Disney Turned Down George Lucas's Star Wars Scripts 422
ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas's writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren't interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, "The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn't really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it's not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens]." After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7's plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams.
Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the plot's NOT in Lucas's hands, I'm happy.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Funny)
Statements like that one unfortunately lives to regret. Lucas dropped the ball on the prequels, but I'm pretty sure JJ got hit in the head once with the ball and suffered long term damage.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Funny)
That explains why there is so much lens flare in his movies. He's trying to recreate what he sees every day.
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IMO they should just have Quentin Tarantino do Star Wars. We could finally have the glorious final showdown involving JarJar that everybody has been waiting for since he first showed his annoying face in episode 1.
Though this is Disney now...hmm...I wonder how a Quentin Tarantino Disney film would look.
Re: Good news (Score:3)
Re:Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, at first the idea of Lucas's script not being used sounds great. But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Honestly, I don't see this working out well at all. The movies would have sucked in Lucas's hands, and they're going to suck in JJ's hands. They should have hired Joss Whedon to do them instead. Or maybe James Cameron (though he probably wouldn't have been interested).
They cured my acme, the cancer patient said..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people have this opinion, but I think if you took a survey, most would agree with the statement that Episode 1-3 was much worse than The ST reboot. I'll take whatever JJ has in store after more of Lucas's awful writing.
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Many of my problems with Into Darkness had to do with problems with the film itself, rather than as a Star Trek fan. Now, I've still got problems with it as a Star Trek film, but more on the level that they poorly copied something existing instead of coming up with something new. I think that the elements that they copied didn't work because they were trying to force many of them in for the purpose of making references rather than to make the film work. Even then, that's not really a problem because I'm a f
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
JJ is a fan of Star Wars, not Star Trek. He was even quoted as saying he didn't want to direct Star Wars because "I’d rather be in the audience not knowing what was coming, rather than being involved in the minutiae of making them.”
Then again, M. Night Shyamalan was a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and we all know how that turned out.
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Yeah, at first the idea of Lucas's script not being used sounds great. But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Those were Star Trek movies? All this time I thought I was watching Star Wars. That explains why Sulu's light saber was made out of metal.
Re:Good news (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, in the original movies Gary Kurtz his producer kept many of his crazy ideas in check. Lucas wanted to create a Flash Gordon style adventure. Kurtz helped to shape the movies into what they were. The 2000 re-releases were closer to Lucas' original vision. No he didn't have a stroke, he just had a stroke of good luck with the original. He's always been a mediocre director.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. And he had a lot of other help; I read somewhere that his (now ex-)wife helped edit the script for ANH to keep it from having the same shit dialog that the Prequels had. And of course ESB and RotJ had other writers and directors. Lucas had a few good ideas for an overall story, then other people came in and cleaned it all up and gave us Episodes 4-6. The Prequels are what you get when Lucas has full control of everything, and the result is crap, some nice ideas, but overall crap.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
It was the result of his divorce. Lucas's ex-wife was the editor on all his earlier movies, and his work went to crap as soon as they divorced.
I'm convinced that Lucas was always terrible and she was just able to edit around his terrible directing.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Informative)
No, we had nerds raging because the damn thing had plot holes big enough to drive a fucking starship through (except you don't NEED to drive a starship anymore because we can just BEAM TO GODDAMN Q'ONOS now...)!
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Plot holes? In Star Trek?????
Say it ain't so.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Funny)
But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds.
Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'
http://www.theonion.com/video/trekkies-bash-new-star-trek-film-as-fun-watchable,14333/
Re:Good news (Score:4, Insightful)
But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds.
It was also terrible because it was terrible.
Well not quite terrible but completely forgettable in the way that generic sci-fi action flicks are.
Then you have Khan. Perfectly good movie. And you had nerds raging because herpaderpawhiteguynamedKhanNoonienSingh.
I didn't hear that, though in retrospect it would have been cool to have a non-standard ethnicity in the role.
Either way I just re-watched the new Khan movie a few days ago, it was better, but still a fairly generic and forgettable action flick.
Abrams will do fine. He probably won't do Empire-level excellence, but I have no doubt it won't be the complete clusterfuck that was sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and IT GETS EVERYWHERE. DO NOT WANT.
He'll do fine in the sense that it will be another generic and forgettable action flick.
I don't really understand why Abrams is getting all these franchises, he did some good TV series but I haven't found his film work to be particularly exceptional.
That being said I think he's a far better choice for Star Wars than he was for Star Trek. Star Trek was always about exploring the philosophy, something Abrams has never really shown any particular talent for.
Star Wars on the other hand is more about the myth, which is really the strong point of his best work. Maybe he will make something great with this one.
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Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.
TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"
The thing that comes closest
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.
TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"
The thing that comes closest to a philosophical masterpiece of Trek is probably the snoozefest that is TMP. Trek's answer to 2001, only not really.
Kirk punched people out and had sex with green slave girls. The only thing that the new Trek got wrong about all that is that their portrayal of sex was presented stylistically as fan service, and they made Kirk into a frat boy instead of a red-blooded macho hero-type.
I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.
Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.
Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.
In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.
Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.
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Would Cameron have done it? I get the impression no. Whedon might have been very good, but Abrams wasn't a terrible choice for this. I am cautiously optimistic.
Re: Good news (Score:3)
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Titanic and Avatar had better visuals than Serenity, to be sure, and Titanic had some good performances. I thought Avatar was a bucket of problems and flaws with some pretty colors, but really there's few of it's many, mnay flaws that I'm blame on a director.
That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.
It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene ca
Made for 10 years olds rather than 15 year olds (Score:3)
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It's been an alternate parallel universe ever since Tasha Yar went back in time with the Enterprise C, ended up being captured by Romulans, and had a half-Romular daughter who went on have her own warbird in the fleet; the ship was supposed to be destroyed with all hands and it was definitely not. Hell, it's been an alternate timeline since Kirk went back to San Francisco if you want to get technical. Which means it's actually been an alternate timeline since the eighties. And that's not even counting the s
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It obviously won't really be Star Wars; it won't be the story Lucas wants to tell, and will instead be some sort of mass Hollywood shoveled shit designed to appeal to the modal average and draw in dollars.
Lucas did an okay job with the prequels. Arguably, he did too good of a job: the players are all too human, and Jar-Jar is too fluid and well-executed for the movie. It clashes with expectations: people want textbook epic heroes and villains played the way modern, bland actors portray them, not comple
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
George, no amount of astroturfing is going to convince anyone that the prequels were good or even tolerable. You should have at least hired someone who knew who to write passable dialog.
You were good when you first started off, but now you've been blinded by your own success.
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Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that Lucas's plots aren't bad. I think the problem became one of what many extremely successful writers and directors suffer from - lack of effective editorial control.
Robert Jordan's books declined when he switched to having his wife be his primary editor - she just wasn't mean enough, if that makes sense. During the prequels Lucas ended up with a bunch of yes-men that agreed with every inane idea he had. Without that he'd have a better product.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
In large part, I think Harrison Ford really carried the first trilogy. After I'd learned that Ford improvised a number of his lines, I watched the trilogy again and noticed just how wooden and dead nearly all of the other characters in the movies were.
I do think that this trilogy stands a much better chance as long as Lucas isn't writing the dialog. He's okay, I think, as far as overall plot is concerned. But dialog and characters really aren't his strong suit.
As for Abrams, his main problem, it seems to me, is that he seems to focus a bit over-much on action sequences. But Star Wars works pretty well with that, so I'm not too concerned. I think it might work fairly well.
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this^
Nostalgia for the things we found fascinating when we were teens sets a bar that can rarely be exceeded
Just wait twenty years for all the complaining about how the 10th Transformer's movie will never live up to the first one, what with all of the stunning dialog and pacing of the first one
Foggy memories and the halo of nostalgia have a way of turning crap into gold
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
The first Transformers movie sucked badly. Really badly.
The Transformers: The Movie is fucking awesome. It has a great story, an amazing soundtrack, and the most amazing voice cast of any movie ever:
Peter Cullen
Frank Welker
Judd Nelson
Kasey Kasem
Eric Idle
Scatman Crothers
Lionel Stander
Leonard Nimoy
Robert Stack
Orson Welles
And you get to top that list off with a song by Weird Al Yankovic.
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I had the same experience with Voltron. As a kid, I was a huge fan - five lions combining into one giant robot that beats up space monsters? YEAH! When I came on Netflix, I decided to watch it again to relive how wonderful it was. I got a couple of episodes in before I couldn't take it anymore. The plot was horrible, dialog cheesy, and characters barely thicker than cardboard. As a kid, I might be able to overlook a group of kids on the run being somehow able to make their way from the enemy's planet t
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult too and found it to mop the floor with the prequels. The difference is I watched the ACTUAL originals and not whatever even-more-slapstick-and-bad-editing version they're selling now.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullsh*t.
I remember the original release of Star Wars. It had a wide appeal even to non-child audiences. While it was a somewhat "childish" concept, Lucas did not treat it in childish manner.
I knew adults that liked Star Wars as much as I did. One couple I knew even had some of the original action figures on display in their living room.
That's in stark contrast to the prequels that managed to bomb with my own kid.
Pandering to kids is ultimately selling them short. It's also likely to annoy adults in the audience. Trying to pretend you understand the mind of kids is likely folly. Just having fun yourself is probably a lot easier and more effective.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Funny)
Are you saying that kids are NOT interested in the drama of unjust taxation of trade routes?
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I think The Empire Strikes Back still stands up very well. I agree the other two don't have the same magic they once held, but Episode V, which, ironically, had the least involvement from Lucas of the original six films, is extremely well plotted, with better dialog and much more convincing acting. The only thing that comes close to Episode V is the final confrontation between Luke, Vader and the Emperor in RotJ. Unfortunately, that's only a handful of scenes in an otherwise mediocre film.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen Mr Plinkett[1] pick the originals apart? While the presentation is a bit weird, though funny if you like that kind of thing, his points are spot on and overall does a very good job of explaining why the originals were considerably better than the prequels.
[1] http://redlettermedia.com/plin... [redlettermedia.com]
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. IMO the complaints about the prequels were fueled primarily by nostalgia about the original movies, remembering the delight of seeing them as a child.
Bro. Phantom Menace. Jar Jar Binks. Droids controlled from a single point of failure (even my non-technically inclined friends were like "wtf is that?"). You can't explain the hate of that away just by mere childhood nostalgia. That crap was awful in an absolute sense.
I rewatched the original trilogy as an adult and wasn't nearly so enchanted.
And neither was I (sans RoTJ).
That shouldn't be surprising. These are all children's movies; we grew up. Lucas' movies didn't change so much as we did.
Sorry, no. Phantom Menace can't be explained away. The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith were watchable as they portrayed Anakin's fall (sans the lingering doopey-doopey romance between emo-Anakin and hot-Amigdala and a whole bunch of other crap.)
But Phanton Menace was some utter crap that stained the other two, and Jar Jar Binks is like the dog turd that stains the sole of your shoe that doesn't come out no matter how much you scrape it on the grass.
You can't explain the utter fail of that to mere childhood nostalgia. You are crazy.
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It obviously won't really be Star Wars; it won't be the story Lucas wants to tell, and will instead be some sort of mass Hollywood shoveled shit designed to appeal to the modal average and draw in dollars.
Indeed, it's hard to see how this will be different than Star Trek, or Transformers.....
The dialog in the three prequels was not the best, but from a story perspective, can you imagine JJ Abrams even attempting to write the story of a nice kid becoming an evil dictator? Then turning it around to show he wasn't pure evil?
Hopefully Lucas will release his proposed scripts.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah uh, the Jedi lived on ceremony, so didn't do shit like any rational human being. Obi-Wan let Anakin burn because it would be "of the dark side" for him to kill Anakin and put him out of his misery. This is the same reason Ben Carson talks about the world being 6000 years old and Homosexuality being a form of bestiality.
People aren't rational when given emotional conflicts. In your perception, the moment you backhand a woman, she realizes you are abusive and leaves; in reality, if you beat your woman regularly, she will be convinced you are a great guy and just things sometimes get a little out of hand, and maybe it's her fault, and she should defend you when people talk bad about you because they just don't understand. That's how people work.
Normal human beings are very broken.
Re:Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
If you ever look at interviews or post-war writings by historical figures when their diaries are also available, you'll find a huge disconnect in perception. During the war, you get "nobody saw this happening" and "it's all winding down now, and will be blown over in a few days"; after the war, you get "everyone was on-edge with the thickening tensions in the air" and "the end was nowhere in sight, and we were desperately afraid it would go on forever." People remember a completely different narrative.
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It's not. He's not involved and he doesn't own Star Wars anymore.
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He'll always be involved. Even if he doesn't participate in the making, he'll be the first person everyone asks when the new one comes out and his opinion is going to carry a lot of weight.
Notice that Next Gen only really started getting good after Roddenberry died, and DS9, being the best Trek series ever*, was flatly impossible as long as he was alive. Even when these people are out of the loop, they are the "author" in the public mind and have a lot of clout.
* I dare you, come at me!
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"Being involved" was referring to the production of the movie.
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Yeah maybe I meant that. Animated series might actually go higher than the first two seasons on TNG, though.
Re: Good news (Score:2)
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I suspect that Abrams is going to be given significantly less latitude to play around with the basic concepts. For Star Wars I think he was given carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to revive what Berman and Braga had driven into the ground. I find the results appalling, but the movies have been hits, so mission accomplished.
But Star Wars, even the pretty dismal prequels, has a certain cinematographic vocabulary, heavily influenced by Kurosawa. At times, the vocabulary was about the only thing that m
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If it would have some story, plot and action, I would definitely watch it.
The problem is that most Star Wars fans (ditto Star Trek fans) want more of the same, being stuck in the loop of few memorable characters and few distinct fetishes of the original show. Change the characters and/or the fetishes - and it becomes a different show. And fans will not accept it.
That's why IMO JJ should just ignore the fans altogether and concentrate on making a "good movie", not a "good Star Wars movie".
Re: Good news (Score:4, Informative)
Star Wars 'ethos' is front and center via the Force, so its harder for JJ to lens flare away the central theme of the story (balance of Light and Dark).
Lightsaber battles with lens flares. Lots of lightsaber battles. And put lens flares on the lightsabre exhaust ports. And the X-Wings speeding over the water; those water droplets surely must interact with light to cause lens flares.
'nuff said.
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Low bar.
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Still better than JarJar and all the stupid Gungan scenes in the prequels.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
His plots aren't all that bad. His screenplay (especially dialog) is weak, and his directing is of a very specific style that only works with certain kinds of actors. It is both those things that hurt the prequels.
As far as directing, Lucas is a hands-off director. He doesn't give the actors feedback or direction - he expects them to bring the characters to life and flush out the nuances on his own. So what he'd do is shoot a scene over and over, even though the actors thought they got it perfectly right, until some nuance or personality came out that seemed more natural and unique. He always said he did his directing in the editing room - but to do that he needed a big pool of material to work with to pull the good stuff out of. With Hamill, Fisher and Ford, they had the talent, energy and personality to simply bring the characters to life. Do you think we liked Han Solo so well because Lucas directed Ford to be that exact character? Or Princess Leia being such a strong female lead and showing playful disdain in the harsh tone of her voice towards Solo? Lucus just stepped back and let them create.
That directorial style worked well in American Graffiti too. Like the liquor store scene. The robber leaves the store and throws the bottle of liquor to Terry. They shot it over and over, and every time he caught it perfectly. Until finally, he turned around too late and just barely caught it with the tips of his fingers. That was what Lucas was waiting for, and that's what made it in the movie. At the very beginning, where Terry runs his Vespa over the curb and hit the wall - total accident, but Lucas kept the cameras rolling and that made it into the movie.
So when it comes to most kids, like Jake Lloyd, they NEED coaching and prompting and directed. I strongly believe that Jake Lloyd was awful in Phantom Menace because of Lucas' directing style. When I watch him in other movies, like Jingle All the Way, I'm reminded that he was pretty talented for his age - Lucas just didn't bring that out because he just sits back and watches with no obvious emotion or constructive feedback.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, I'd direct you to the writings of Harry Plinkett on that question. It's not just the plot holes, but really fundamental aspects of the prequel films: what is the Trade Federation, why are the blockading, what is the Republic exactly (The queen of Naboo is elected, but the senator of Naboo is appointed?), what is the fundamental cause of the rebellion, what exactly are the Jedi... These reflect on Lucas's really fundamental cynicism, and his inability to write characters as if they're intelligent agents that know what's going on, and his lack of faith in the audience to think about any of this stuff critically.
The first trilogy managed to keep all these balls in the air, but he didn't write those. George's writing work isn't really represented in any of the original Star Wars films. Larry Kasdan wrote V and VI, and though George's name is on the first one, he had a ton of help from Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Will Huyck, Gloria Katz, Alec Guinness, de Palma, Spielberg and many, many others, who he failed to credit.
I dunno, he had a great original concept -- Flash Gordon meets World War II genre films -- and he saw it through to the conclusion, and he was the central person in those early films, but all the good stuff happened when he got out of the way and let the actors, Gary Kurtz, John Dykstra, John Williams and his wife Marcia do their magic. At some point in the 80s, after he banished Marcia and Gary and surrounded himself with sycophants, George must have thoroughly convinced himself that he did everything himself.
Note that Michael Bay is known for this as well, and the results are very different. Not good, but different.
Jake Lloyd was terrible because George Lucas, himself, didn't know what Anakin was supposed to be or represent, what it was like to be him, what it meant to be a slave on Tatooine, or any of that. The character has no purpose in the movie but to establish that Anakin exists. Even if George were a "hands on" director, he wouldn't have had the slightest idea what to tell him. "Just sit in the cockpit while the battle happens."
JJ has a chance, maybe (Score:2)
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I avoided the prequels; haven't read a single one. It's the two follow-ups to Chapterhouse that have me pissed off for all eternity. They took Frank's notes and shoved Brian and Kevin's fan-fiction into it. That, on top of the fact that the writing was high-school level next to Frank's.
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Since there's less canon to violate than Trek, and it's not a reboot... maybe?
Use the lenseflares, Luke!
No.... There is nothing that man can't make stupid.
after jar jar (Score:2)
Viva Jar Jar! (Score:4, Interesting)
You just don't "get" Jar Jar. The Force channels power through his clumsiness. His "accidents" are guided and/or re-shaped by The Force. It's not like Scooby Doo's F-ups where shear luck catches the bad guy; Jar Jar is divinely-guided chaos.
It's mutation-based evolution cross-bred with Intelligent Design (Catholic model?) It's a contrast to The Force channeled through skill, planning, and discipline of the other characters. He's a rare character pattern in film.
Maybe he gives hope to those of us sorely lacking Jedi qualities? :-)
Re:Viva Jar Jar! (Score:5, Informative)
Best use of Jar-Jar I've ever seen was in the Clone Wars TV show. The clone troopers needed to get by some enemy soldiers so they let Jar-Jar talk to them to "negotiate." Jar-Jar's clumsiness winds up taking out every single enemy soldier. Jar-Jar is weaponized clumsiness. (Unfortunately, weaponizing his clumsiness also makes him extremely annoying.)
Yay!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good on Disney. Lucas may be ok at imagining a story but he sucks at things like writing dialogue. That they dumped his scripts gives me hope these movies may be decent.
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Not me. JJ's Star Trek movies were lame, so I have no hope he's going to do better here. Better than Lucas, perhaps, but that's not saying much.
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They'll be more decent than 3 more Lucas shitfests.
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The Kardashians is more decent than Lucas's shitfests, but I'm not about to spend my time watching the Kardashians.
Re:Yay!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Not me. JJ's Star Trek movies were lame, so I have no hope he's going to do better here. Better than Lucas, perhaps, but that's not saying much.
I know I'm not the only Star Wars fan that liked the new Star Treks better than the SW prequels.
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I liked the first JJ ST movie better than the SW prequels (1 and 2, never saw 3).
I still didn't like it enough to bother watching his second ST movie. And considering I used to be a big ST fan as a teenager, that's saying something.
One shitfest being better than another shitfest just isn't enough to get me to spend time or money watching a movie.
Re:Yay!! (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about? Shatner never directed a Star Trek movie. Although I have sometimes wondered why the Star Trek franchise went straight from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I guess someone at Paramount forgot how to count. But that's OK, IV and VI were both good movies.
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Good on Disney. Lucas may be ok at imagining a story...
That's part of the problem: "a story". I watched 4, 5, 6, and 1. 1 was bad enough that I haven't bothered to seek out 2 and 3.
I would note that in 4, 6, and 1 the entire plot was "attack the single point of failure on the enemy ship/base for the win".
He's baaaaaack! (Score:2)
My guess is he brought back Jar Jar Binks, as a Jedi. He was in exile, just like Obi-Wan. Every scene will be like the one where he got the droids stuck on his foot, and accidentally killed enemies. Only this time, it will be with a light saber and mad acrobatics.
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It would be hilarious to bring back jar jar, but make him more serious than Mace Windu at a funeral
Something about all of jarjar's stumbling luck was an expression of natural force abilities and the sith decided to turn the entire race into their new warriors
Re:He's baaaaaack! (Score:5, Funny)
Star Wars is over (Score:2, Insightful)
The one-two punch of Disney and Abrams being involved with Star Wars basically kills any desire I have to see new Star Wars movies. Especially Abrams. After what Abrams did to Star Trek, I don't trust him.
Re:Star Wars is over (Score:4, Insightful)
How could they possibly do worse than Lucas?
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Yes, that is true, but the thing is, even if Abrams's SW is better than Lucas's, that's not enough to make me spend my time watching it. Something slightly better than utter crap is still crap. I'm not going to go watch a movie just because it's not quite as horrifically bad as some other movie.
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Better than 5+ minute drawn-out JarJar scenes.
whew (Score:2)
dodged that bullet.
Meh (Score:2)
I have a hard time getting excited about the new movies. I think I'm content to just enjoy the original trilogy and politely ignore anything new that comes along unless I hear something from sources that I trust that makes me change my mind.
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Just read the Timothy Zahn books and ignore everything else.
Lolz (Score:5, Funny)
> When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying
Riiiight, unsatisfying. That's exactly the right description to use.
Unsatisfying? (Score:2)
Saying the prequels were "unsatisfying" is like saying that a Corolla with two bad cylinders has "unsatisfying" performance.
Lucas has lost it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lucas has lost it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that Star Wars was in any case not "cerebral" to start with
Oh, but it wanted to be. The places where it tried were solipsistic, cosmic-humanistic dreck, and the weakest dialogue in the original trilogy.
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Oh please.
THX-1138 was an enjoyable film, but it had no dialog! That's the #1 complaint about Lucas's scripts: he can't write dialog worth a shit. THX didn't have any, except a few weird lines ("I'm an android!"). THX was all about visual effects, nothing more. And it did well with that. It really didn't have much of a plot, and certainly no dialog worth speaking of.
JJ's Star Trek movies were lame, and they cut out everything that made ST great: the intellectualism and consideration of social issues, i
Good for Disney (Score:4, Informative)
After seeing a truly execrable trailer for "Strange Magic" (an upcoming animated movie, with the story provided by Lucas), I don't think there's anything JJ Abrams could possibly do worse than George Lucas.
Lucas: Highest form sci fi (Score:2)
Science fiction reaches its zenith when it is commentary by analogy to the present human condition. The original trilogy reached this as it was Lucas' protest of the Vietnam War [nypost.com]. This was evident even before Lucas' public statements, from the 1976 novelization and its prologue Journal of the Whills [darthgrader.com]. The prequels were, from the strict standpoint of plot and political commentary, a satisfying fulfillment of this 1976 prologue. That the prequels were released during the Iraq War, a mirror in many ways of the V
Not a good sign. (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm happy to see that Lucas wouldn't be directing the new movies and think Jar-Jar Binks must die - I'm disappointed that they completely ignored his scripts.
Like him or love him he still kept a good eye on the overall mythos of the Star Wars universe. While JJ Abrams can certainly do sci-fi action I highly HIGHLY doubt his sci-fi story telling skills which, while interesting, never seem to actually have a point (cloverfield, 8mm, ST:2009... LOST!)
I think Rebels is a decent entry for Star Wars, I don't think it's surpassed Clone Wars but with Lucas setting the bar so low with the Holiday Special it's hard to go wrong. Disney has shown with Marvel that they can do good stories too.
But this isn't Lucas' story - So bringing back the original cast plus Hollywood's current penchant for rehashing old plots that worked AND JJ's blatant cribbing of Wrath of Khan into STID doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings.
I'd like to be pleasantly surprised...
Analogy: Sex (Score:2)
There's good sex, great sex and just sex. None of it is ever really bad (between consenting people YMMV) just like a Star Wars film. Some were good, some great and some were just movies.
I am say, 68% excited (Score:5, Insightful)
- Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.
- Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.
- Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.
- Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.
And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.
Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.
Lawrence Kasdan gets only a quick mention? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand. A hundred comments and you're the only one I see who even mentions, let's alone puts due faith in co-writer Lawrence Kasdan [imdb.com].
Kasdan co-wrote "The Empire Strikes Back", co-wrote a movie called "Raiders of the Lost Ark [maddogmovies.com]", and wrote other, ehem, minor movies like "The Big Chill", and "The Bodyguard" and "Silverado".
He's co-writing this thing.
what prequels? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no prequels, and this follow on trilogy won't exist either.
Just like the matrix sequels don't exist...
What?! (Score:5, Funny)
Disney Turned Down George Lucas's Star Wars Scripts
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
Good Call for The Rat (Score:3, Funny)
Reasons to throw out Lucas scripts:
There's really nothing they can do to make it worse than anything Lucas has done, except more Jar Jar and ewoks.
Re: (Score:2)
Because Lucas didn't use the franchise as a cash cow and was going to give up his copyrights?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't; we've already seen what JJ produces with sci-fi with his Star Trek movies, and the result isn't pretty. Better than the SW Prequels, maybe a little, but that's not saying much.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if this is insightful, informative or funny. Or all three.
Lucas scripts for the prequels sucked badly. But modern Disney scripts are not much better.
Re:Your scripts were terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea whether Guinness was an asshole or not, but he was a very good actor, certainly the best one on the set of Episode IV. I recently rewatched his brilliant take as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and was reminded of just how good he was. That's not even mentioning his extraordinary work with David Lean in Bridge Over The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. A personal favorite is the original The Ladykillers.
So far as I understand it, while Guinness disliked the dialogue (who can blame him, a lot of it was pretty bad), he was grateful for the money it gave him.