How Original Do You Want Your Star Wars?

Star Wars has to walk a very fine line.
It's birthed from a love and respect of many classic sci-fi and fantasy films/stories.

If it strays too far from what we've established as "Star Wars" it will begin to blend and look more like those than Star Wars IMO. Star Wars has an aesthetic and feel we know.

When it comes to borrowing from what is now Legends, it makes sense to use the stuff that is actually good to form stories and ideas for the future. There's so much of it that overlap would be near impossible without touching that "not Star Wars" kind of feel.

I think people want an "original" Star Wars until they actually get one.

 

the redundancy doesn't bother me. the new aliens don't bother me. the silly fan service doesn't bother me.

as long as it looks and feels like it exists in the same world (or a progression of) the OT and tells an entertaining story with great characters, i'm not all that concerned about "originality".

 

I thought Rogue One nailed it. It obviously existed in the world of the Original Trilogy, but was constantly giving us new things, too, along with prequel references. And most importantly — the plot was something we hadn't seen before. Where it was (the need to lower a shield, for example), they did enough new stuff to refresh the concept.

To be honest — I'll get flack here — the more I watch The Force Awakens, the more the beat-for-beat similarities to other films (A New Hope...) take away from my ability to truly enjoy the film. I didn't mind it at first. It's gotten to me more strongly after having seen Rogue One and how well Rogue One balanced stuff.

 

i agree. i totally believed R1 was Star Wars.
i still don't understand people complaining about scariff troopers and death troopers and tank commanders.
so what if we never saw them before now. the galaxy is big. really big.

 

Yep. I just need to feel like this is happening in the GFFA and it fits within the established rules of the universe. Star Wars, in and of itself, borrows so heavily from past stories and lore that the concept of "originality" within it is blurred and well, overrated. One of my biggest problems with the PT was that I didn't feel like it did enough to make me feel that this was in the same world as the OT. But that's a big reason why I dislike prequels (of all films) in general as a concept, unless they are willing and able to play within the sandbox. Expand forward, not backward. Han Solo seems to be willing to play in the sandbox. Rogue One thrived in the sandbox of that pre-ANH time. I felt like the PT tried to do too much too fast instead of giving you some of that classic SW feel.

It will be tirelessly frustrating. It's why you won't see "true auteurs" in Star Wars like Nolan, Fincher, Lynch, Del Toro etc. They have such an unwavering style and seem ultimately disinterested in playing with the rules someone else built there's almost no way it could be "Star Wars" and a "Nolan film".

 

Yep. There's too much easy to use goodness in Legends to ignore it. And they smartly aren't.
The key is your last line. Stick inside the GFFA.

This isn't for us. This isn't for the people who post and read about Star Wars every day. This is for the people who see Star Wars has a new movie coming out a month or two ahead of the release and have a level of set expectations on what they think Star Wars is. If you deviate from that, you will ultimately risk alienating more people than attracting new viewers.

 

Appreciated.
I always look at it like this:
My sister has never watched a Star Wars film start to finish.
Yet she knows who Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, the Force etc are.
She gets the cultural waypoints.

The goal of future Star Wars endeavors is not to get me into theaters, they know I will show up, it's to figure out how to get her in to the theater.
If she went in and it had NONE of the basic tenants of Star Wars, no force talk at all, no character reference points, no lightsabers etc (not limiting to those but just general things in SW), she'd be so confused more than likely.

I think Rogue One did such a great job telling people it was Star Wars without having to reinvent the wheel. My dad, who doesn't care for Star Wars, liked Rogue One because it was a war movie. But it was so "Star Wars" to it's core.

Now with that long-winded spiel done...I really don't want to see a Star Wars designed for my sister to like. That scares me.

 

In time you will see most of that kind of stuff but they have to play the long game.
Same way Marvel didn't come out of the box with Guardians of the Galaxy or Civil War.
They will give you tastes of these things. Check general fan reactions.