ST George Lucas and the Mystery of the Treatment

Then you are in small group.

 

Clearly Disney did the right thing. In most people's eyes (which doesn't make them right) TFA is better than anything Lucas has put out since 1983. I've seen zero evidence that he still has the ability to create something like TFA at this point in his life. Obviously others will disagree, but if you look at it from Disney's point of view I'm sure they think they made the right decision.

 

Am I really? I know that the overwhelming majority loved the movie. And for me, I never cringed at Star Wars so hard until Attack of The Clone's dreadful love scenes with Anakin and Padme. It ends shivers down my spine just thinking about how terrible it was, ugh.

 

Gotta disagree with you there. The other two example wrote a series of books, utterly by themselves (though Tolkein had C.S. Lewis as a sounding board and Rowling had editors), then movies were produced based on them. George made movies first, and while he was the dominant hand in the story, others had a HUGE influence on the entire finished product, from dialogue, to design, to VFX. Thousands of people have worked on Star Wars canon material at this point. It's really not a good comparison.

 

The one thing we do know for sure is. No matter who made this movie - Disney and J.J. or George Lucas - a very vocal group of fans would vehemently lament not getting the other option.

As life long fan of George Lucas, it's quite strange to read other people championing him again after so much hostility. Regardless of quality do you think Episode 7 could be as popular if we got George Lucas's version?

 

If Lucas made this EXACT SAME MOVIE I would like it exactly the same amount.

There are very, very few people who actually care about Lucas... most of them only care about the quality of his films

 

Considering how he trimmed the squibs in the OT:SE's, I'm assuming the amount of damage we saw wreaked on the stormtroopers would be lessened.

Though I'd certainly expect to see a rathtar scene in Lucas' version.

 

Just to clear the air a bit, I don't hate George Lucas. I think that without his contributions, the film making landscape would be completely different. I'm just very critical of the decisions that he's made post-ROTJ.

 

If Lucas made TFA as it is, people would be praising the return of a master--it's as simple as that.

That said, I do think TFA lacks a certain oddness that Lucas gave I-VI. It's as if the OT were split in two: the PT retains the really offbeat character of the OT, while TFA retains its warmth and humanity. The closest we ever got to combining those two again was TCW.

 

The sith are gone. Anakin fulfilled the proficy.

 

I actually think that the "oddness" was there during the Jakku scenes... but I didn't feel it quite as much after that.

 

Yeah, I'd agree with that. Maz's castle is the other obvious response, although it feels a bit forced to me (no pun intended).

 

I will say, Maz saying that Chewbacca is her "boyfriend" and just restating it with "I like that Wookie" has a nicely bizarre quality that can, and should!, pop up in Star Wars a lot. That and did you see how gimpy the "spies" were at Maz's castle? that's also good weird Star Wars. Heck, I even think Hux's speech has this really weird "ultimate Space Nazi" vibe which is from ANH but cranked up to 11 here. Which is also good weird.

It's impossible to completely drain the weird out of Star Wars, it'll always kinda be there, and that came from Lucas just coming up with a crazy idea of mashing about seven different genres into a single film.

 

Yeah, you're right. The Resistance spy droid is actually one of the best things in the movie. And you're right about it being part of the SW DNA. But I do think Lucas added a flavour that can't be fully reproduced. It's kind of like comparing lineups in a great band--Lucas wasn't the sole irreplaceable member, but by the same token, he still made a worthwhile contribution.

 

Maybe Lucas = Ringo. Sure, they could have hired better drummers, but it would never have sounded quite the same...

 

I think it says something that you cited TCW, which was probably the only time since the OT that Lucas was involved in the idea generation and worldbuilding but other people could contribute input and fine tune the details.

 

OK, but even by your response, Lucas would actually be far more definitive of SW than those 2 were of their overall franchises.

1) Lucas wrote the stories just like they did for Potter/Rings.

2) Lucas got a lot of help with the movies, but had the biggest hand in them by far; those two had almost nothing to do with the movies (I don't know much about Potter because I don't care for it, but my assumption is that this is correct regarding Rowling).

Therefore, if you combine movies and books, Lucas would tower over them in terms of his overall influence.

Edit; I wouldn't have preferred for Lucas to do TFA, I'm just talking in terms of being the creator of the franchise, or being personally definitive of the franchise..

 

Marvel Comics recently put out a limited series, "The Star Wars," based on Lucas's original draft of the first film.
I wonder if they could do the same for his sequel treatments. It's always interesting to see what could have been.

 

The first draft? Oh, that's be a hoot. People would read that and think, "Holy Cow! This is nothing like Star Wars!"

 

Interesting.

 

That's true, but I think IJ must have been a special case. According to this article, Frank Darabont specifically turned down the chance to write TPM because it wasn't a union job: http://theforce.net/episode1/story/Frank_Darabont_Refutes_TPM_Rumors_75332.asp
I'm not sure at what point Lucasfilm did become a WGA signatory (whether it was before the sale to Disney or not) but it would be interesting to find out, since that would have had a major impact on TFA's script depending on who Lucas would have been able to hire if he still ran the company. A Lucas/Jonathan Hales script for TFA probably wouldn't have won back many fans

 

I'm just flabbergasted that multiple people in this thread thought that Dexter was a bad effect. He's probably in my top five aliens in all seven films. I thought he was done well with a lot of personality. To each their own...

As for TFA, I fully expected to be very disappointed in it but I came out of it loving it despite its faults. I've seen it four times and while I do feel that there is a little something missing without George's touch (and I think that there should have been more "known" aliens in the film to ground it in that galaxy), I feel like it came close to the other films for me.

 

I agree that you lose a little "Georgeness" without him, which is a shame, but overall I personally think the benefits of having him step away and hand off to others have so far outweighed a little less of an offbeat tone in places. I think it's a shame he couldn't stick around more as a sounding board, but that was never going to fly.