Official Star Wars Thread

The point is that these connections are meaningless unless they are acutely felt or perceived by the audience. Clearly they are not, if they require freeze-framing with a stopwatch to discover.

The resonance of repeated imagery comes from story context. If you have two scenes with completely different emotional textures and plot relevance, it doesn't matter if the shots are similar, or if something superficially similar is going on (like a hand getting chopped off), because it's not enough to evoke a response from the viewer. What the article argues is that the prequels were painstakingly designed to include a set of links and callbacks to the original trilogy that nobody notices, and which doesn't have the slightest effect on anything even if you do, because the links are almost entirely cosmetic. If Lucas really did plan it that way - which I doubt - he is a more primitive filmmaker than I thought.

I mean, even if this is true, who cares? If a chair is uncomfortable, it's no relief to know that it's designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.
 
Shadow said:
The point is that these connections are meaningless unless they are acutely felt or perceived by the audience. Clearly they are not, if they require freeze-framing with a stopwatch to discover.

The resonance of repeated imagery comes from story context. If you have two scenes with completely different emotional textures and plot relevance, it doesn't matter if the shots are similar, or if something superficially similar is going on (like a hand getting chopped off), because it's not enough to evoke a response from the viewer.
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That's your opinion. If an interested audience learns more about a film, and about the maker's (possible) intentions, appreciation can increase. Especially if a film is watched more than once.

Of course, if a story clearly suffers from obsessive planning, then that's certainly something that should not be underestimated.
 
Shadow said:
The point is that these connections are meaningless unless they are acutely felt or perceived by the audience. Clearly they are not, if they require freeze-framing with a stopwatch to discover.

The resonance of repeated imagery comes from story context. If you have two scenes with completely different emotional textures and plot relevance, it doesn't matter if the shots are similar, or if something superficially similar is going on (like a hand getting chopped off), because it's not enough to evoke a response from the viewer. What the article argues is that the prequels were painstakingly designed to include a set of links and callbacks to the original trilogy that nobody notices, and which doesn't have the slightest effect on anything even if you do, because the links are almost entirely cosmetic. If Lucas really did plan it that way - which I doubt - he is a more primitive filmmaker than I thought.

I mean, even if this is true, who cares? If a chair is uncomfortable, it's no relief to know that it's designed according to the most advanced theoretical principles.
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What you are forgetting is that audience perception is constantly changing - and thus stories are perceived differently all the time. Shakespeare had his real breakthrough some hundred years after his death - today you would have to explain yourself if you thought other than that Hamlet is a fantastic piece of literature - and the damn thing wasn't even meant to be read! There has been few general opinions on work that has stood the tests of time.

I agree these things are completely meaningless when you compare them to what the audiences today values in art, literature, film and other things. Star Wars is clearly a work that plays by other rules - and like you probably wouldn't get so much out of trying to read Dante if you want to read Stephen King, does this make Dante a bad writer?

Maybe the critics have never understood what Star Wars is and was meant to be? You are free to say it doesn't matter, but if I started to critisize The Dark Knight and expected it to be a great romantic comedy, it would sort of miss the point, right?
 
Shadow said:
It's like how people still fawn over Casablanca - and it is great, isn't it? - even though on an intellectual level you couldn't really say how it's any better than many other silly movie romances.
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But would it still be amazing had some other romance film had taken its place? One that was equally good, but was a slightly different take? What makes it great still is that the audience who still love the film has it defining what is good and what is bad. It's been that influential. Works doesn't age - it's the perception that changes. Then, what changes the perception? Why have some work still an ability to affect us while other works are considered bad?

There we have an interesting question. In literature study today, we have the concept of intertextuality. That means that all works exists in context with all other work around it. And if I said that what you appreciate in a film, book or painting is totally dependent on what shaped your opinion on what good or bad is, would you agree? If I showed you something that is close enough to your favourite work, but still different enough for it to feel fresh and new, chances are you would like it - because it agrees with your view on what good and bad is. Even most bad films probably do, because it so damn obvious that they tried to follow the same rules - until there is concluding evidence against, we should assume.

But what if I show you something that is so incredibly different from everything you have enjoyed since you were a child? What that would mean is that in most cases, it would probably take a too big effort for you to understand it. The reason you don't devour Icelandic sagas in the same way you enjoy Marvel. Even I presented you the absolute best, the masterpiece of all native American storytelling - you would probably prefer and appreciate Marvel more. It's true for everyone, for the other work that has played a part in the creation of these stories, are not the same as the ones that have affected your taste - no text exist in a vacuum, by itself. It exists in a context of all other work that exist around it. Like a discussion.

George Lucas, by all accounts, does not consider the prequel trilogy a failure - he is more critical of his original one. This is infinitely important in trying to understand Star Wars as a work. If Lucas has based it on some other rules, it makes as much sense to criticize the Icelandic saga mentioned above for not being Spider Man, as it does to call Star Wars bad. For believe me, by Marvel standard that Icelandic saga is lousy. And while Star Wars certainly exist in the same context as The Lord of the Rings for the most part - it may have something entirely different going on.

I am not trying to convince you to read Icelandic sagas. I have read one, and it was not enjoyable. But what can happen from here? Either we agree that Star Wars isn't playing by the same rules of good and bad, or we do not. If we do not, nothing will happen. If we do, there are possibilities of George Lucas and Star Wars being viewed in a different light. Star Wars as a modern myth, in some way enjoyable to the majority of the audience, and in some ways not. Star Wars as a masterpiece, the single greatest piece of cinema ever created, creating a totally new direction in western arts some decades after it was created? I would like to think so, and it certainly is possible, but it has to be preceded by someone influential that is not George Lucas catching on.

And suddenly, I do wonder what Disney are up to. What J.J. Abrams is up to. Are they making Star Wars according to the rules of contemporary cinema? Most likely. But if they are not...

Storytelling is the most human thing there is, and it is found in all cultures across all of human history - but believe me when I say that there are those who have some pretty crazy perception of what good stories are!
 
CriedWhenBrucieLeft said:
I've read you're posts, Maturin; what Icelandic Sagas are you referring to?
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I have it in an anthology, will check tomorrow! It's one of the famous ones, obviously. But it is not important to the argument and can be replaced by any piece of literature written in a culture sufficiently different from our contemporary Western canon.
 
My point about Casablanca was that the kind of intellectualized approach to movies displayed by the article above is not necessarily useful to get at what really make a certain movie work for viewers. Movies work partly - perhaps mostly - on a visceral level, and their strengths and weaknesses can not always be dissected so clinically. There are lots of technically well-made films with good scripts and good acting that are nevertheless completely forgettable.

Take that scene where the Nazis start singing and Bogart tells the band to play the Marseillaise. It's horribly cheesy and emotionally manipulative and in a different movie we would laugh at it. Yet somehow it works in Casablanca, even though good taste tells us to feel dirty for being seduced by such a cheap trick. The point is that by any standards it's not more deserving of our love than many other films, just like it's hard to say why Star Wars in particular became such a massive pop-cultural phenomenon. I don't think you could ever really explain these perfect storms.

The idea here appears to be to redefine the Star Wars saga into something different from what people today perceive it to be. Well, alright, but to me it seems uncomfortably much like trying to convince yourself that your failure wasn't actually a failure, it was meant to be that way. And it's the audience's job to catch up.

Maturin said:
George Lucas, by all accounts, does not consider the prequel trilogy a failure - he is more critical of his original one. This is infinitely important in trying to understand Star Wars as a work.
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On the contrary, I would say that it's mostly of historical interest (that most damning of phrases!). Once you make your work public, people are going to use and misuse it for their own purposes. Often the creator's personal favourites will not be the most popular with audiences. Sometimes people will enjoy a work for entirely different reasons than the creator intended. Lucas may have intended Star Wars to be perceived in a certain way (most likely he has intended it to be different things over the years), but most viewers will never trouble themselves to find out. When enough time has passed, the creator's intentions are likely to be forgotten entirely, to the extent that they're not apparent from the work itself.

I find it exceedingly unlikely that Star Wars movies will ever be evaluated as anything other than thalamic space adventures. Some academics may talk about their mythological underpinnings, but even they will most likely want to watch Harrison Ford and forget that those awkward messes called the prequels ever existed, however interesting the six-part structure may be. I still don't see how this idea actually makes the movies any better. Anybody can employ a certain form of storytelling, just like anybody can write a sonnet. It's what you do with the form that matters.

Oh, and I've enjoyed Icelandic sagas, while I don't particularly care for Marvel. :p
 
I think you are missing a few important points, @Maturin.

You are completely right about intertextuality the shifting of context and, to an extent, perception of good and bad. However, I am surprised that you completely miss to discuss the question of medium. I guess most people will agree with you that Icelandic sagas are difficult for a modern reader to digest, but I think there is a very simple reason for that: Icelandic sagas weren't meant to be read.

One thing that is often overlooked when discussing concepts such as the monomyth, the composition of epic poetry and the history of reception is that for the longest part of the history of any of these pieces of literature, they were not written down but transmitted through oral tradition. In science, this is nowadays called oral literature. It has been shown to great extent that long texts can be transmitted orally for a long time with a remarkable amount of accuracy if their composition follows some basic rules. One of these rules is that they can be performed in front of audiences, and audiences can be very critical. Many pieces of ancient and medieval literature possess components that would not be expected in modern epic or prose literature. They often include choruses, repetition or explicit foreshadowing that seems foreign and anti-climatic to us. Fact is, these were intended to establish an emotional bond between performer and audience. Repeating formulae were used to draw an audience in the same way Bruce now shouts "scream for me!" at a Maiden gig or we always sing along to the same parts of Fear of the Dark. We would notice if something in the performance is missing, and if we could, we'd point it out to the band. If a Maiden tribute band tried to emulate every aspect of a Maiden gig but left out a specific piece of audience participation during Hallowed, we'd also notice and tell them. Such was the case with minstrels performing literature in ancient and medieval times. If you don't believe me, then ask yourself if you wouldn't feel cheated if somebody told you the story of the wolf and the three piglets and didn't say "and he huffed, and he puffed..." Hence, we can't have the same reaction to an Icelandic saga because we aren't "reading" it the way it was originally intended.

So what does all this have to do with Star Wars? Simple - it's the same thing. The composition of it all is one thing. It may be impressive and brilliantly thought out, but Star Wars isn't a book to be read, but a film to be watched. So the composition is just one aspect of it - the performance is another one. With performance, I mean the general execution, not merely the work of the actors. And this is where most people agree that the prequel trilogy is lacking. It doesn't feel the way the original trilogy felt. The props are too shiny, the backdrops are too polished, and you can tell it's all just CGI. The actors don't interact with their environment, you can just always tell that they don't actually see any of it. Inbetween the money shots - i.e. the ones that mirror the original trilogy - all we have is people sitting on a couch talking, the shot-reverse shot LC mentioned and so forth. This would all work if it would be read, because we visualise it in our head. But film, as we all know, is a visual medium, so it does the visualisation for us, and us critics think that the prequel trilogy does a bad job of it. And you could argue it's precisely because the material - Star Wars - is so good, the poor execution of the prequel trilogy drives us nuts. If somebody did a poor performance of Hamlet, you don't go out saying that it was a bad play, because as you said, nobody thinks it is. You go out saying it's a shame this great play was ruined by a terrible performance.
 
Shadow said:
The idea here appears to be to redefine the Star Wars saga into something different from what people today perceive it to be. Well, alright, but to me it seems uncomfortably much like trying to convince yourself that your failure wasn't actually a failure, it was meant to be that way. And it's the audience's job to catch up.
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Shadow said:
I still don't see how this idea actually makes the movies any better.
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I discussed the perception of what good and bad means at great length. A perception of what something is sets the rules by which it is then judged. Obviously, the three original films had great reverberation across the whole world, and that may well have been in part because of other people stepping in and tempering with the vision of the original creator to make sure it fit better into the cinema of its time. That is now done, and the result is out so we can discuss it.

Now, most critics and older audience agree that the prequel trilogy does not make sense from a contemporary perspective. For some people, that is the only perspective there is and they will go on through their whole lives never questioning anything beyond their view on good and bad. Critics, for that part, may also fall into this category, although they believe their opininion is more right. But that perspective is very much a learned one, never forget that. Expecting something to follow the rules of what we think it will be, and the work then proceeding with breaking it will cause a negative reaction in line with what we can see today regarding the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

It is perfectly fine if you are still happy with viewing it as a failure as a contemporary science-fiction film. But what I learned from the article I posted, and the questions I have started to raise makes me think that there is more to these films. That we may be doing ourselves a great disfavour by looking at it from the wrong angle. Let me ask you this – if Star Wars is a modern myth, constructed almost shot by shot to be as delicate as a mechanic clockwork, telling the story of a hero and a galaxy far, far away, while still being mostly enjoyable to anyone – would that not be worth acknowledging?

The problem here is that people have decided what it is, and if that is never discussed, then it have no chance of ever being redeemed. I agree a work escapes authorial intent as soon as it is released to an audience, but since there now is proof that this structuring (and perhaps a great many other things) is there, not in Lucas mind, but in the films temselves, I think we are on our way in trying to understand the work. Some will say, who cares? For others, who want to believe - it may rock their whole understanding of Star Wars, its themes, and what it really is about.

Last, but not least, I would like George Lucas to get some form of public respect back. I am truly saddened by the hate he has got. And no matter what he has done wrong, nobody would deserve that sort of hate for making movies.

Perun said:
I think you are missing a few important points
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I have thought of every part of what you mention. And I actually do not think that the execution necessarily is bad. I completely believed in Qui Gon and Obi Wan as a child, and I thought Ian McDiarmid was menacing even in Episode I. This is also what I'm discussing - from a contemporary viewpoint of what good acting is, it may be different. But I don't think it ends there, and I don't feel it is that bad. Great at times, and mediocre in some parts. But so I feel about Mark Hamill in particular too.

If there is something else going on, is that not looking at before writing it off? Let me quote the man himself:

"I don't use, you know, 'reality acting.' That's not what these movies are."

I take this to mean that he had something else in mind. But, as I said in a previous post - what happens to the perception of the execution of the prequel trilogy if we were to find out that it has been done that way entirely by intent? We know Lucas adored films like Ben Hur and Gone with the Wind. He may have wanted to mimic something he felt is missing today? Let us remember that realism for all we put into the word, is a fairly new approach. My area isn't acting, so I just want to ask the questions.

And for the point on the visuals, that is actually a new one - I thought most people found them breathtaking. But I do recall there being quite a lot of dirt and lived in feel - Tatooine is still sand and scrapheap in The Phantom Menace. People also see CGI where there is none. There were more stuff made for the prequels than the other films. Check this out:

http://furiousfanboys.com/2014/05/the-star-wars-prequels-model-or-cg/1/

Still feel the point about the CGI is valid?

Great addition to the discussion, both of you.

Perun said:
If somebody did a poor performance of Hamlet, you don't go out saying that it was a bad play, because as you said, nobody thinks it is. You go out saying it's a shame this great play was ruined by a terrible performance.
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When I was 15, I sat through a version of Hamlet at Dramaten in Stockholm, with a cast including the elite stage and film actors in Sweden. It was the most boring, and incomprehensible thing I have ever experienced. I thought the version I watched at my school in fifth grade outdid it. But I have since read reviews online, and found out that the critics thought it was great. I would never have imagined.

Can both be right? Or would I have agreed if I had seen and understood what they were trying to do with Hamlet? This is basically what we are discussing.
 
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Star Wars #1 preview images released (no dialog, just art):

screen-shot-2014-12-05-at-1-16-25-pm-114661.png


More at http://comicbook.com/2014/12/05/marvel-releases-preview-of-star-wars-1//
 
That's actually the "Marvel Method". I don't know how much it's used today, but when Marvel got famous in the 60s it was always art first and story written to fit. When interviewing writers, Stan Lee would give them a page (actually several) like that and tell them to write the story.
 
They'd never give me a job, then. :p If anyone has suitable fonts or graphics package I'll write in a plot for that page, though.
 
Watched the prequel trilogy on TV this weekend, followed by RLM's reviews, which I hadn't watched before. Well put to together, and very convincing... until you apply your own logic to them. No wonder they aren't available as text you can read and discuss with. Is this what I've been told is the end-all criticism of the prequels? I sat there laughing throughout, because the reviewer's ridiculing of Qui-Gon "Gin" was great fun and it was obviously not serious. Great argumentation techniques, but not very convincing or important criticism's overall.

I'm baffled by how the 'prequels = bad' is treated as the general consensus among Star Wars-fans on the internet and in the media. It's a riduculous generalisation, no matter if you consider critics' opinions or the fans, and sadly one of the great downsides of the internet and media today. How many times are we guilty of just accepting the opinion of others instead of taking the time and effort it takes to actually think for ourselves?
 
Maturin said:
How many times are we guilty of just accepting the opinion of others instead of taking the time and effort it takes to actually think for ourselves?
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My opinion of the prequels is based purely on my own feelings. Some moments of the prequels are actually quite amazing, most of them deal with lightsabers. However, the acting in all three movies is atrocious. The script is pathetically written; characters are written like robots. The effects are cartoonish. Turning The Force into biology and chemistry is silly. Jar Jar is obnoxious. I don't care about trade routes and political posturing in Star Wars.

Not to mention the effect the prequels had on the original trilogy: for some reason it became alright to erase certain scenes, FX, actors, and dialogue from a series of films because they did not completely fit with the new ones. That's retconning. I fucking hate retconning.

No, no, no, the prequels are bad and it is not some idea that was planted in my head by the media.
 
The Plinkett reviews are definitely a bit nitpicky at times but I think that's part of what makes them funny, and he definitely raises valid points anyway. A lot of things he's pointed out that I didn't notice before don't really affect my opinion of the films at all because they're so minute. I still really enjoy Revenge Of the Sith for example. I think the hate toward the prequels makes perfect sense. They aren't good movies and compared to the masterpieces of the original trilogy they're even worse. I think it's unfair to suggest that people aren't thinking for themselves with these movies, especially when these movies' flaws are so blatant. I remember being bored by The Phantom Menace even even when I first saw it as a kid. It's not a good movie and any enjoyment I get out of it now is weird nostalgic value.
 
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