema twice, and after coming out of it the second time I told the group I was with that though it was a great movie, if they didn't patch the foundation of the movie by patching the plot holes, then they wouldn't be able to successfully build anything from it because without a firm set of rules and explanation of "why" eventually everything would be just gibberish.
The sequel trilogy kept writing itself into corners and then writing itself out of it by breaking established rules. Things kept getting less and less logical, and more and more just pure spectacle with no heart. That deft mix of pacing between action and slower moments to build character that are the hallmark of the original trilogy (and most of Rogue One, which was better paced on second viewing than I remembered) just isn't in the sequels, with the result that after 7 hours of movie we still haven't had anyone in the new "golden trio" meaningfully interact with each other.
Last edited:
MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
I felt that part was one of the good parts of the movie... I was nearly crying... Ok, I'm ridiculously easy to please and move to tears, but still...
Similar Threads
