Star Wars: What Went Wrong?

I finally got around to seeing all the Star Wars movies. The first one was just amazing and with so much promise… but at some point along the way I gave up on the series and only now have made a point of seeing them all. Now there are two things I’d like to get you’re opinion on:

1. What went wrong?
2. Which movie in the series is the WORST and why?

1. Lucas went crazy. It really is as simple as that.

2. There is a four-way tie, between RETURN OF THE JEDI and EPISODES ONE TWO and THREE. Four of the worst movies ever made. Shoddily written and embarassingly acted.

What Roscoe said…

It was hubris for Lucas to think that he could lay down the narrative and then pick it up again sixteen years later and have any sort of continuity to it, particularly when it was accompanied by Lucas’s own return to directing after a 22 year-long sabbatical. The world passed Lucas by.

Lucas was always crazy, but crazy and absolute dictatorship are a dangerous combination. The first movie was a struggle with no guarantee of success. He was answerable to expectations, both studio and audience (credit where credit is due – he offered an enormous amount of creativity into the initial vision.) Empire and Jedi were collaborations with very talented directors and writers. An inconvenience from Lucas’ point of view, but a great benefit to the films. This is the process that created the best of the series (Empire) and the damn good Jedi. Years passed and he was became a pure businessman. His preference for technology over character and story became obvious. The prequels were weak because he exercised total control and, without gifts of a great auteur, the films suffered from lack of collaboration and nobody willing to say “no.”

Short answer – The man can’t write

The original tree Star Wars are the best. Episode one, I actually really liked…2 and 3, yeah, they weren’t so good. What went wrong??? I do’nt know honestly. I think things went overboard at one point, and they suffered from way to much CGI and less focus on charecters…etc.

What went right? You’re starting with the wrong question.

There are notorious reviews of Episodes One and Two floating around on YouTube (from RedLetterMedia, I believe) that dissect everything about those films. They’ll help u out (I would link them but I’m @ work). Additonally they’re quite funny. If you have an hour 2 kill.

After the first two, the quality went downhill and you are witnessing a franchise that is designed to appeal to children and maximize profits. There is no doubt that Lucas ushered in great teams working in the field of special effects, but he had an empire to run. Even the third film, with its Stoppard punch up was beyond repair.

People can dump on him, but Lucas cares not….

Lawrence Kasdan was a good influence in the first films. The 3 prequels were just capitalizing on rabid fans’ ability to eat anything Lucas would throw at them. They’re just bad films. Unfortunately George Lucas’ bad influence also contamined the latest Indiana Jones, turning it into a brainless mash of videogame style action sequences and ridiculous dialogue. I’ll never forgive Spielberg for allowing such miserable material to find its way to the silver screen.
Lucas nevertheless had some talent. If we see “American Grafitti”, “THX 1138”, “Star Wars” and “The Empire Strikes Back” we can find great things there. It’s interesting to notice that all those films were made in the 70’s. Since then his inspiration seemed to evaporate (unless you consider “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as being more Lucas than Spielberg, which I think is false).

Lucas has admitted they are made for children. His mistake is that he has also promoted the films as modern mythology which makes adults think they should be something more than they are.

Even as children’s films they are poorly made, but adults shouldn’t feel slighted, kids should.

A less talked about problem I think is that the prequels attempted more to be real science fiction. Star Wars worked best as fantasy with a spacey flavor, and when intergalactic politics were crammed into the forefront, things got, well, boring.

Lucas decided to be a businessman rather than a film-maker. People laugh at his writing while he laughs all the way to the bank.

I’m saying this as a die hard “Star Wars” fan, so seeing the prequels was rather painful for me. What went wrong is simply Lucas forgetting that “Star Wars” is about one thing: FUN. There are no politics bogging down the OT, but there are all these bland, horrific Senate sequences in the PT. While I think that TPM is a half-way decent film, he got off on the wrong foot in so many ways right from the start. There was no reason why Anakin could not be older and there was no reason for Jar Jar. The comic relief in the OT came from the quirky relationships between the main characters – it came from what they said, not what they looked like.

I’m not a “Star Wars” fan that digests everything Lucas has said with a blind-eye. I was at Celebration V in Orlando this past August where Lucas appeared and nearly signed his own death sentence when he said that people hated C-3PO in 1977 and that anyone 7-30 hates the OT. I’m 20 and I love the OT more than anything else and here’s the creator of all this spurting out this thoughtless garbage. Even Jon Stewart (who interviewed him) almost keeled over when he said this stuff. Lucas only knows how to do one thing: make money. He doesn’t even know his own fan base.

It kills me to see all this Return of the Jedi bashing…=[

1. EVERYTHING
2. Episode Three … I’ve gone on ad nauseum in these forums why I think so

@Hidden: I like Return of the Jedi, but it’s for the same reason I like Temple of Doom, heh.

It all went south after the first when he payed more attention to merchandising and felt he could make movies without attention to acting, script etc.

Watch the first episode however and it must gall him that it looks kinda cheesy and has the feel of a “B” western in space. Too bad, that was a great deal of the appeal.

The prequels were absolutely terrible.

The Ewoks and Jar Jar Binks ruined it for me.

The Phantom Menace is the worst followed by Return of the Jedi.

As a child growing up, I was obsessed with “Star Wars” films and the merchandise.

I saw the sequels at the cinema and yes, I did enjoy them. But you know what? I haven’t been back to revisit them. At the time, they seemed wonderful—they could have been much better in some ways, but they were still good for a “Star Wars” fan like myself.

But they haven’t made too strong a lasting impression, not like the original trilogy. George Lucas’ recalcitrance in disallowing revival cinemas to replay the original threesome is disheartening to say the least. Yes, he’s a businessman first, filmmaker second.

The prequels (1999-2005) looked more advanced technology wise than the sequels (1977-1983)! For example, they had double light sabres when Anakin Skywalker was a child, but not when he was Darth Vader?

The CGI in the final “Star Wars” film looked rather hokey, particularly the big dragon Obi Wan Kenobi rides. George Lucas, interviewed for television, once hit back at people who accused the CGI of looking unrealistic.

“Duh, movies aren’t real” said Lucas.

Erm, yes George, but they are at least meant to APPEAR real. Otherwise you would’ve had X-Wing fighters flying around on visible wires in front of a backdrop painted by primary school students, George (the airhead interviewing G.L. was too dumb/starstruck/sycophantic to contradict her subject and agreed with him with a really annoying and condescending “Hell-LO?”).

Another thing: the first trilogy had a more colourful cast. Sir Alec Guinness, Billy Dee Williams, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, even Mark Hamill: these performers had more presence and oomph than many of the players in the prequels (for example, does anyone remember ANYTHING Samuel L. Jackson said in his time on the “Star Wars” set?).

The prequels did give us Christopher Lee in the “Star Wars” universe, an excellent casting choice and good presence. It reminds me of fellow Hammer Horror standout Peter Cushing being used as a player in the first “Star Wars” film.

To answer the questions, I guess George got greedy and failed to make films as great as the originals, sacrificing creativity in favour of box office. Which I don’t get: George could’ve made much less “dollar conscious” films and they still would’ve cleaned up at the box office. Still, I liked them okay enough.

I won’t pick a worst, so I’ll just say I prefer the originals (1977-1983). I really fancy “Return of the Jedi” very much. It gave the series a new gloss without compromising the flavour of the previous films and had a lot of eagerly anticipated confrontations. The Ewoks were fun, like good hard-working alternatives to the Jawas. The again, were Jawas so bad? They were like Wombles, scavenging and recycling things they found. Jawas were the flea market stall holders of the “Star Wars” universe.

Finally, I never did get sucked in to seeing the “revamped” versions of the original films. When everyone else was lining up for the “updated” versions of the “Star Wars” films back in 1997, I went with my brother to see “Beavis and Butthead Do America”.

Sorry, one last video:

I enjoy Star Wars for what it is. The Empire Strikes Back has always been my favorite, it features richer themes than all the others combined. The New Trilogy versus the Old is really no contest in terms of filmic quality. The ewoks and firework ending in Return of the Jedi has always thrown me, but I grew up on Lucas I prefer not pick on movies I was weened on, but the New hurt my jedi soul. Ewan McGregor is the only good character in the new, not even Liam Neeson can salvage the Phantom Menace.
C3PO and R2D2 were meant to play the fool characters just as in mythology, but the vulgar humor in the new trilogy and Jar Jar take an already over the top movie further skyward. Jake Lloyd, young Anakin, is the worst casting disaster I have yet to see. The massive age difference has always made Episode One unbearable. Even my mother was in shock. Yeah, pod racing might be cool, but Lucas throws the CGI in the audience’s face. It is easy to pick out Episode One as the worst, but it is flaringly so.

I posted another thread not too long ago concerning a falling out between Gary Kurtz and George Lucas after they had made Empire. It was written up in a newspaper, if I can remember correctly. As I said in that previous thread, I thought Return of the Jedi didn’t really match up to the first two Star Wars films. One of the annoying things in Jedi were the Ewoks. I think that Gary Kurtz’s help with the first two Star Wars films helped make them very good films. Originally, there was thoughts that maybe Han Solo would die in Return of the Jedi, but that was obviously changed, in what was printed in the newspaper article. Also, Lucas had some really good collaborators such as I had mentioned before, Gary Kurtz, and others like Lawrence Kasdan and Irvin Kirshner. Lucas wanted to make the third film end on a light and happy note rather than on a very dark one. I thought his first film, THX 1138 was pretty good. I think it’s low budget sort of makes it look appealing because it shows how someone can make a decent science fiction film with not a lot of sophisticated technology. Not that I’m against CGI in all films, but as people are saying, some of the CGI in the prequels was annoying which I agree with. I think THX is also a much darker film and is more of a thought provoking one as well concerning topics such as conformity, consumerism and love. Anyways, that’s my two cents.

“After the first two, the quality went downhill and you are witnessing a franchise that is designed to appeal to children and maximize profits.”

Yes, though I still think JEDI does that well while the subsequent prequels do not (maybe I’m just a sucker for amazing puppetry). Then again, ask a kid these days…almost all that I’ve met LOVE the prequels over the originals. Regardless, compare the sequence where the Max Rebo band is introduced in Jabba’s fortress: a minute and a half in the original and an additional 30 seconds longer in the re-release…not one second of it entertaining. Yes, the original costumes look particularly hokey and rubbery and fake, but what Lucas seems to think these days is that ‘more is always more’. Maybe people wanted Sy Snootles to look more realistic, but no one wanted her song to be longer. One of the fundamental pleasures of the original three is some nifty, genuinely economic story-telling. And now that’s goooooone forever from the series.

“The comic relief in the OT came from the quirky relationships between the main characters – it came from what they said, not what they looked like.”

This is a great point…rewatching “A New Hope” last month, I was struck by how good the shtick was between Leia, Han, Luke, and Chewy. The film couldn’t afford budgetarily rely solely on SFX scenes, so it had to have entertaining performances to back those up. And it does. Some of that material would be funny even if you took it entirely out of the context of the movie and staged it on its own, just because the character dynamics really tick.

^ That’s a good point. The original trilogy didn’t rely too much on gimmickry, unlike the trilogy of films which followed. Characters that mattered, had a history and their personalities developed like they would in real life (well, more or less, it was still very much ensconced in traditional narrative fiction). Sure, we had Jabba the Hutt and Boba Fett but these characters were only featured briefly, and I’d suspect that if either of these characters were featured in the newer trilogy, he’d have his own side story which would ruin the mystery of these characters (and they did try to provide some backstory to the Boba Fett character).

We had Chewbacca, but that character never really interfered with the plotline and wasn’t overdone with the gurgling howl (let’s compare that with Jar Jar) … even though it very easily could have been.

I think the newer trilogy just suffered from technological gluttony and they didn’t put enough thought into the characters themselves. And there’s so many events going on at once in the newer trilogy that the older one (the events of which take place after) would seem rather droll and laidback comparatively. They just overegged the pudding and focused on the wrong aspect of the series.

And as Ben mentioned, there was the dynamics between the characters/actors. It just worked and there wasn’t really any dynamics at all between the characters in the newer trilogy. It was just like, “Oh, I’m angry now because the script requires it before we can move on to this CGI-ridden battle scene.”

And MIASMA:
thank you for reminding me of my least favorite moment in STAR WARS history (granted, I haven’t even seen all of PHANTOM MENACE, so I might still be in for some surprises if I get around to finishing it).

Also, regarding the CGI looking real or not in the new installments: a student in my class just drew up a clip from the SITH movie the other day, and I was reminded of how cartoonish the animation is. Obviously an INTENTIONAL aesthetic—it’s ultra-realistic texturally and anatomically yet unbelievably exaggerated in its physics and motion. But more importantly, a SHITTY aesthetic, at least in my opinion, and at least compared to the puppetry and model-work of the first few movies which, as I’ve said before, rules with a sense of true wizardly craftsmanship which I find pretty much lacking yet in computer animation choices (especially those integrated with live-action).

“I think the newer trilogy just suffered from technological gluttony and they didn’t put enough thought into the characters themselves. And there’s so many events going on at once in the newer trilogy that the older one (the events of which take place after) would seem rather droll and laidback comparatively. They just overegged the pudding and focused on the wrong aspect of the series.”

part of the reason they were so overdone i believe is because Lucas is aware that Star Wars is his legacy. Fans expect big things, and he wanted to deliver ‘epics’ on the grandest scale possible, rather than let the epic vibe come through a bit more naturally like it did in the first 2-3 films. It was the same problem i had with Godfather 3 really. all these movies just presumed from the outset they were ‘epics’ rather instead of having to work for it.

I agree with mike that Star Wars are kids films, and the same goes for Indiana Jones. if you are a 40 year old and Star Wars is your favourite movie, you have problems ;-0

So are we all ready to get in line for Star Wars 3D?

leaving wallet at skywalker ranch

Here, just take it all……

Here is an interesting thought:

What if this guy…

…directed one of the prequels? Or all of them?

George Lucas and Philip Kaufman are good friends from way back, plus Philip has experience with sci-fi/space films, namely “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) and “The Right Stuff” (1983), both genuine classics, in addition to writing for “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. I think Phil could have made the prequels much better than they were, especially Part III, which probably needed the most help.