I've been thinking a lot about how I analyze writing. What do I like, what don't I like, and why? I'm usually pretty easy to please, so when I hear "critics" trash something I like, I don't really understand.
Case in point: Star Wars Episodes I-III. I enjoyed the movies, but they are generally trashed by those who get paid more than I do to talk about what they think. Is there something I'm missing?
So I pose this question to you all, to help me figure out how to analyze my own writing: what is wrong with Star Wars? Is it a writing issue, an acting issue, a little of both? Stay on target...
Mind you, it's been a while since I watched any of the movies. But here goes.
It's really difficult, in any medium, to execute a story in which the audience already knows that the protagonist is going to become the antagonist in the last half of the series. We knew all along that Anakin was going to fail and become Darth Vader. It's hard to let yourself identify with that character and it robs the story of some of its suspense when we already know the outcome. Some of it just may have to do with seeing the last half first, taking the story out of order.
The wiz-bang special effects that made episodes IV-VI so exciting when they first came out (yes, I'm old enough to remember that) are old hat, now. The droids and the pod race and all of the rest of it were no longer so new and unusual.
For me, at least, the stories didn't hold together. I got Anakin's impatience and his anger, but I just never believed that that alone would have made him slaughter the Jedi children, attack Obi-Wan and Padma, etc. If that doesn't work, the whole plot blows up--which is what it did for me.
And the story didn't tie in properly with the later episodes, which we all knew by heart by then. For example, Leia is supposed to remember their mother, while Luke doesn't. Yet Padma dies right after they're born.
If you want a good series to study and vs. your own stuff, look at Spider Man. Those were amazing. If I could teach a writing class, I would use those three scripts ONLY as my course book.
If you can put these six movies next to each other, you may have some of your own answers.
Check out: http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/2000-08-02-1.shtml
Ignoring (if you choose) the first section where they discuss novel length, skip down to the info on try-fail cycles and dual desires.
I don't remember the movies specifically, so I can't speak to how powerfully Lucas captured Anakin's desire to remain good, but I don't recall any real conflicting emotions in him. It seemed more like he was simply biding his time until he became Vader. Look at the struggle Luke goes through. You can really feel it when he'd cowering in the dark and Vader is verbally tormenting him. Then, Luke goes nuts and still manages to stay on the side of good because that's the decision he's made. But you don't know that when he's fighting. You think he's lost. But he comes back, and we cheer him for it.
I didn't feel the equal but opposite emotion in Ani during the first movies. Which I assume to be part of the plan. i.e. showing what would have happened if Luke had turned.
The visuals were amazing.
http://www.themovieblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/lucas-green-screen.jpg
The acting was referred to as wooden. There were times, yes, but overall it wasn't horrific. However, it wasn't great. Lucas made acting into a mechanic, instead of an emotion and it showed.
Yoda was CG. Now, there are younger folks who may argue w/me and say puppet Yoda was less realistic because it's a puppet for heaven's sake. That's a matter of choice. But I could believe an alien looked and behaved as puppet Yoda did. How do I know there aren't real Yoda people out there?
CG Yoda had zero believability because I knew he wasn't there. There was nothing there. Actors were acting against nothing. Their eyes didn't focus on the Yoda. (JarJar was really there in the form of an actor, and they still didn't always get the eyes thing right. That drove me nuts! So long immersion.)
If I sat here long enough, I'd come up with a dozen more things, but those are the biggies.
Oh...
And who in their right freekin mind would ever, EVER believe a woman would DIE and leave her two kids behind because she had a broken heart? I mean, perhaps if they were married for many years. Many many years. But they have this brief history, and then a fling, and a marriage, and we have to assume some time spent off camera, fine fine, but no way. No way is it even remotely believable that she would so selfishly abandon her kids in this manner.
Lucas seemed to think this was a viable explanation as to her death. This is not heroic. This is cowardly. We don't like when our characters/heroes die cowardly. Or even pointlessly. (I'm looking at YOU Joss Whedon) So, why put this in there? It would have been better if the slugs got her a movie earlier. At least it could have some backlash. Make us hate who did it, make us want revenge, send Ani off the deep end and he turns as a result...
But no. There was none of that interplay. There was simply "Here, take my kids, I don't care, I give up."
So, yeah. I have a problem with that.
To briefly address what Meredith wrote about expectations and knowing what happens...
Consider the movie Titanic.
I remember joking ahead of time that I knew the ship would sink, so what was the point in watching it?
Then we meet Jack and Rose. We care about THEM and NEED to know if they will get together - but much more than that, will they survive? It's riveting.
Qui-Gon Jinn. He's our Jack. He's the best character in all three movies because he's an unknown and we care about him and he does what's right so passionately that he dies as a result of it. He's a hero and he dies tragically. We care.
Sadly, he dies early on in the trilogy which leaves us very little to care about after that. Meredith's right. After Qui-Gon, the movies are simply an execution of style and style doesn't carry movies. Characters do.
Axe
Lucas made a lot of mistakes when he made this new trilogy. In fact, he made a lot of mistakes on the old trilogy too!
Here's a few facts to consider.
Episode IV. When Lucas made this, he had a rough idea of where the story would go (which was nothing like the final draft, mind you), he wrote the first movie to be a standalone film. In fact, it is the only film in the entire series that can ultimately stand alone. It's pretty straight forward, the force is mentioned but never overplayed, and Darth Vader is just a bad guy, and the Emperor is barely mentioned. Also, Luke and Leia kiss. Lucas had no idea where it would all end up in the end and I think that this becomes fairly obvious by watching this movie.
Episode V. This wasn't written by Lucas. It wasn't even directed by Lucas. This film was actually co-written by Lucas and some other guy who decided to take it in a new direction. That direction being a darker story where Han gets screwed and in the end the future is completely uncertain. There's a reason why 90% of fans regard this as the best in the series. Because Lucas didn't do it!
Episode VI. This is where the money came in (an issue that would inevitably cause more problems in the second trilogy). Lucas' sponsors wanted toys, and to make toys, they needed characters that stand out. Enter the Ewoks. The guy who helped lucas on the second film wanted to keep things dark, even going so far as to kill off Han Solo and (in the end) have Luke ride off into the sunset like the old west flicks of yesteryear, but Lucas wanted something for kids that would sell toys. As a result, we get Episode VI, arguably the worst in the trilogy. Many fans agree the Ewoks ruined the film.
The new trilogy. This is a whole new bag of crap worth scrutinizing, and I could go on forever, but I'll try to keep it brief.
Episode 1. Anakin Skywalker is portrayed by a very silly child actor. It's not his fault though, because hey, kids can act if the director knows what he's doing. That aside, there were other problems. For starters, you've got Jar Jar Binks, a character thrown in simply because Lucas wanted to cater his films to kids. It's the same reason you've got talking droids who sound like idiots (Roger roger!). To make matters worse, audiences were expected a story that would give more insight into the backstory of the characters from the first film. All they got was a story that didn't appear to have any real ties (except for R2D2, C3P-O, Anakin, Yoda, and ObiWan) to the original trilogy. I think people wanted to see more of a direct prequel instead of something so far gone.
Episode 2. This one was the worst out of them all, in my opinion. It focused on all the wrong issues. No one cared about Anakin's character at this point. Hadenson's acting was downright pathetic, and all he did was whine about his problems (like any teenager, really), and about how he was crushing over a woman who was probably twice his age (but never seems to age at all). Then we're treated/punished to seeing the entire affair play out at an unusually slow pace. This is supposed to be Star Wars, not some poorly written romance novel. Nobody cared, and the reviews reflected that. Still, Lucas seemed to be listening, at least a little bit. Jar Jar was mostly gone from the picture, and the talking idiot droids were few and far between.
Episode 3. This was by far the best movie in the new trilogy (some say it's the best out of them all, but I wouldn't go that far). It brought back the feel of Star Wars, and the reason why people wanted a prequel trilogy to begin with. We wanted to watch Darth Vader become Darth Vader. This is where it happened. Only a few moments were done poorly (NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! comes to mind...), but compared to the last two episodes it was an acceptable loss. This iteration got high marks from most people, despite its flaws, but that could have just been their relief that it wasn't yet another piece of crap like the last two.
Now, granted, there were some fun moments in every film. Every single fight was amazing, and every film had them. Of course, it didn't make any real sense as to why the original trilogy had master Jedi/Sith who apparently couldn't fight this well, but people let it go because these new fights were just so damn good. There were also some fantastic actors like Ewan McGreggor (or whatever his name is) and Liam Neelson who completely took their characters over. And no one can forget seeing the death star being created. That was just fantastic.
But the problems are many, and people remember.
Which leaves me with my final slogan of the day:
Jar Jar Binks. Never Forget.
The movies were visually amazing, the fight scenes were awesome, but the story lacked the heart that the original ones did.
Han, Leia, amd Luke were great characters and truly cared about each other to the point where they would really sacrifice anything to save each other. I think this is why the stories were so great. We loved the characters and wanted to see them win.
While I think episodes I-III had some great characters, the two main characters were flat and inconsistent. Aniken (sp?) was kind of all over the place (cocky one minute, whiny the next, then suddenly angry). I could never get a feel for him and he lacked depth. Padame was pretty strong in the first two, but then turned weak and blubbery in the last one. It was like she was a different person.
I never really felt like they cared about each other, or that Anakin or Padame really cared about anyone else either. They didn't have that bond that Luke, Leia, and Han had.
I never got attached to the two main characters. I never cared if they suceeded or failed or if they got together. So the movie fell flat for me.
Of course attachment to characters is very important to me as a reader. Not everyone feels that way. But I feel that the lesson to learn from Lucas is to focus more on believable, likeable characters than amazing visuals and cool fight scenes.
It seems that we're revolving around the idea of character strength, which is something I've been suspecting in myself recently--that I'm drawn to stories with characters I care about. I'm re-reading Wheel of Time now and have found myself invested once again, even through the 14 page descriptions of leaves, because the characters are people I want to experience things with. Some great food for thought, thanks.
Now, if you were to make a movie out of every book that involved the characters that were involved, then you might have something to talk about. I've read or listened to a lot of the books in the star wars universe, and the characters have been fleshed out so much more over all those story arcs, that they are actually much more believable.
Just going on what is done in the movies is like writing a biography of somebody who you spent a day with at a seminar. It's just not gonna be very informative about the person as a whole.
more later on the characters and other stuff.
In a film, characters can't make choices that are unrelatable, not like they can in the books. Films like Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile had characters that did things because they made sense, not just for the direction of the story but also because that's what most people would do within those particlar walls of circumstances. That's why the new star wars films didn't work.
At least, that's what I think
On Episode Five, also-known-as The Empire Strikes Back, one of the writers is Leigh Brackett, well-known adventure-SF writer as well as well-known screenwriter. This was the only time both her fields combined. Just how much much of Brackett's work survived into the final version, I can't say (she died before the movie came out), but I'm hoping some of what happened was on account of her influence.
If you haven't seen it already, check out Red Letter Media's review of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. CAVEAT: The video reviews contain profanity. It's a bit of a long review, but he does a very good job of explaining exactly why that movie went wrong. He also has reviews for Episodes II and III.
[This message has been edited by redux (edited May 17, 2011).]
And I believe Anakin turned for a lot of reasons. He never had a strong inner core to start off with. I don't think he ever was a Jedi at heart. That is why he was bold, whiny and cocky. Then there was what happened to his mother and what Yoda said about Jedis(?) not having a family. I knew that was a mistake when he said it. I mean to insist Anakin live by it. The influence the Emperor, before he declared himself emperor, had over him. All of that and more. I thought it was an interesting study on how someone turns evil.
That is not to say the movies were perfect, there were the inconsistencies mentioned and certain scenes didn't do much for the story to say the least but over all, as I said, I liked them.
Padame was strong when she had to be when she was Queen, but later she could be herself even when she mophed into Leia in the second one.
Just kicking around ideas, of course. There's no telling what really would have happened. But I think it would have been nice to have seen (in a visual medium) the rest of the story play out. The empire's gone...so now what? There are books, but with so many out there, I'd rather just be lazy and watch it on a screen. *hides*
So by that, there were originally three more episodes planned after Return of the Jedi...but, really, I don't think Lucas will ever do them, or authorize someone to do them.
I definitely think that I see the original trilogy through the sheen of their place in history, story-telling wise. I think that's why I have a hard time with critics trashing Eps I-III; since the original trilogy was SO groundbreaking, will anything really ever compare? Is it possible to grade the "new" ones on a stand alone basis, as stories?
I completely agree with the comment about it being hard to judge movies. However, it seems valuable to me in a conversation about storytelling and what works/doesn't work. Movies, after all, are just a different medium for sharing stories. The criteria are maybe different for objective analysis, but at the end of the day, its all about the telling.
[This message has been edited by tripper (edited May 18, 2011).]
To know what is wrong with the Star Wars Prequels one only need to simply try and give a plot summary. You will find yourself rambling a lot more than when you try to do it for the Original Trilogy.
i.e.
Episode 4: A New Hope
An orphan along with his wise mentor and a mercenary rescue a princess and defeat the evil empire's super weapon.
Episode 1: Phantom Menace
Two Jedi Knights become involved in a trade dispute, help an elected Queen escape only to have their ship breakdown. While hunting down a part for their ship they free a midichlorian-ridden slave. After consulting with the Jedi Council they return to liberate the Queen's planet from a trade blockade and fight a Sith Jedi.
See what I mean?
quote:
To know what is wrong with the Star Wars Prequels one only need to simply try and give a plot summary. You will find yourself rambling a lot more than when you try to do it for the Original Trilogy.i.e.
Episode 4: A New Hope
An orphan along with his wise mentor and a mercenary rescue a princess and defeat the evil empire's super weapon.Episode 1: Phantom Menace
Two Jedi Knights become involved in a trade dispute, help an elected Queen escape only to have their ship breakdown. While hunting down a part for their ship they free a midichlorian-ridden slave. After consulting with the Jedi Council they return to liberate the Queen's planet from a trade blockade and fight a Sith Jedi.See what I mean?
So, in other words, the original trilogy (episodes IV - VI) was more high-concept than the prequels?
Works for me.
quote:
Any prints of Star Wars that say "Episode Four: A New Hope" are in latter-day alterations, introducing elements not present in the original release prints---it wasn't Episode Four until Lucas grew so successful that he could re-edit his own work. Adding enhanced effects, a scene with Jabba the Hut that was cut, and the crawl. (He did this with American Graffiti, too.)
This.
Robert pretty much got the details of what I was saying.
quote:
So, in other words, the original trilogy (episodes IV - VI) was more high-concept than the prequels?Works for me.
Yeah, less political and more adventure. The originals weren't trying to explain the science behind the magic like the new ones do (hence the midecloriens...). Did we really need to know that there were microscopic creatures living in people's bodies telling them the future?
No. No we did not.
The original trilogy, by all rasonable accounts, was a fantasy story cleverly disguised as a science fiction story. The characters are using magic. That's what the Force is, just a clever name for magic, and it is never really explained, sort of like God. That's part of what makes it a mystery, and also interesting. When they explained it in episode 1, they took away those decades of speculation and mystery. Huge mistake, and it shows, but what can you do.
[This message has been edited by jcavonpark (edited May 18, 2011).]
i don't remember what happened as to why lucas cancelled the plans for the third trilogy, but that's what i remember.
Much later, he stated he would no longer be making the final three films.
(Would you believe I had to look up the spelling of "sequel?" Couldn't decide if it had two "e"s or an "e" and an "a"...)
Speaking of Star Wars; I heard today Lucas is seriously thinking of doing a Live action TV show. He wants to wait 'till the special Effects can be done cheaper. No idea how long he thinks that will take-or if he thinks it would never be so it was an excuse- or what time period-Star Wars time that is- the show would take place in.
quote:That's all I need to hear to turn my back on it and never look back. Same with LOTR.
Characters are flat and shallow? Dialog stinks? Plots are inconsistent and uninteresting?
quote:Agreed. To get a sense of the hugeness of the depth of LoTR, don't just read Tolkien--read about him. Particularly J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey.
Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury:
Uh, hmm.
I have to take exception to the "Same with LOTR" up there.
Whether you like LOTR or not, that's fine. I would just like to ask that you not lump it with George Lucas' work. They may both be unappealing to you, but they really are not in the same class at all.
LOTR has a huge depth to it, a depth that STAR WARS etc will never begin to aspire to.
Thank you.
quote:This tells me nothing.
"This story couldn't grab my interest, I'm afraid."