Star Wars feelings

[schneefink]

It's still months until the next Star Wars movie, but I suddenly have a lot of feelings about Star Wars. Confused feelings. (And I use them to procrastinate. Today is not a good day.)

Star Wars was the first science fiction movie I saw, I'm pretty sure. It had spaceships! Robots! Lightsabers! I loved it.

I think "Revenge of the Sith" was the first Star Wars movie I saw in the theatre, when I was 14. I was not impressed. Anakin was unsympathetic, Padmé was extremely passive, Obi-Wan was incompetent as a mentor, the Jedi Order seemed little more than a military with magic… I already didn't like Attack of the Clones very much. And then I didn't want to rewatch the original trilogy because I was afraid it wouldn't hold up.

So the question of whether or not I actually like the Star Wars movies is kind of complicated. I really like the idea of them, but the movies itself… I don't think I can look at them without bias. For me Star Wars is the perfect example of a canon where the fascination comes from "wow, this has SO MUCH potential." If I ignore some parts of canon and add a lot of headcanon I get something really cool.

There are some aspects I want to clarify for myself, like "how would/should the Jedi order actually work", "are droids sentient and if yes how do you justify keeping them as property", similarly with the clones (who are definitely sentient so programming them to be obedient is highly questionable), and what exactly I think about Luke's actions on the second Death Star. I definitely need to rewatch the movies. I'd like to watch them with LK and AV to discuss questions like these, but it's rare enough that we get time to watch anything together, and we probably first want to finish Bab5. But we'll definitely watch Star Wars again before Episode VII. Maybe even sooner, we'll see.

Comments

[gaffsie]

I didn't see the original trilogy until I was 12, 13, on home video (Return of the Jedi first, during a visit to my dad). I ended up enjoying them a lot, so when the new trilogy was announced, I was excited.

I remember with The Phantom Menace, the high point for me was the intro scroll of yellow text accompanied by that iconic John Williams music. The rest of the movie did not live up to that initial feeling of *finally* watching Star Wars on the big screen.

I hope they do a limited run of the old movies leading up to the new one. It would be fantastic to see the original trilogy the way it was meant to be seen.

[schneefink]

I love the Star Wars music so much. All of the individual themes are great, and they fit together so well, it's beautiful.

I'd love to see the original trilogy in a movie theater! If they only do a few showings I bet half the seats would be full of people in Jedi cosplay, that'd be great.

[beatrice_otter]

I was born the year Return of the Jedi came out. My parents are huge geeks, so the first things I can remember watching on television were Star Wars and Star Trek. We had a VHS taped-off-tv copy of RotJ that we watched all the time (but not the rest of the trilogy), and the Zahn trilogy* of books (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command) came out in the late 90s as I was discovering the adult SF section at my local public library. And when the PT came out, I avidly watched all the teasers and stuff coming out and read all the articles even as I told everyone, as pragmatically as I could, that given the hype, Phantom Menace could be the best movie EVER and people would still be disappointed. (And, well, it was not even close to that good.)

*If you enjoy the OT at all, YOU NEED TO READ THOSE BOOKS. Zahn was one of the very few people writing for the Extended Universe (what became "Legends" when Disney bought it) who really, truly, deeply understood the characters and the feel of the OT movies. AND he's a far better writer than most of the ones who wrote for the EU, too.

The OT I LOVE. The Zahn trilogy I LOVE, plus a few other bits of odds-and-ends from the EU. The Prequel trilogy ... I love some of the ideas, and what could have been done with them if Lucas had pulled in the same kind of talent for the PT that he did on the OT or given the reigns to the talented people he did hire.

I mean, his wife edited the first three movies and came up with a couple of the crucial plot points, for example. And she was a phenomenal editor who took a mish-mash of stuff that Lucas filmed and put it together in a coherent and compelling way. And he hired other people to write both ESB and RotJ. And--here's the crucial difference between the OT and PT--when he hired great and talented people (writers, editors, etc), he got out of the way and let them do their job. I mean, he was still the guy in overall control, but he didn't micromanage them in the OT the way he did in the PT. George Lucas has some great ideas, but the OT was very much a collaborative effort in which his great ideas got honed into something awesome by a great team. Between then and the PT, he'd decided he was the Great Auteur with Vision, so he didn't let the same honing take place.

[schneefink]

I read all the tie-in novels I could find in the library, so a random mix: I remember a Corran Horn book, one X-Wing book, one with Leia's kids... I didn't read the Thrawn trilogy, but I read and enjoyed the "Hand of Thrawn" books. I should probably get my hands on the Thrawn trilogy too.

I'm not unhappy about George Lucas not working on Episode VII (sequel trilogy?) From the (few) articles I read it seems like the success of the OT went to his head and that was detrimental for the PT, so maybe with new people... I liked the second trailer, so for now I'm very cautiously optimistic :)

[beatrice_otter]

The second trailer is pretty good, and I'm excited. But I've been down this road before, and even as a teenager watching the hoopla over Phantom Menace, well. The hype seems to be less this time, which means that it may be actually close to what the movie itself deserves.