George Lucas is saying some really dumb stuff about The Force Awakens and Disney. He is not a politic man.

I think if you look past the whining and inappropriateness and general douchiness of his comments, his basic point is The Force Awakens is just a retread. I always tried to make new things. New planets, new ships, new stories. And, frankly, he's not exactly wrong. TFA is very close to a remake of Star Wars, in many ways. And it has many many plot problems. More than any of the original trilogy, I think. But of course, as has been said many times, what he's missing is that it is FUN, with well-crafted characters, and snappy dialogue. And that is what people actually LIKE about the original trilogy.

It's a shame that he never understood that (and didn't have good people to help him with the prequels) because after this rewatch of TPM and AoTC, I really think the prequels could have been pretty amazing. The way the prequels set up Palpatine's rise to power is really brilliant and interesting, and solves the problem in the original trilogy of the Empire being a meaningless organization of "evil". The political / war-mongering / playing both ends against the middle storyline of the prequels is filled with moments and reveals that SHOULD be HSQ moments. But because they are paced so poorly, and acted so poorly, and written so poorly, and simply not given the drama they deserve, they just don't work.

Then the movies try to make up for the lack of good writing on those actually important and good things by throwing in lots of weird action scenes, and lightsaber duels, and podracing, and Jar Jar, and what the hell is Darth Maul all about, and way too much C-3PO and R2-D2 to make any sense. It's like George Lucas wrote a political history of the Empire and Anakin Skywalker's role in it, then looked at it and said "There. This is a good setup to the universe I built." But then he realized he needed to add stuff to make the fans happy, and was really really bad at that.

Plus, uggh, CGI so terrible.

In some world, the people at Disney, who know how to make an enjoyable film with quality fanservice, make some movies with the galaxy-wide scope of the prequel trilogy, and it's like Game of Thrones in space, and it is awesome. And maybe this new Star Wars universe will get to that point. I hope so.

Until then, I'm perfectly happy with the fun-over-scope choices Disney has made so far.

Speaking of fan edits and Game of Thrones in space, I just watched a three hour fan edit of Dune using all the ancillary material and it made me realize how much Martin took from Herbert in creating the houses and their shenanigans (at least as much as he took from the War of the Roses).

And, not unrelatedly, how much Dune would have benefitted from a Game of Thrones slow burn through the course of the season, because so much of what its about is political manipulation and betrayal and the action scenes are designed to be the culmination of events rather than the lever the story hinges upon.

how much Martin took from Herbert in creating the houses and their shenanigans

Or perhaps they were drawing from the same historical sources?

Or perhaps they were drawing from the same historical sources?

It's not like they're contemporaries. Dune's been the playbook to copy for lots of fantastic world-building for decades. I can see Martin turning to Herbert instead of Tokien when he was thinking out these things. Certainly Martin boned up on his Tudors while creating his universe, but the scope and the elements of prophecy, unimaginably dangerous megabeasts, developing new powers within the context of those manipulations looks way more like Herbert to me.

That's exactly what I felt about the prequels, Gris, especially AOTC. Knowing that the Republic is walking straight into the trap Palpatine set for them -- it should be hugely tragic.

HBO's Dune is the greatest of ideas.

Revenge of the Sith is definitely better than AotC, but it still suffers from many of the same problems. No scene that contains dialogue is filmed in a way to give it any narrative weight, which means your mind assumes that the effect-laden action scenes are supposed to be the most important bits. They aren't. If I listen to the dialogue and pretend it's a book, it's pretty good! But man is it poorly crafted. This could have been an amazing movie. Instead, it's a kind of okay one.

This is actually the first time I've ever seen Revenge of the Sith. So clearly TFA won me over enough to get me back involved in the Star Wars universe. That is definitely something.

Yeah, I've always thought the prequels had a lot of promise ruined by poor execution and a lot of foolish indulgence on Lucas' part.

I never understood the complaints from some quarters about Palpatine's plans making no sense. It was very clear to me that he was setting up multiple routes to power between the militarization of the Republic, his secret programming of the Clones, and his guidance of the Separatists. If for whatever reason the Republic had balked at abandoning liberty in favor of security and making him Emperor, he had both the Clone and Droid armies with which to conquer it by force. Though obviously the plan to have the Republic willingly hand him the reins of power was the one that would put him most securely in control. And by forcing the Jedi to be soldiers rather than peacekeepers, he caused them to be off-balance and vulnerable when it came time to betray them.

Revenge of the Sith is definitely better than AotC, but it still suffers from many of the same problems. No scene that contains dialogue is filmed in a way to give it any narrative weight, which means your mind assumes that the effect-laden action scenes are supposed to be the most important bits. They aren't. If I listen to the dialogue and pretend it's a book, it's pretty good! But man is it poorly crafted. This could have been an amazing movie. Instead, it's a kind of okay one.

The sheer ridiculousness of the spectacle also takes away from the emotional weight of the action. Watching the History of the Lightsaber thing that Mark Hamill recently hosted, I was shocked out how much more brutal and well-choreographed Anakin and Obi-Wan's duel was when I was watching the scenes of the actors fighting on the sound stage before all the effects were put in. With all the effects it just becomes a wall of noise and CGI lava that drowns out what's actually happening with the characters.

I think it's still a pretty effective scene, but then it's all undercut with Padme's death of a broken heart and Darth Vader's epic "Nooooo!"