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I hope the Deathstar rumor is fake...
Join the club. Surely there wouldn't be another one. We've had two already!
I hope the Deathstar rumor is fake...
. Several people have told me they feel like they are just ‘going over old ground’ with the things they are being asked to work on. The feeling is that The Force Awakens is a rehash of the original movie and doesn’t have enough new ideas in it.
Maybe they didnt started right after Endor?Why would it take the Republic 30 years to build a Death Star when it took the Empire just under 20 to build the first one?
Why would it take the Republic 30 years to build a Death Star when it took the Empire just under 20 to build the first one?
Plus, crew scuttlebutt is usually unreliable as an indicator of the movie's overall quality anyway.
Hell, there were large chunks of the crew in 76 certain they were helping this weird-beard with the quiet voice sink his own career.
Plus, crew scuttlebutt is usually unreliable as an indicator of the movie's overall quality anyway.
Hell, there were large chunks of the crew in 76 certain they were helping this weird-beard with the quiet voice sink his own career.
Why would it take the Republic 30 years to build a Death Star when it took the Empire just under 20 to build the first one?
The spoiler is that Leia's decision to use the Death Star is to destroy the superweapon-planet.
I hope they didn't reject Arndt's script and Lucas' ideas just to make a remake of the original movie.
Why would it take the Republic 30 years to build a Death Star when it took the Empire just under 20 to build the first one?
The prequels were full of new ideas and concepts but as one person put it to me there’s a ‘lack of imagination’ around The Force Awakens and everything is just a riff on what’s already been done.
This caught my attention:
Why? Because as much as I love JJ Abrams and his style of cinematography, you have to admit he rehashes a lot from other directos, adding only a more modern and realistic art-style.
My fear is that, like Star Trek: Into Darkness, he just tries to copy what worked before (Wrath of Khan) with some added camera angels, lens flairs and more updated design. Super 8 is another one that borrows heavily from mostly Spielberg and other movies in the 80s, when he was growing up.
Nothing wrong with trying to bring back late 70s and 80s storytelling, but as we saw with Into Darkness, if not done write, you end up with a half-assed attempt to live-off nostalgia, and that is all. And a lot of the rumors around The Force Awakens indicate they are trying to go for another Empire Strikes Back, with twist and all at the end.
A new Death Star would fucking suck.
Yeah, that's a pretty apt way to describe him. His interviews always seem very forced with excitement.Anthony Daniels is kind of a cheerleader.
The execution of the prequels were terrible. But the idea behind them were very fresh and very different than the OT in a good way. It was the execution that failed, not the story outline behind them.
Of all the times we've disagreed. Of all the borderline offensive things said...
Cheebo, this time we agree.
The PT was never going to be what fans wanted it to be, nor should it have been. It was what it needed to be. It could certainly have been better, but the nature of the films were dead on.
The PT was never going to be what fans wanted it to be, nor should it have been. It was what it needed to be.
The execution of the prequels were terrible. But the idea behind them were very fresh and very different than the OT in a good way. It was the execution that failed, not the story outline behind them.
Take away all the awful dialogue, acting, cgi, etc. And look at it very high level. The core story of the prequels as in how Palpatine rose to power, turned the Republic into the Empire and killed the Jedi was done in a VERY unique way for stories like this.
Pre-prequels I remember most assumed the clone wars was basically just like the Rebels vs. the Empire but with Clones involved in which the Emperor won a war and the Empire took over.
But what happened really was a proxy war used as a tool to be able to setup the destruction of the Jedi and gain the war time support to increase power to the point the Republic morphs into a Empire without most people even realizing what happened in joyous celebration of the beloved Palpatine.
It ended up mirroring the rise of Hitler rather than a typical blockbuster bad guy who wants to take over by blowing things up.
Lucas messed up in the execution of the thing but what he was trying to tell was a brilliant idea.
There was originally going to be an arc that further focused on Boba honing his skills and possibly donning the armor while with a bunch of other bounty hunters including Cad Bane (who would likely have assisted him).
That's not how Hitler rose to power. He manipulated public unrest, which was largely due to the punishing reparations forced on Germany by the treaty of Versailles and how damaging it was to the German economy. Hitler basically channeled that anger into an intense wave of antisemitism and to a lesser extent anticommunism which he rode into power.
I think Lucas was really aiming more for a Caesar analogy, who was elected Tyrant in a time of crisis, built up military power in a war of conquest and ultimately used it to seize power from the Senate. Of course, if that's what he was he was going for, he botched it. Caesar ruled as part of a triumvirate but his popularity made him dangerous to Crassus and Pompey so after his initial term was up he was given a governorship far from Rome. Of course he made sure he went where he wanted and ending up conquering half of Europe before marching on Rome and chasing his enemies from the city.
You could argue he was killed by a trusted friend, but as he'd already been stabbed by half the senate before Brutus stuck the knife in, it's still not a great analogy.
I've never seen it suggested that the inspiration for the plot was Caesar before, so that's an interesting thought. I actually don't think it meshes as well as the Nazi allegory, though, which I think is the conventional assumption of what Lucas was inspired by. Particularly, the rather common belief that the Reichstag fire was secretly caused by Nazis and blamed on Communists, and the Nazis taking full control in the aftermath of that, feels much more like what Palpatine was doing to me. Unlike Caesar's conquests, Palpatine kept the war going (with the Republic even looking like it might lose) right up until he had his "enabling act" going, at which point he quickly moved to end the war.
Also, the nature of the democracy in the Weimar Republic, as well as its enabling act effectively ending democracy, is much closer to what we see in the Star Wars prequels.
But of course, it's really worth keeping in mind that all politics since Rome have been to some extent influenced by it, including how power was seized from quasi-democratic institutions, so it's also pretty reasonable to say that Hitler was acting out a replay of Caesar's rise to empire in a way.
And of course, Lucas borrowed liberally from basically everything, so there's basically a bit of every fall of democratic principles in there. But I still think the Third Reich was in his mind more than the original.
I don't know, I think there were plenty of bad ideas at the base level of the story. Trade negotiations and disputes getting notable screen time, an older Padme meeting Anakin when he was a boy, contriving C3PO and R2 in, killing Maul in episode 1, completely glossing over the actual training of Anakin, the overall treatment of the Jedi order, Padme dying in child birth, General Grievous existing, Order 66 essentially being a nonsense McGuffin, etc.The execution of the prequels were terrible. But the idea behind them were very fresh and very different than the OT in a good way. It was the execution that failed, not the story outline behind them.
Take away all the awful dialogue, acting, cgi, etc. And look at it very high level. The core story of the prequels as in how Palpatine rose to power, turned the Republic into the Empire and killed the Jedi was done in a VERY unique way for stories like this.
Pre-prequels I remember most assumed the clone wars was basically just like the Rebels vs. the Empire but with Clones involved in which the Emperor won a war and the Empire took over.
But what happened really was a proxy war used as a tool to be able to setup the destruction of the Jedi and gain the war time support to increase power to the point the Republic morphs into a Empire without most people even realizing what happened in joyous celebration of the beloved Palpatine.
It ended up mirroring the rise of Hitler rather than a typical blockbuster bad guy who wants to take over by blowing things up.
Lucas messed up in the execution of the thing but what he was trying to tell was a brilliant idea.
I'm pretty sure Lucas referred to Caesar and Richard Nixon as the inspiration behind Palpatine's political plot more than anything.
Obviously the portrayal of the Empire itself and Palpatine's actions as emperor were rooted in Nazism and Hitler.
And him seducing Anakin was supposed to be like Iago tempting Othello or the Devil making a deal with Faust.
The Reichstag fire? What exactly is the Star Wars Reichstag fire? Who are the communists? And most importantly, if the whole thing is modeled on Hitler, who are the Jews? I'm not denying the Hitler parallels aren't there, they are in some very shallow way, just as the Caesar analogy is extremely shallow. That's all I was trying to say.
But as far as the nature of the democracy we see in Star Wars, we never hear of an election. We never see a voter. Palpatine is elected by the Senate and it's exclusively members of the Senate (and Jedi) who try to remove him from power. You think that sounds more like the Weimar Republic than it does Ancient Rome? I don't think it's much like either really, but I'd lean toward the latter.
edit: The ultimate fall of democracy in Episode III does certainly bear more resemblance to Hitler than Caesar, but I'm pretty sure that part was just a thinly veiled Bush criticism. Though again, Caesar just slowly assumed more and more powers once he'd chased Pompey out of Rome.
He notes the cast is happy but some of the people he is talking to isn't. And I highly doubt his sources are cast members, most likely pre-production/post-production types. Especially since Ward himself lives in San Francisco right by ILM and Lucasfilm itself which lends to his ability to get leaks all the time.So do we think the Death Star/cast being unhappy rumor is true? I hope it isn't, and it sounds like something someone could have just made up.
Nixon huh? I always went Bush but I guess a lot of Baby Boomers spent most of Bush's Presidency reliving Watergate and waxing lyrical on their past as Vietnam protesters.
Heck, you can read the original Star Wars as Lucas' story book retelling of the domestic protests to the war. It wasn't the Vietnam film Coppola wanted him to make but he made it nevertheless.
I see the Reichstag fire as the Jedi's attempt to arrest him, which does go back to the idea that Lucas was working from interesting if not good ideas and then botching the execution. I think it was his intent that Palpatine was working towards such a thing happening, which he would then take advantage of (honestly, the parent trap game he was playing only had so much line to play out before someone figured it out).
Honestly I always kind of imagined Palpatine just being really frustrated that they were taking so long to challenge him. It amuses me.
Until Ep3 came out I expected him to claim the Jedi raised the clone army as a means to usurp his (and the senate's) power and that would be the excuse for turning on the Jedi, along with establishing a frightfully powerful false enemy to fight against. He botched that too, though.
Lucas did say George W. Bush and the Iraq War had a big influence on Revenge of the Sith due how angry he was at Bush at the time of writing the screenplay in late 2003. He has also directly referenced Nixon as well.
Oh ok, I just went and read it again. Don't know why I thought it said the cast was unhappy.He notes the cast is happy but some of the people he is talking to isn't. And I highly doubt his sources are cast members, most likely pre-production/post-production types. Especially since Ward himself lives in San Francisco right by ILM and Lucasfilm itself which lends to his ability to get leaks all the time.
And this is from Jason Ward of Making Star Wars, he doesn't make stuff up. He is easily the most reliable person in the Star Wars spoiler scene.
Oh ok, I just went and read it again. Don't know why I thought it said the cast was unhappy.
And yeah, I trust Ward enough, especially with his track record, I just wasn't sure how reliable this source in particular is. Hopefully the source is off the mark due to it being mostly second hand info, because I'm not sure how much I like the sound of some of this.
I have to admit, I'm not exactly enthused over the possibility of another 'Death Star'