Taking all 6 movies, it's the chronicle of the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker.
Yeah, and Luke plays a trivial enough part in that story to stick him in a corner.
A) The bit about how, since it's an entire set, highlighting that it's about Darth Vader moreso than Luke & co makes sense when you make Anakin & Darth the biggest
Which is fair enough but still doesn't make Boba and Jango Fett more important than Han Solo.
Also am I the only one who remembers one of the golden rules of time travel in any form of media: It rarely works? It almost always ends up screwing up the future even worse than if they let it happen?
No, you're not. Even assuming the "go back in time to stop Vader" plot is for-real, I can't imagine them actually succeeding. "He's retconning out the original trilogy!" is fanboy silliness.
Star Wars has fallen so far as a franchise at this point that attaching the license to something actually makes me less interested in it. I used to want to be a Jedi in games, now I dread it.
Haven't played TOR yet but I dug the first two games. Hear great things about Clone Wars, though I've only watched one episode. (It was all right. Dini wrote it.) I actually think the live-action TV series could be pretty great -- even the Seth Green in-universe sitcom could work.
Basically I think the universe still has plenty of life left in it, and the farther back Lucas steps the better it gets. This is not new; as I've commented before, the best of the six movies is the one he had the least to do with.
I really did not want to know that Darth Vader used to be a total bitch. Maybe that's a statement on how villains are really made or something, but I very much preferred it when he was an enigmatic figure of doom that we knew had fallen from grace somehow, but not exactly how (0 to wholesale child slaughter in about ten minutes of screen time is not the answer I wanted, had I been looking for an answer).
People love fall-from-grace stories, and while telling Darth Vader's origin story was a risky proposition, it COULD have been great.
I remember reading a Dragonlance prequel focused on Raistlin shortly after Episode 1 came out. The first chapter has a wandering mage show up in Solace, recognize six-year-old Raistlin's talent, and take him under his wing. The chapter ends with him asking Raistlin why he wants to be a wizard, and Raistlin looking over at Otik and then responding, "I want to make fat innkeepers bow to me."
For all the excesses of late-period Weis/Dragonlance, the scene nails her gift for memorable dialogue and her understanding of Raistlin as a character. She gets the allure of the Dark Side, the seductiveness of power, and that yes even a little boy can see that his life's fucked up and he deserves better -- and come to believe that the people around him are inferior.
As opposed to "Yipee! Let's try spinning! That's a good trick!"
The trouble with the prequels is that it feels like Lucas is ticking off boxes. We all knew that Shmi and Padme were going to die and that was what was going to drive Anakin to the Dark Side. But we never got any real sense of pathos out of the deal. They just get fridged -- Padme in particular dies for no good reason except that the story says she's supposed to die. (It also says Leia is supposed to remember her, but never mind that.) The only scene where we really get a sense that Anakin's realizing there's darkness in him and is afraid of it is the scene where he describes how he killed the Sand People -- and in that case, his flat delivery actually works pretty well; he doesn't know how to feel and he's empty inside. Episode 3 is the better movie and he's (marginally) better in it, but his fall is still clumsy and arbitrary.
It almost feels like Lucas is reading Joseph Campbell's fawning deconstruction of the original trilogy and trying to apply the elements of classic myth to the new one, and mostly failing.
As a storyteller, his problem is in connecting the dots. He knows what he wants to see, and he understands the mechanics of the story, but he just can't make them gel. His movies feel more like a series of disconnected scenes and moments than real arcs.
Another example: For all that was horribly, laughably wrong with Smallville, it had a great Lex Luthor. A guy who you could really believe was trying to be good and was on the verge of redemption, who feared his own potential for evil and who ultimately embraced it out of a legitimate belief that it was for the greater good. The prequel trilogy touches on all those elements, but never quite makes them work.
Lucas revising the films until it's a musical about raising awareness for the plight of the Hutts during World War 2 while Snoop Dogg narrates isn't going to break the old versions.
No, TIME is going to do that.
Lucasfilm Stormtroopers aren't going to break down your door and stomp all over your VHS/DVDs/Laserdiscs.
Yes. People can still watch them. On their VCR's and Laserdisc players.
Point taken that you can still get the theatrical versions on DVD. For $25 used. But you understand that that price is because they're out of print and becoming scarcer, yes?
I won't rule out the possibility that they'll get another print run. Or that they'll pull the exact same crap on Blu-Ray as they did on DVD and say "Just kidding! We ARE going to release the theatrical versions! That'll be sixty more dollars, please."
As far as actual scarcity -- okay, realistically they'll always be easy to find through illicit means. But it would be nice to be able to get them legally for a decent price!
I'd like an edition that is restored. Fix the audio, get rid of the matte overlays on R2 and the smudge under the landspeeder, clean up the cut when Luke activates the lightsaber. I don't buy Lucas's insistence that the original prints were destroyed. Hell, the National Film Registry has a copy of Episode IV, and I doubt it's on VHS.
I think if George Lucas died, we might actually get one.
Man, Criterion Star Wars would be pretty great.
