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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6099073" data-attributes="member: 4937">To be very specific, Star Wars starts with an external shot of a spaceship, and the fills the screen with what is one of the most iconic scenes in movie history - the purusing Star Destroyer that just gets bigger and bigger and keeps on coming.  That's the missing element in my earlier campaigns - I failed to go epic right from the first scene.  You have to start with something BIG, because just like a novel, you need to win the trust of the audience right from the start.  Then, if you need to slow down later, they trust you because they've got a taste of where this is all going.But the fight within the ship is staged in a completely unusual fashion.  It's told from the view point of the droids, who aren't even participating in it.  For the first 15 or so minutes of the movie the droids are our protagonists  - not Luke, not Han, not even Leia.  It's a daring (and given his later writing history, probably accidental) move, but it has a huge pay off. Oh but they do.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  It lasts several minutes.  Lucas spends like 30 camera shots, 4 scenes and nearly as many minutes on the epic voyage of the droids across the desert.  It's nearly three pages of script.  Why?  Because he's establishing the character of the droids!   That was part of what made Star Wars so startling when it came out.  We the audience are getting to know the personalities of these two individuals we've been following around the first portion of the movie, and they are robots.  We could have started the movie with Old Ben giving Luke his lightsaber and telling him about his legacy.  Cut to the chase.  But we don't.   Instead we spend 15 minutes on the droids and another 10 minutes on Luke's petty trials as a farmboy IN SPACE, before we really begin the quest.You don't have to take my word for it.  You can watch Lucas's commentaries on the movie.  They were initially terrified by the slow initial pace of the movie when they first cut it together.  They thought they'd bore the audience to tears.  They were so scared they started cutting everything they could out of the movie and they still felt it was too slow.And, I will also say that as a result before the extended version, the movie was nearly incomprehensible.  Having a sequel let them put together the peices from that decision.  The recut (unlike the recut of the later two, which generally added filler) really helped the structure of the movie because they had cut so much out in an effort to pick the pace up.  And we are still missing what is probably the most important early scene of the movie, Luke's encounter with Biggs Darklighter at Toshi Station that really sets the stage for his emotional arc through the movie and which allows the audience to participate in Luke's grief at his friends death.  It's in the novelization of the movie, and at age seven as a second grader I was like, "Why is this scene missing?  The movie is so much better and more enjoyable now that I know that happened."  (You can read the original script online, which has problems and puts I think the scene in the wrong place, but which gives structure to the movie nontheless.)No, what we have is about two minutes of that.  Once we establish our context, there is no need to be redundant and show the next sand dune or the next or the next.  But then again, I've never been arguing for that.   I mean, in theory, we could have jumped from the droids leaving the crippled blockade runner to them being herded out of the Jawa crawler.  We might could have even shown the scene of them being herded out of the Jawa crawler first, then cut immediately to a scene with Old Ben Kenobi.  But we would be losing things in doing so. And another thing, you seem to be fixated on the idea that the action scenes are what makes the movie have fast pacing.  Action scenes don't make a movie have fast pacing, as one season of CGI infested soulless 200 million dollar 'action movies' after another proves.  Action can be as slow and deadly dull as any other sort of scene.   Without reasons to care, it's all just meaningless spectacle.  I'm quite sure you agree with me, since we both agree that after a certain point one random encounter after another is just meaningless filler.But again, you want an emotional, dramatic, 'plotsy' character driven movie, spend some time building up your drama.  You want just a meaningless action movie, just blow some things up and have some people die on the screen.  CGI gets cheaper every day.</blockquote>

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