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Nothin' but Star Wars
May. 5th, 2013 09:46 amOn May the Fourth, I hung out with a batch of old friends and some really cool people I hadn't known for half of forever and watched the entire Star Wars trilogy. I have thoughts.
Episode IV works because it's a simple concept done really well. Outsider films were in and Lucas had the chance to make a Flash Gordon style serial, with a fresh-faced youthful hero and a monolithic evil empire with bigger than life technologies and enemies. To this, Lucas brought a pretty good understanding of Joseph Campbell so that the whole thing was coherent. Add that to hot pre-internet summers in a country really wanting heros, and you have a runaway hit. Rewatching the movies gets me thinking that actually A New Hope was my favorite of all of 'em because it's so good at doing something simple and fun.
Episode IV was a little like Alien, The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Trek - it had nothing to live up to or disappoint, so when it succeeded wildly, it succeeded on its own merits. Every other film in the franchise had to live up to it and inevitably that wasn't going to happen.
And this is where I think George Lucas gets schizophrenic. I think as the series and Lucas' career continued he really wanted to make both fun kid films and do epic storytelling. Now that I've re-watched Return of the Jedi, I think it's an awesome film for 8-10 year olds - the same way A New Hope was a good 8-10 year old film, and the prequels were probably a lot of fun for 8-10 year old kids. And there are a lot of really fantastic epic ideas that are definitely Lucas' brainchildren in Empire, Jedi and the prequels, enough that he could potentially have gone for a very adult story and made that work, with a few tweaks. But I don't think Lucas quite has the skill to manage that level of hopping around between great kid films and serious epic story.
I'll back this up with Red Tails, which was sort of like trying to do the epic racial issues of Glory and a really stereotypical but fun WWII hero film. If Lucas was going to throw weight behind an epic story of Black heros, it would have worked. If Lucas was going to throw weight behind hugely fun nobler-than-noble fighter pilots tackling the evil Luftwaffe and their oh-so-evil nemesis, and incidentally why not make the good guys all Black 'cause nobody's done this before, it would have worked. I think trying for both is part of why that movie doesn't work.
Another thing here is The Missing Script. Leigh Brackett, who was a ridiculously good scriptwriter, came up for the original script for Empire but after she died early in production that script was hidden away. I've read a description of it once. Lucas claims it as inspiration but little more. My suspicion is that Brackett's experience led to the really snap pacing that makes Empire work, tabbing between separated groups of heroes, but Lucas doesn't have her level of skill with pacing so his attempts to split the group are a bit less compelling.
Similarly, Lucas' director for Empire was Irwin Kershner, who was a lot more about serious character interaction.
This leads to my next point; part of why people are ambivalent about the series I think is that it didn't grow with them. A New Hope was a great kid movie, and so was Jedi, but in between you have Empire - you have the expectation of getting a more teenager/adult take on the whole thing, and there's no follow up.
Last bit of nerd theorizing about Star Wars;
Iain McCaig, who I think is seriously awesome, is on record as saying "flip it" a lot and about trying to apply that to story as well as just drawing technique. Something McCaig says in interviews is that one good way to automatically flip stories is to make them about women instead of defaulting to male heros. McCaig obviously contributed to the design of a lot of the prequel characters, including the default male heros, but he's usually described as - and I'd assume that this is how he thinks of himself with the prequels - as the artist who designed Darth Maul and Padme Amidala. Iain McCaig also seems to have some sort of iron-clad ego where he's fine with his awesome drawings not being the story the director is trying to tell - so I suspect at some level he basically thinks of the prequels as Amidala's story.
Episode IV works because it's a simple concept done really well. Outsider films were in and Lucas had the chance to make a Flash Gordon style serial, with a fresh-faced youthful hero and a monolithic evil empire with bigger than life technologies and enemies. To this, Lucas brought a pretty good understanding of Joseph Campbell so that the whole thing was coherent. Add that to hot pre-internet summers in a country really wanting heros, and you have a runaway hit. Rewatching the movies gets me thinking that actually A New Hope was my favorite of all of 'em because it's so good at doing something simple and fun.
Episode IV was a little like Alien, The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Trek - it had nothing to live up to or disappoint, so when it succeeded wildly, it succeeded on its own merits. Every other film in the franchise had to live up to it and inevitably that wasn't going to happen.
And this is where I think George Lucas gets schizophrenic. I think as the series and Lucas' career continued he really wanted to make both fun kid films and do epic storytelling. Now that I've re-watched Return of the Jedi, I think it's an awesome film for 8-10 year olds - the same way A New Hope was a good 8-10 year old film, and the prequels were probably a lot of fun for 8-10 year old kids. And there are a lot of really fantastic epic ideas that are definitely Lucas' brainchildren in Empire, Jedi and the prequels, enough that he could potentially have gone for a very adult story and made that work, with a few tweaks. But I don't think Lucas quite has the skill to manage that level of hopping around between great kid films and serious epic story.
I'll back this up with Red Tails, which was sort of like trying to do the epic racial issues of Glory and a really stereotypical but fun WWII hero film. If Lucas was going to throw weight behind an epic story of Black heros, it would have worked. If Lucas was going to throw weight behind hugely fun nobler-than-noble fighter pilots tackling the evil Luftwaffe and their oh-so-evil nemesis, and incidentally why not make the good guys all Black 'cause nobody's done this before, it would have worked. I think trying for both is part of why that movie doesn't work.
Another thing here is The Missing Script. Leigh Brackett, who was a ridiculously good scriptwriter, came up for the original script for Empire but after she died early in production that script was hidden away. I've read a description of it once. Lucas claims it as inspiration but little more. My suspicion is that Brackett's experience led to the really snap pacing that makes Empire work, tabbing between separated groups of heroes, but Lucas doesn't have her level of skill with pacing so his attempts to split the group are a bit less compelling.
Similarly, Lucas' director for Empire was Irwin Kershner, who was a lot more about serious character interaction.
This leads to my next point; part of why people are ambivalent about the series I think is that it didn't grow with them. A New Hope was a great kid movie, and so was Jedi, but in between you have Empire - you have the expectation of getting a more teenager/adult take on the whole thing, and there's no follow up.
Last bit of nerd theorizing about Star Wars;
Iain McCaig, who I think is seriously awesome, is on record as saying "flip it" a lot and about trying to apply that to story as well as just drawing technique. Something McCaig says in interviews is that one good way to automatically flip stories is to make them about women instead of defaulting to male heros. McCaig obviously contributed to the design of a lot of the prequel characters, including the default male heros, but he's usually described as - and I'd assume that this is how he thinks of himself with the prequels - as the artist who designed Darth Maul and Padme Amidala. Iain McCaig also seems to have some sort of iron-clad ego where he's fine with his awesome drawings not being the story the director is trying to tell - so I suspect at some level he basically thinks of the prequels as Amidala's story.