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What George Lucas thinks of The Force Awakens
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hQV... is the actual link to the TFA segment."I sold them to the white slavers..." (quote from the interview)
WTF? Screw you Lucas...
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/st...http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/st...
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/st...
A.J. wrote: "I agree with Lucas 100%https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIrQ..."
He's right about the "fear of creativity."
There have been a whole slew of films that have been released in franchises where all they do is bang the gong of nostalgia over and over again. They're going beyond reboots like the Planet of the Apes movies and adaptations of novels and are just remixing what's already been done.
Jurassic World is a greatest hits of Jurassic Park movies.
Toy Story 3 is a remake of TS and TS2.
Terminator: Genisys revisits the original and lovingly recreates entire sequences.
Star Trek '09 and ST: Into Darkness do nothing but regurgitate Cliff's Notes versions of previous Trek films.
Star Wars VII is a remix of the original film.
Riddick essentially remade the first film.
Evil Dead did the same thing.
So did Carrie.
Creed is a love sonnet to previous Rocky films, even reusing footage from them.
The Thing recreates the Carpenter film yet tries to be a prequel to it.
The good news is that despite this we do get original films every year that are amazing. But the current trend is against that.
After the prequels, I no longer care what Lucas would have wanted to do. Lawrence Kasdan, perhaps. And since Kasdan was on this film, he managed to bring in at least a decent script. Was it perfect? Nah. But the original trilogy is only "perfect" in the eyes of nostalgia.This was a decent movie, on a par with the originals. It lacked a great actor like Alec Guiness, but it was good space opera. They can't all be 2001.
Trike wrote: "A.J. wrote: "I agree with Lucas 100%https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIrQ..."
He's right about the "fear of creativity."..."
A lot of that is the money. Blockbusters, if they hit, deliver a LOT of cash to the bank but it's less risk to do sequels. Look at, say, Jupiter Ascending... regardless of quality it made $47m. Star Trek Into Darkness which also got panned? $228m.
China is also a factor here - big effects movie are less of a language barrier.
But yeah, we're still seeing fewer good films than a generation ago.
Trike wrote: "He's right about the "fear of creativity."There have been a whole slew of films that have been released in franchises where all they do is bang the gong of nostalgia over and over again."
We live in a morally bankrupt time. Why can't writers be as original as Ovid and Shakespeare who absolutely never retold existing stories? Thank God for George Lucas standing up against writers who cobble together stories from preexisting sources like Legos -- if only modern Hollywood would produce more films as original as Indiana Jones and A New Hope!
Sean wrote: "Trike wrote: "He's right about the "fear of creativity."There have been a whole slew of films that have been released in franchises where all they do is bang the gong of nostalgia over and over a..."
A New Hope? Is that like Star Wars??
Sean wrote: "We live in a morally bankrupt time. Why can't writers be as original as Ovid and Shakespeare who absolutely never retold existing stories? Thank God for George Lucas standing up against writers who cobble together stories from preexisting sources like Legos -- if only modern Hollywood would produce more films as original as Indiana Jones and A New Hope! "That's what he's saying, essentially: because he synthesized something financially viable by remixing (and stealing, let's be real) previous things, through Star Wars he reinforced the idea that regurgitating something is safer than coming up with something new, even if "new" means simply recombining bits from what has been made before.
There have always been copycats and bandwagon-jumpers. When Jaws destroyed the box office, studios didn't see a well-made movie with an exciting script, excellent acting and a terrific score, they saw a big fish eating people. So for the next decade we got a bunch of knock-offs of that idea without any of the talent behind it. If you're familiar with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, check out movies starring Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. That sort of thing makes you wonder how they didn't get sued out of existence.
What we have now, though, is something different than that sort of copycat nonsense: it's the actual material merely being repackaged and sold again. There isn't even the creativity of trying to rip someone off, they're just slapping a fresh coat of paint on the existing thing.
It's not generalized Legos they're turning out, where you can use the same elements in different configurations to make something slightly different yet unique, they're squirting out boxes of bricks that can only be assembled a single way according to a predetermined plan.
Randolph wrote: "Who gives a f? This is the only decent installment since Empire 42 years ago."It's still not Empire. I enjoyed the movie, but it's not even close to Empire. And Jedi was a good movie.
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I'm sure Disney will run Star Wars into the ground eventually, but for now I'm hoping/expecting to get a few more enjoyable movies out of the deal.
I've enjoyed the vast majority of their Marvel movies. I greatly enjoyed Episode 7.
I'd agree with Trike that most of what comes out these days seems to be very little effort to tweak well established formulas. I skip more new movies than I watch these days, and most of the ones I do watch I wait to rent.
Personally though, I'm not going to stress how much is copied and how much is new so long as I'm enjoying myself. And I'm not going to care if something I enjoy doesn't please someone else, even if that someone once created a few movies I love.
John (Taloni) wrote: "After the prequels, I no longer care what Lucas would have wanted to do. Lawrence Kasdan, perhaps. And since Kasdan was on this film, he managed to bring in at least a decent script. Was it perfect..."exactly, when you crash the family car 3 times, you shouldn't complain when the keys get taken away
Fresno Bob wrote: "exactly, when you crash the family car 3 times, you shouldn't complain when the keys get taken away "4 times. The first one was the worst. He didn't merely dent the fender on Empire, he totaled that sucker. After that it never drove straight again.
Empire is half of a good movie. And then...Ewoks.
I will give Lucas credit in that he did do something different with each film. I did not feel that any movie was similar to the last. (Maybe with the exception of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi since it uses the Deathstar again.)The prequels all had something unique and different from the original series.
Episode One: Uhhh... pod racers?
Episode Two: Giant battle on Genosha
Episode Three: Lava battle and the creation of Vader.
The Force Awakens is way too similar to A New Hope. Although the action was awesome and the new cast excellent, the story beats were awfully predictable.
If the next Star Wars movie ends up being too similar to Empire Strikes Back, (in terms of story beats) well . . . I'm going to save my pennies and not bother watching it in the theater.
I want a brand new experience delivered with the excellent quality of Star Wars Force Awakens. But I don't want a rehash of the same stories.
See: Superman Returns and Star Trek: Into Darkness
EDIT: Also, people hate ROTJ for the Ewoks but that lightsaber battle between Luke and Darth Vader was epic. It was raw, messy, and completely fitting for a character fueled by rage. Also, the space battle and flying through the Death star? C'mon. I can ignore Ewoks for those epic moments.
I mostly agree with you Wilmar, but I'm just not going to spend time worrying about the next movie. I'll give them TFA because it was a nice way to bring Poe, Finn and Rey into the fray and give people a bit of fan service fun. The next installment needs to start telling new stories.Here's the thing though. I had fun at TFA. I was happy to have spent $12 and a couple of hours with it. That's really all I ask from movies like it.
Also.. There is no A New Hope. It's Star Wars. Calling it ANH is one of Lucas' retcons.... grr..... /breathesdeep.... OK, I'm all better. :)
The prequels didn't take ENOUGH from the originals so they were muddled pieces of crap with no real plots or characters that anyone cares about. The originals were hashed together bits from previous media. George Lucas has never done anything super original in his entire career aside from THX1138.
Wilmar wrote: "Episode One: Uhhh... pod racers?."And the senate. Senators. You know, committees. Pretty much opposite of the Han Solo quote. PLENTY of time for discussing things in a committee.
I only ever watched Phantom Menace, but the problem with that was the very heavy handed foreshadowing combined with smoething that sunk all of them for me... we know the outcome. Unlike Star Trek where we rebooted into a different timeline and we thus don't necessarily know the future, the prequels were in the same universe as the originals so we knew Padme would die. We knew Anakin would become Darth Vader. We knew the Clone Wars would happen... etc. When you know how the story ends the quality of the movie becomes how good you can make the journey. Does the plot reveal things we didn't know along the way? Are the characters interesting? DOES JAR JAR DIE????
Oh sorry...
Rick wrote: "When you know how the story ends the quality of the movie becomes how good you can make the journey. Does the plot reveal things we didn't know along the way? Are the characters interesting?"That is the chief problem which plagues almost every prequel.
The only one that has genuinely escaped this issue is Better Call Saul. You know what happens to almost all of these characters because they were in Breaking Bad, yet the show is fresh and compelling nonetheless, because it turns out you had no idea what their true backstories were.
That show is distilled genius.
One of the better versions of prequels are the original Planet of the Apes movies, but the trick there is because of time travel they were able to slightly change the story, so it only matched the given backstory in broad outline. Taken together, that series is one of the more interesting time travel narratives.
Monsters University flat-out ignores things from Monsters Inc., while the makers of X-Men Origins: Wolverine seems to completely forget it's supposed to link into existing stories and completely reimagines characters for no reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEIrQ...