The Problem with Star Wars

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

That, sir, was very rude

No, its just making sure the movies don't get an NC-17 rating.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Well, all of them. The undergrad in question nearly wet himself in anticipation when I told him I had the trailer. He's a fan without being one of us. Saw the OT on video as a kid, but it was after all the hoopla had died down. Then there's my father, who sat through the OT with me about a thousand times in my youth, is a reasonably sharp fellow, and enjoys the movies tremendously, but he didn't put it together entirely until Palpy's conversation with Anakin in AotC. He thought Palpy "was up to something" in tPM, but didn't think he was Siddious.

I can see this. If the director had had the presence of mind to tell the guy who plays Palpatine to deliver his Palpatine lines sincerely, instead of dripping with evil intent, I might not have so much of an issue with the lack of "phantom menace" in tPM. As it is, Palpatine may as well be smirking at the camera, so blatant is his evil intent in every line he delivers. "Have no fears, Queen Amidala, I'll take care of everything..." Ugh.

Remember, in the OT, the Emperor was "the Emperor" NOT "Emperor Palpatine." You only saw that name in the novels and some of the other tie-ins.

True. But the fact that the voices are the same, combined with Palpatine's "deliver every line as if you were the Emperor, despite the circumstances" acting choice (whether director-mandated or otherwise,) still makes it seem painfully transparent, IMO.

Which makes it very, very hard to use in real life, because most of those angles are just as dangerous to you as to your opponent, if not more so.

Sure, if you aren't a badass like Darth Maul.

It would be too dangerous to use, realistically, and the fact that you can only grip it in the middle takes away the primary advantage of a staff, reach. Every staff technique I've ever seen relies upon grips that are impossible with that beast.

Perhaps to be more realistic, the middle grip should have been lengthened to allow for a longer grip. Interestingly, in the game I mentioned earlier it often looked like the character avatars were gripping the double-bladed lightsaber dangerously close to the "live" ends, even to my untrained eye. But still, as a non-staff fighter, the logic and execution were close enough to plausible for me to suspend disbelief and really enjoy Maul's fighting style.

It was. And I loved it when I first saw it, but once I took some martial arts it became increasingly irksome. It's not so bad when he was 1-on-1 with one of them, but when he was fighting both jedi, there are too many moments where Ewan McGregor visibly hesitates to wait for Park to get his blade into place and what not. It's just not possible to use that "weapon" efficiently.

Fair enough. My father is a 20+ year firearms expert, and second-hand knowledge of firearms has ruined my suspension of disbelief regarding most treatments of guns and ammo in movies in a similar way.

Well, sure. He had to be bad-ass to overcome the severe limitations of that weapon. I personally found him to be much more impressive when he was using only one side of the thing. I REALLY wanted to see more of that first fight in the desert with Qui-gon. The use of a single blade with that really long handle was cool. And the additional leverage would be nice.

I agree, he was badass then too. That's the shame of it, really. I'd have liked to see the fighting prowess and the symbolic and stylistic greatness of the design combined with a character with the depth and staying power of Darth Vader. Maul was perfect for a series long villain, and Vader replacing Maul would have been a great transition.

Similarly, people keep complaining about Dooku's "bent lightsaber." I don't see the problem. It's not like the blade was curved. And there is a precedent for curved handles in swords. Arguably, it merely makes the lightsaber into a one-handed sword instead of it's typical sort of hand-and-a-half usage.

The bent lightsaber just struck me as stupid. Nobody else has such a thing. It is like Mace Windu's purple pimp-saber. Only present to give the character something special, with no reasoning why that character should be the only one with something special, and no effect aside from a cosmetic peculiarity. That, and it did indeed remind me of a pistol-grip, which seems even more silly on a sword, Final Fantasy imagery aside.

<snip a description of bodiless swordfighting> This is why I don't believe in animated swords in D&D, either. It is impossible to defeat them, with any sort of verisimilitude.

I understood what you meant in your previous post, even without the excellent visualisation in your latest. My thougth is that it doesn't have to be done in the most utterly effective way that you describe. In the game, the floating lightsabers behaved basically as if an invisible person were wielding them. The same could have been done with Yoda, where he isn't necessarily controlling the blade as if it were completely independent, but merely using the Force to provide him with "invisible hands" that are stronger and taller than he is, but still operate as "hands" connected to him by an invisible thread of the Force.

Or it could work exactly as you claim, and Yoda could have thrown Dooku onto the defensive immediately, showing what a badass Yoda is in lightsaber combat for exactly the reasons you mention.

In either case, it's not a big sticking point with me. I did like the Gummy-Bear Yoda. My only really small quibble was how quickly he goes from being Super-Ninja to weak-and-dying on Dagobah in only a few short years (relatively speaking for Yoda's race.) All I can think of is that that swamp planet really did a number on his health.

Um.

They are most certainly popular but nowhere close to the best loved. That title is and will always belong to Darth Vader. He had lots of lines. They were pretty cool, too.

I agree completely. That's what I hoped to have from Maul (who incidentally is not loved by me at all, exactly because his potential was so wasted.) Thus far, the new trilogy has nobody even close to Vader's stature in the original series, which is a shame imo.

 

[Flyspeck23]

No, its just making sure the movies don't get an NC-17 rating.

Apology accepted

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Not that all our discussions have to be objective, but if Ankh was trying to establish a baseline for discussion, I guess I took it for granted that he was using successful to mean financially successful.

I only used successful because The Serge said they WEREN'T, so I took the objective point of view since that can actually be measured. But I still say that the subjective view can be supported by it.

I will continue to believe that the amount of success Star Wars movies have had financially(including the Prequels) shows that movies ARE successful in the more subjective elements. Bad movies do make money, but not the kind of money Star Wars movies have been making. If they are really so unsuccessful in telling a story, etc, nothing could boost the numbers as high as they are, beyond even the Lord of the Rings movies. Sure, seeing it multiple times, etc, WILL contribute, but not that much when you look at how financially successful the movies have been.

 

[Desdichado]

A. Perfectly obvious that Lucas watched Kurosawa very carefully before directing Star Wars. The wipes, the use of music, the setting-the-scene shots -- all very Kurosawa.

Indeed. He's never claimed otherwise. Although I thought it mildly amusing on the commentaries for the DVD release of Hidden Fortress that Lucas was there saying that he thought Seven Samurai was a much better film For what it's worth, I do too. Still, filming techniques are a far cry from the claims I've heard that Star Wars is just a remake of Hidden Fortress set in space.

B. Arguable that The Hidden Fortress serves as a pretty significant inspiration for Star Wars. The princess, the bickering menials, the swashbuckling hero, the final award-granting scene -- all very Star Wars-y. Of course Kurosawa's film doesn't have a Luke-type of character, and obviously that means you can't directly map one film to the other, but he'd obviously SEEN the picture and been strongly affected by it.

Yeah, the two bickering peasants are a straight borrow from Hidden Fortress, and he's never said otherwise. In fact, Lucas has specifically confirmed that, including the concept of starting the movie off from their point of view. Other than that, though, the correspondences start to become much more hazy. There's not really all that many correspondences between the two princesses, for isntance, and it's not like a princess in danger is a unique plot element by any means.

C. Perfectly obvious that Kurosawa exceeds Lucas on every single level. Things that in Kurosawa's hands are beautifully timed and structured moments are heavy-handed and facile in Lucas'.

I agree. If only Kurosawa had the resources that Lucas had.

Lucas is a hack. He got spectacularly lucky with Star Wars (the original film) and I don't believe for a second he ever planned anything other than that one film at first. It was only with the incredible success of the original picture that he even THOUGHT of doing more films. And I wish he'd never done a single sequel.

I totally agree. He's obviously been a film school guy who was familiar with truly good work, and tried to imitate it in a very ham-fisted way. Not only did he ape some of the filming techniques of Kurosawa, he also specifically copied elements from the old serials, from older movies (he said over and over again that he wanted an old fashioned Erich Korngold-esque soundtrack, which John Williams delivered magnificently). I also think the idea that he had more than a very vague idea of story beyond the first movie (much less specific plans of any kind to make subsequent movies) is unbelievable.

I'm certainly glad he made more movies; I love Empire and I even quite like Jedi, and even though I can't even watch them straight through anymore, I still like Menace and Clones well enough for the good elements they do contain, and I'm quite excited for Sith in two months. But, as I've said before, his talent really just isn't in directing or scripting, and he did just get lucky with Star Wars. Empire (and to a lesser extent, Jedi) succeeds because his approach is more hands-off of the details, and the same can be said for Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein he developed the characters and story, but Larry Kasdan wrote the screenplay and Spielberg directed. With the exception of the first Star Wars (and American Grafitti, but that's such a different kind of movie that it probably doesn't mean anything), the more directly involved he's been, the worse the movie's turned out.

I agree that the climactic fight scene in Episode I is spectacular. But Lucas didn't direct that -- that was directed by the stunt team, I'm sure. And powered by Ewan, Liam and Ray's tremendous desire to create a fantastic fight scene and do whatever it took to accomplish.

Exactly why I'm hoping that Sith is the best by far of the new trilogy. He'll be more hands off of the specifics of the fight scenes, they'll be more of them, and the actors are serious about trying to make those as good as they can. If later, after I've seen it three or four times at the theater and own the DVD, all I can do is watch the fight scenes, I'm OK with that.

 

[Desdichado]

???

The early drafts are irrelevant? That's sort of like saying that Shakespeare's play is irrelevant to Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet.

Not buying it.

No, it's like saying Shakespeare's early drafts of Hamlet are irrelevent to the final draft of Hamlet. And, for all intents and purposes, they are. The final draft's the one that we got, not the earlier ones. It's just that in this case, we have better documentation of the evolution of the final draft.

But either way, I don't see how comparing the early drafts of the script to Hidden Fortress says anything at all about comparing the movies that actually got made instead to Hidden Fortress. If you mean instead that early drafts more closely resembled Kurosawa's film, then that's one thing, and I won't really argue with you (since I don't remember many details of reading those early scripts online, assuming those are actually genuine.) But watching the two movies side by side I can say that I think it's preposterous to say that one is simply a remake of the other, as it's just as easy to find substantial differences as it is to find superficial similarities.

 

[Storm Raven]

The bent lightsaber just struck me as stupid. Nobody else has such a thing. It is like Mace Windu's purple pimp-saber. Only present to give the character something special, with no reasoning why that character should be the only one with something special, and no effect aside from a cosmetic peculiarity. That, and it did indeed remind me of a pistol-grip, which seems even more silly on a sword, Final Fantasy imagery aside.

Many fencers prefer the pistol grip for their swords, as it gives a stronger hold on the weapon. I know some competitive fencers who refuse to use any other type of grip.

 

[Desdichado]

Thanks. That was bugging me. I knew it had a name I should be remembering.

Can you expand at all on the functional significance of such a grip? I've only ever used straight grips (escrima sticks, staves, and such).

Sorry, can't. I've never actually used one, but my fencing instructor did, and just as a matter of course, we were familiar with the idea.

 

[Desdichado]

That, sir, was very rude

I'm guessing he figured there weren't any real wookies around to get offended by it...

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I can see this. If the director had had the presence of mind to tell the guy who plays Palpatine to deliver his Palpatine lines sincerely, instead of dripping with evil intent, I might not have so much of an issue with the lack of "phantom menace" in tPM. As it is, Palpatine may as well be smirking at the camera, so blatant is his evil intent in every line he delivers. "Have no fears, Queen Amidala, I'll take care of everything..." Ugh.

Meh. I didn't think it was that bad. Slimy and manipulative, yes, but not dripping with "evil." Just smarminess. He sounds like a politician. YMMV, and apparently does.

Only present to give the character something special, with no reasoning why that character should be the only one with something special, and no effect aside from a cosmetic peculiarity.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the grip was meant to reference Lee's history of fencing in movies, or something like that. And the whole "lightsaber forms" thing they bandied about in the lead-up to Episode 2 came from that. Perhaps our fencing geeks can tell us why a pistol grip would be appropriate to the reference? Or maybe film geeks. Did Chris Lee make a habit of using such swords in his earlier work?

My thougth is that it doesn't have to be done in the most utterly effective way that you describe. In the game, the floating lightsabers behaved basically as if an invisible person were wielding them. The same could have been done with Yoda, where he isn't necessarily controlling the blade as if it were completely independent, but merely using the Force to provide him with "invisible hands" that are stronger and taller than he is, but still operate as "hands" connected to him by an invisible thread of the Force.

It's just better drama to have directly engaged combatants, IMO. Plus, they already have "armchair swordsmen" (like myself ) second-guessing their fighting. Without spending some exposition on the limitations of levitative fighting like that, people would see it in action and say, "well, geez, why doesn't Yoda just do X"

In either case, it's not a big sticking point with me. I did like the Gummy-Bear Yoda. My only really small quibble was how quickly he goes from being Super-Ninja to weak-and-dying on Dagobah in only a few short years (relatively speaking for Yoda's race.) All I can think of is that that swamp planet really did a number on his health.

Well, he's not exactly spry most of the time in the prequels either. After AotC, a friend of mine commented that he liked how Yoda used that walking stick "eventhough he clearly doesn't need it." My reading was that he DOES need it. His body really is old and failing, but he can draw on the Force, for short periods, to transcend his physical limitations. "Luminous beings are we..." It's probably very taxing for him, physically and spiritually, so he wouldn't want to do it regularly. I have the notion in my head that he probably had to spend a lot of time meditating and recuperating from that brief fight.

Yes, I know I'm reading a lot into it. I do that with most movies, literature, and everything. Those little details are important to me for some reason. Heck, I used to have complicated notions for how my wizards prepare their material components at the time of spell preparation. Adds flavor.

My real gripe with that fight is that there was little dialogue between the principals (a fault of all the prequels, as some others here have already pointed out). The fights with Vader in the OT were always punctuated with comments and taunts that upped the emotional ante. The best we got in the new movies is Dooku's "Master Kenobi, you disappoint me..." bit. That was a nice line. I heard rumors at one point that there had been a line from Yoda when Dooku challenges him that went something like, "No interest in contests, do I have." Which, from Yoda, is sort of like smack-talk: "I am above your childish contests... punk."

Besides, I'd love to get more of the history between Yoda and Dooku. Their apparent relationship does bring out another Fathers and Sons angle to the whole story. Ooh! Now I can play armchair psychologist, too! "So, Georgie. Tell me about your father..."