Posted on 09/28/2013 11:23:27 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
If you haven't seen it, a design company in Portland has created a video called 4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again. They've also set up a website and a petition which they are hoping 1 million people will sign.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
I like the video. It's very well produced and I'm sure the creators will get a lot of traffic. That said, I think you can boil all of these rules down to one underlying concept. The Star Wars universe was driven by a realistic sense of capitalist enterprise, specifically the idea of secondary and black markets that exist outside the Empire's control.
Without the underlying gradient of economic necessity almost none of the connections in the first 30 minutes of Star Wars would happen. Luke Skywalker lives on a moisture farm in the middle of nowhere. Early in Episode IV, Luke purchases two droids. Why? Because they are needed for work on the farm. Now what Luke wants to do is go to Toshi station to pick up some power converters, but he can't because he has to work and get the droids ready for work.
By the way, Luke's family buys the droids from the Jawas who are essentially junk collectors making a meager existence off whatever they can collect in the desert, fix up and resell. They are all capitalists trying to survive in a tough environment.
When he does have spare time, Luke spends it flying his beat up T-16 Skyhopper and his beat up X-34 Landspeeder. The reason his stuff is old is not because there is no new stuff in the Star Wars universe, it's old because Luke is broke. Used stuff that he rebuilds himself is all he can afford....
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Yeah, it smacked of pure GL throughout.
When it bombed worse than an Edsall at a stockcar rally, he went out of his way to remove every copy he could, even tried denying it existed.
One of the more recent things said was that “the network executives wanted it to be a variety show format.”
Whether that is true, who knows.
GL and his “pet ideas” are really odd to watch in action.
His “attack and savage the fans” because they disliked Jar-Jar was bizarre by itself.
JJ Abrams Star Trek had some good bloopers, like Nero’s villain monogue, “Spock...will die, Kirk..will die, JJ Abrams will die..”
loved the blooper reels.
Lol!
Well, possibly.
I really hope so. As a tangent, I have always maintained that one of the main reasons why the Nolan Batman series was such a huge success is partly because Nolan got rid of the camp in Batman. No nipples on the suits, no silly jokes, no silly villains (Mr Freeze Arnold anyone, or crooks on rollerblades and hockey sticks), etc. Getting rid of the camp, and adding a dollop of realism - as much reqlism as can be expected from a superhero movie - did a lot of good. For instance the second movie in the serieswas more or less a terrorism movie (in the vein of The Siege) with a gangster sub-theme thrown in ....just that the protagonist dressed up as a flying rodent. Keep the script, take out Batman references, and put Bruce Willis in while changing it to Die Hard, and the script would still have worked!
Back to Star Wars ...make it gritty and real. As real as one can make something set in space and featuring force wielders. Get rid of talking teddy bears and long-eared idiots. Recipe for success ...assuming of course that the script is gold.
Abrams is about as overrated a director as I’ve seen in recent years. I’m not sure who he’s related to or who he has some dark secrets on that he keeps getting jobs.
The new Trek II was a mostly pointless exercise with no character development to speak of, just cheesy sitcom banter between Spock and Uhura and turgid melodrama between Kirk and Spock. The action scenes lacked logic, like when Kirk is constantly shooting at an enemy ship that neglects to turn and defend itself, and just keeps shooting in the other direction. Or when spaceships get torn apart under enemy fire and still manage to navigate through space and survive re-entry into the planet’s atmosphere.
Super 8 was a hodgepodge of rip-offs of earlier, much better films like E.T., Jurassic Park and Close Encounters. Once again it’s 2 hours of characters doing semi-random acts with little to no plotline to pull it all together and make a point with the whole exercise. And it built a story around silly elements yet forgot to add any sense of fun to it and instead acted like it was a serious sci-fi like Contact.
Mission Impossible 3 was the worst of all 4 of those films, with a dull storyline and extremely poorly directed action scenes that looked like rejected TV movie of the week stuff with no style or coherence.
Bottom line is Abrams doesn’t know how to direct movies. He started out as a TV producer and never learned how to tell a complete, coherent, satisfying story in 2 hours. He was a poor choice to direct the next trilogy. The fact that the new producers could make that bad a decision right off the bat doesn’t bode well for the whole project.
Maybe, but nevertheless Star Wars wouldn’t be Star Wars without having some cute characters in it. Of course R2 will be in this trilogy as well.
Exactly.
Hopefully the writers come up with something worth our time.
“SEE Jar-Jar DIE via womp rat!”
And why not on that, we “see” Jar-Jar frozen in carbonate in the trophy room in Star Wars Force Unleashed 2. (A game, but still. The fans loved that one.)
R2 is to be expected.
“Nub nub” chattering teddy bears besting battle hardened elite troops is “another thing entirely”, GL had to have tossed it in at the last minute.
It seemed so haphazard and ill designed.
saw about 5 minutes of it once and couldn't stand any more of the armature hokey crap!
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LvswNDAAZCU
Troops by Kevin Rubio.
One of the voices heard is the voice actor for one of the Animaniacs characters.
PC is an understatement. Ever notice now that on SyFy with all these cheap knock off disaster movies involving storms, tornados with sharks in them, land sharks, ice storms, et al, that the term ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ is given as the cause.
I’d expect a future Star Wars movie to be based on something along the lines of “the demise of XXXXXX (Rebel Alliance OR Empire) was due to global warming across multiple planets.
Excellent.
If they stick to already Lucas-approved canon, then the story will follow the fall of Han and Leia's son Jacen Solo to the dark side (he become's Darth Caedus) and his twin sister Jaina's efforts to stop him.
O.K., maybe it was just because I was a kid, but I loved the Christmas special!
That being said, Lucas was just another artsy socialist with NO clue about how the world works generally (but specifically, he made out really well for himself, as they so often and so ironically do.) Disney can head into Avatar territory without deviating much from the prequels at all. Add J.J. Abrams to that, and well...
Which is why I pretend the last three movies don’t exist.
Second, most of the characters from the first series were drawn from Joseph Campbell's archetypes (see his works like The Hero with a Thousand Faces, et al.) and work with mythology. It is my understanding that Campbell and Lucas were not only friends, but also Campbell consulted on the first script/movie ideas. After he died in 1988, Lucas had no one else with the expertise to help him create iconic characters (and by the time he made the second trilogy, he had isolated himself from dispute, anyway. I just read a post mortem of the video game company "LucasArts" that Lucas owned, and it is full of complaints that Lucas was intolerant of opposing views, to the point that he fired people who would disagree with him. I hear the same thing happened to an aide who cautioned him against Jar Jar).
George Lucas may be one of the luckiest men alive. He parlayed a special effects company (because ILM really IS very good) into film history. He rode other people's stories and ideas to fame and success, and hasn't had a good one himself since then...
If you go back and read what George Lucas himself said about the Star Wars franchise, he had the vision to keep the marketing rights. He made 10 times more money on product marketing the Star Wars brand than he or the studios ever made from theater ticket sales.
Disney, the masters of marketing, know this as well.
Good points. The series peaked, I think, with "Empire Strikes Back". From that point on, story line, dialog, and plot were sacrificed to marketable toys and special effects for the purpose of special effects. (What the heck was the point of that whole long-running pod race scene in Episode I?)
Agreed! Don’t even get me started on the prequels. It’s my opinion that Star Wars fell apart with ROTJ. Leia is Luke’s sister-WHAT!!?? Cutesy furballs who can take on “elite” stormtroopers—WTH! Leia’s “I always knew.” Really!!? And you kissed your brother anyway in ESB? Ugh. Han Solo’s 90210 immature acting (”Well, if that’s the way you really feel about it, hmph”). Retreaded ideas—ANOTHER DEATH STAR!! And it’s BIGGER! Ooh. Yay.
Bad cinematography was it’s biggest downfall. The first two movies look gritty and real. ROTJ looks like someone took some Windex to everything and cleaned it up. I mean, even Jabba’s palace looked hokey.
Stupid. Just stupid.
Heh! That was a pretty good video.
The Millennium Falcon is still the coolest spaceship ever.
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