ST George Lucas and the Mystery of the Treatment

Lucas should have learned his lesson and dumbed Star Wars down for the drooling masses. In what fantasy land does George Lucas give a damn about detractors more than artistic independence? The movies have substance. They're not idiot movies. They're complicated mixes of high and low art, they're not one thing or the other. And if anyone doesn't like it, they're not to be considered.

 

Wtf did they do to my baby?

 

See you later.

 

Really? REALLY?

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I should have expounded. What I meant is that [REDACTED] profoundly changed the world. AotC came out less than a year after the events of [REDACTED]. Along with all forms of leisure and entertainment, movie attendance was initially stunted in the aftermath of [REDACTED]. Sorry for the confusion. Seriously.

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Spider-man seemed to cope OK, even given that teaser.

 

I don't think so. the first Harry Potter opened quite soon after that event and that it did very well. Same with FotR. And Two Towers did even better despite some arguing that the title should be changed.
And Spiderman as have already been mentioned.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

Drooling masses? Meesah present Jar-Jar Binks!

I mean no offense, but most of George's philosophy is about as deep as a fortune cookie. It's mostly a surface pastiche of eastern philosophy, and the demands of the story often cause contradiction.

Don't confuse plot DENSITY with depth. Ep I-III has a very dense plot, but it's not particularly deep (at least not in my opinion). Still, I love the overall story of Palpatine/Sidious. Anakin's story is less interesting to me (sadly).

 

That's because it's works on multiple levels.

It is VERY DEEP but if you don't spend the time to go into the depths then you can just stay on the surface and enjoy it on that level. That is the level that the vast majority of the audience watches them, goes to the movies, have a great time and tell their friends to go see them.

The "problem" seems to be for some that the prequels density is so many levels higher than the original's that their complaint is that too much is going on and they can't follow it. They can't seem to focus on any one thing enough. It's like the visual and musical storytelling overpower them. Their remembrance of the experience of watching the originals in the theaters seem to have gone.

Lucas is really doing nothing that he didn't do on the OT. It's just that he's doing it faster, with more intensity and intricate density. I find that they actually abhor the visual storytelling and want it to be more like a TV series where virtually EVERYTHING is layed out character-wise through dialogue. They also seem to think for some strange reason that the OT were dialogue based movies with visuals merely in support whereas the reality is that they were visual and audio based movies with dialogue in support.

It's like somewhere along the way they blocked out the actual overall movie and what it did and is meant to be and think of it as some kind of acting and dialogue based experience.

This is I think their huge "problem" with the prequels. Star Wars movies are not as they want them to be solely acting and dialogue based experiences with some nice visuals thrown in to support the story.

The originals are very simple and surface depth in terms of the dialogue. Characters generally say what they mean. In the prequels that is just as often not the case. We are dealing with constant multiple points of view. Dealing with politicians, businessmen, scientists, religious orders and the like. They are not groups of beings who simply say what they mean. They dance around what they mean, they fib, present something similar to the truth and outright lie.

To take the dialogue of the prequels as the basis to follow the story directly just isn't going to work. You have to watch what the people say while they are saying it and balance that against what is going on in the story and for the characters. The story is very deliberate in keeping things below the surface and constantly adding a building subtext that doesn't just finish in 2 scenes or 20 but continues across not just one movie but all 3.

This motion and flow of characters and situations is across the entire trilogy itself in visuals and music supported by dialogue. The interconnections between the 3 is intricate and on top of all of that it's add all kinds of story and text to the originals as well which means that the simple surface interactions of the OT is "interfered with" by the PT.

So now Obi-Wan, Yoda, Sidious and most of all Vader are not the same anymore. The Jedi and Sith aren't. The Republic isn't. Almost nothing is as it was.

 

Yeah I'd agree with that... although I'd say the plot, the narrative and themes, are more complex than dense (which I agree is not the same as depth). Another thing to remember is that it's relative. Whilst SW isn't what I'd call 'deep', relative to big budget action/fantasy movies, it's narrative appears deep in comparison. Similar to when people refer to The Empire Strikes Back as 'dark'. It's a very light weight movie really, but again, compared to it's relative peers, TESB appears dark and brooding.

 

Exactly and relative to it's peers the PT is incredibly dense, complex and deep as well as other franchise film series.

I fully expect TFA and the ST to go down a middle road between the PT and OT. I don't expect it to be anywhere near the overall relative density, complexity and depth of the prequels but it's also certainly not going to be as generally open as ANH and the entire OT was save for a few character elements.

The fact is that TESB dropped over 30% from ANH as you well know.

Why? Because the audience didn't have as much fun and so it didn't get the same business or number of releases.

Every movie had great audiences and again as you know when all was said and done AOTC was one of the biggest hits in film history with over a billion dollars (about 1.1B) just like 2002's Spider-Man.

This is not the place for this anyway and we went over it all multiple times on the box office thread.

 

On an unrelated note... did anyone watch Game of Thrones last night? The finale was totally channeling AOTC. I thought Yoda was gonna climb off the dragon...

 

Ha, it was.

 

Yeah, I thought: This is how it should have been, in terms of pace, action, and overall direction and emotion...
...I love some things of the PT, but that "roman circus" scene is lame, and G.O.T. did it MUCH better!

 

Whilst I really enjoy Game of Thrones, I respectfully disagree in terms of GOT doing it "much better". The arena scene in AOTC was much more a set piece within a larger final reel. The GOT scene was designed primarily to be self contained and have a twist i.e. the reveal that it's actually an assasination attempt. So I'd agree that the GOTC scene has more inherent drama, because of the 'reveal', and subsequent threat, but it had less scope and spectacle. And let's also remember that GOT is designed specifically for an adult audience, where they can depict much more graphic violence to up the anti interms of 'peril'. SW is constrained by having to play to a more family/kid friendly audience...

 

It looked like a realistic version of the orange sand cartoon arena we had in AOTC

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...years-of-industrial-light-and-magic/71050038/

 

Yeah, and Lucas had certain alien species in mind when he first wrote about midi's in July/August 1977, not the Skywalkers....

 

Actually, Lucas had NOT invented Midis back in 77. The line about midis was added to the original document. J W Rinzler, the writer of the making of ANH book, admitted that this line was not present in the original version and had been added later.

But you are correct in that Lucas said back then that certain Alien species had a greater connection to the Force. But that seemed to be connected to the fact that their brains were different.
Which makes sense since the mind seemed more important than the body when using the Force.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Lucas revised his original ideas? Mind blown.

 

I like that Lucas even goes to the lengths of 'Special Edition' -ing his own words and thoughts.

'That comma needs to be taken out and replaced with a newly shot one, and that hyphen should be CGI'.

At least the dude's consistent.

 

He special editioned American Graffiti for crying out loud!

 

everyone does that to a degree. especially after many years.

 

The biggest tragedy of the Sequel Trilogy would be if George Lucas feels that the franchise has been so far taken away from his basic idea's that he can't watch the movies.