Midichlorians

For me as well, GL as a writer needs a good editor at times... I don't know if anyone is familiar with the tale of how GL came up with Indiana Jones? He originally wanted to call him Indiana Smith but Spielberg said that sounds awful let's call him Indiana Jones... it has a nice ring to it... anywho might not be a good analogy, but if it weren't for Alan Ladd Jr. we would have gotten a totally different Star Wars film back in '77... GL become the emperor when he filmed the prequels surrounded by yes men... films are a collaboration... let's keep the force mystical, please. (Star Wars isn't Star Trek... LOL).

 

Here's where Lucas turns everything on its head and ton of people would have lost their marbles.

I've seen it in here a few times that midi's (chlorinated digital audio files, as I jokingly call them) are primarily present to showcase Force strength potential, or how strong someone is in the Force, etc... some variation of this thought.

Well...then there's what Lucas was going to do for the ST that Disney looked at and said ...




What Lucas had intended for midis was this:

"[The next three ‘Star Wars’ films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force. Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in. We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force." - George Lucas.

And there you have it.

High midi-chlorians doesn't mean a person is stronger in the Force.
It means the Force is stronger in a person.

Further, he doesn't just stop there, but spins it on its head entirely and points out that it's not just that midi-chlorians mean the Force is stronger in a person, but is actually an indicator of how well the Whills can take a person around for a joyride.

So...that was the idea for midi-chlorians.
Inicators of a good cosmic ride for the controllers of the universe.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

In other words, The weaker in the force you are, the more free will you have.

 

Exactly the problem I have with it.

If that had been the ST made, then the derivative reality of the saga would be one where Anakin and Luke didn't exactly make moral choices so much as get drone piloted through them like a weird marionette used to enact the play of the cosmos which has to occur to make the universe become a certain kind of universe as desired by the Whills. Meanwhile, Jabba and Watto are totally free to go about their way.

I get where Lucas is going here, and in a hippy culture sort of vibe it makes sense to speak in this manner of thinking - hell, you could argue for it in an Ancient Hebrew kind of thinking as well, but in terms of what people have taken away into their personal lives and what Star Wars has meant psychologically to the growth of millions upon millions of minds, I cannot think of a more nuclear conclusion than to effectively point out that Luke and Vader weren't really making entirely radical choices of free will in the throne room.

And the argument you would need to design to skid out from determinism would be so full of holes and pedantic that it would mean very, very little - especially since such would likely come after the films came out rather than in the films themselves.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Love this thread!!! It started over 6 yrs ago!!!

 

Agree with Jayson’s comment.
The way I look at Midichlorians/the Force is this easy-to-understand analogy:

A person is a radio.
The Force is the radio waves.
MIdichlorians are the antenna.

Therefore, if you have a big antenna (or a high M-count like Anakin or Baby Yoda,) you have the ability to receive/transmit/use the Force easier. Some creatures in the Star Wars universe have bigger “antennas” than others (humans seem to be strong in the Force, as does Yoda-like creatures. But Thrawn’s race? I don’t think the males of the Chiss species can use the Force at all, if I read the last book correctly...They don’t have “antennas” so to speak.)
More midichlorians means you can “pick up” the Force easier, but it does not change the nature/mysteriousness/ spirituality of the Force mentioned in the OT in the slightest. I think it’s also safe to say that the more one trains or opens up oneself to the Force, the more midicholrians you have produced (or the more efficient your “radio antenna” has become.)

If anyone wants to revise my “radio” analogy, go right ahead.

 

But, as always, it's all about the execution. Could it have been good? Sure. Would it have been good? I don't know. Get Lucas to work with Christopher Nolan and yeah, it might have been freakin mind blowing. A sequel trilogy written by say Dave Filoni and George Lucas, and directed by Jon Favreau? Could also have been fantastic.

There is also the problem with George that he is a revisionist when it comes to his statements. As we all know, the "saga" and how many films he had planned has changed. At one point in the aftermath of ANH, flush with success, it was 12 films. Then no, it was 9. Then no it was 6. So yeah I don't know where I'm going with this but I do think his ST COULD have been fascinating as hell. Sadly we will never quite know.

 

It was 12 even before ANH went out. Some of his oldest notes outlined 12 films in total, mostly with just placeholders.
But he wasn't sure he was going to do it, or even if he could.

Then he got success and it looked like he was going to be able to do more, so he was of the mind of going for it. Then he went through the nightmare that was the original trilogy which put him in the hospital and a divorce.

After finishing a tour for Nevermind, on the last night of the tour on stage Kurt Cobain announced at the last song of the show that it would be the last they ever did.
When two years later they released another album, a journalist asked him about this and he said that he was dead serious then, but had two years to back off and do nothing.

Time changes the mind.

Lucas may have been wishywashy and in some interviews slightly a bit less than entirely forthcoming, but it's also not wrong to say there were never any plans for more films when by "plans" you can mean production plans. That is actually true.
Designs? Sure, he always had some level of designs for 12 films.

Then it altered according to reality over time.
The problem that he kept running into was how much work is involved in bringing these beasts to life and how much of his life would go to just these films and nothing else.

As to your list of folks...mostly I'd pass on that list.
Filoni irritates me, honestly. What he's interested in is so Star Wars lore niche it's just removed from anything I can relate to.

Favreau is fantastic and the very first person I'd want to see do westerns for me, and because of that he can whip up Star Wars pretty dang good.

Nolan...screw that outright. That's like saying that Star Wars 1977 should've been directed and co-wrote by Scorsese.
If that's your cup of tea, then sure, but a Dark Knight/Inception/Dunkirk/Momento flavored Star Wars isn't my cup of tea by any stretch.
That's pretty much the antithesis of Star Wars' atmosphere.

Now, who do I have?
No one.

I don't have any suggestions. I also don't want to make any.
My personal view is one that's not happening and not going to happen.

I would like a Lucasian film school to be opened and Lucas' ideals taught there - fundamentals in cinematography, history of film, the cultural weight of the story telling history through the medium of cinema, pure cinema, documentarianism, tone poems, editing, and the rest of his varied and vastly rich views on the subject.

Then it would be great if those new up and coming talents were put into the wheelhouse of Star Wars shorts as part of a series like Twilight Zone was for many back in the day.

And from that pool, new talents that move into the field proper, and a couple who move on to do big Star Wars projects, now being fully versed and trained in the technical arts of cinema as Lucas looks at them.

They don't have to do things like Lucas exactly, but there is a massive gap between Lucas' Star Wars and anyone else's Star Wars.
Everyone can do a few things well that Lucas did, but no one has just outright nailed all of them.

The closest to it was Ron Howard, but that makes sense as he was around with Lucas right at the beginning and working in the same cultural world right there with Lucas. Grew up on the same cinema languages that Lucas did, and has known Lucas for so long that he fully understands a ton about Lucas' ideals, methods, and philosophies regarding cinema and specifically regarding Star Wars and what he was trying to do on the big level and the small levels.

As to the idea of depending on execution...if history is any judge, a large number of people would have been ticked off.
Lucas always went down when you wanted to go right. Screw going left. Left wasn't good enough. The man straight up went a direction that's not even on the map.

Everyone walked into the Prequels expecting more OT style Star Wars in atmosphere, pace, cinematic framing, and the rest - even if they couldn't articulate that idea.
What they, instead, got was Lucas's attempts at his Lawrence of Arabia.
A mash-up between more esoteric concepts and technical challenges he set up to accomplish just to accomplish them because they were interesting to him.

There's no reason to think it would have been any different this time around.
He wouldn't have made something that was like the OT, nor would it have been like the PT.
It would have felt like the ST and the ST alone, and retconned the entire series and its meanings...deeply...regardless how it was presented.

On one hand, I'm bummed that I won't get to see that because I am curious what that would look like.
On the other hand, I'm quite fine not getting that as I don't think it would do the series much good.
I'm far more curious and interested to see what George is working on now in his personal projects with tone poems. I would f*ing kill to see those!
I actually love a couple of his college films more than I love Star Wars. They're just some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen, and I'm constantly bummed that I never got to see anything out of George like that on the grand scale.

So I'm quite happy with the man walking away. Good for him. He's been trying to walk away from this beast for decades and finally got to do that.
Good. And I think both he and the series are better for it.

I just wish that Lucasfilm/Disney would do what Walt Disney once did for animation and set up their own institution for teaching their way of doing the art, driven by the ideals set out by the founder.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

100% agreed on both TBH.
I can enjoy Filoni to a degree but there's a time where he gets so focused on the lore he loses the forest through the trees.

And yeah, I don't think there's a director I would want less involved* in Star Wars than Nolan.


*excluding obvious non-starters like Zack Snyder or one of the rapey ones.

 

I like midichloroians, i think it is a cool aspect to the force wielder and why they are a foce wielder. Its actually a good explanation tool by Lucas if you ask me.

 

I’ve always been a bit surprised at the backlash against midi-Chloreans in the PT. It seems like the main complaint is, “It takes a mystical power of wonder and turns it into a weird pseudoscience.”

But those ideas aren’t really contradictory. The Force is still a mystical and special power. It’s just a mystical, special power that happens to be managed by a microscopic cellular system. It isn’t scientifically realistic to say that those cells could emit the Force, but it is equally unrealistic to say that the Force just flows out of your whole body. It isn’t supposed to be scientifically realistic. It’s a fable.

In my opinion, describing part of the mechanism of the Force does not detract from its wonder.

 

I hit the whole Midiclorean thing hard back in my TPM Basher glory days. I thought it took a mystical power of wonder and turned it into a weird pseudoscience.

Nowadays, The Mandalorian is my favorite show and it's one of the important subplots regarding Grogu and Moth Gideon so that's a pretty good sign I've gotten used to the idea over time. But back in 2000, it felt like George Lucas had screwed up one of the coolest aspects of the OTs.

 

Someone finally gets it. The midichlorians also served as a literary metaphor for the relationship between the Nabooans and the Gungans. This was especially the case in Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's conversation with Boss Nass, earlier in the film; along with the two groups on Naboo finally connecting in order to defeat the Trade Federation.

 

I always thought it was kind of cool from day 1. Reminded me a bit of mitochondria from bio.

They help explain why Anakin lost a fair amount of his force power (although still retaining a LOT of course) after he lost so much of his body after the lava pit battle and became as much machine as man almost.

But, contrary to all the complaints, they don't explain anything about the Force and they are not the Force. And I don't see how they really change anything at all or contradict anything that was there day 1 of the whole saga and, as mentioned above, even make clear a few things.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 6, 2023, Original Post Date: Feb 6, 2023 ---

How can such a statement possibly be made? I don't get this extreme need by some to take away and diminish Lucas at every turn and to take it so far to make it sound like he barely had a part in the OT. Frankly, it's just objectively totally incorrect. Of course he is the most important part behind it and of the OT too.
Sure tons of other helped and contributed, but it's ridiculous to try to claim that he wasn't the most important and driving force behind it all. And it's crazy to declare that he doesn't even understand anything about what he created and that he gets it all wrong ever since.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 6, 2023 ---

It is interesting that way back when during the 12 films talk, he said something about how one of those sequel trilogies would focus a lot on the depths of the force and be quite different from the other three trilogies.

Of course then he got burned out and sort of took some ideas from some early rough 7-9 plans and brought them into ROTJ and partially ended it there while also then adding some new vague 7-9 plans about the struggles of re-stablishing order and how do you get everything working again and form a new republic without accidentally getting sucked into doing all sorts of bad things trying to bring it all together, etc. (before needing a break and being tired of being pestered and then saying the stuff about how it was only ever 6 much less 12, etc. but all that talk was just how he'd feel in the moment due to things going on in his life and going back and forth on ideas, etc.). And Leia became "the other" and Luke's sister. Out went the other "the other" a girl, on the far side of the galaxy, all alone out there, super powerful in the Force, in some cases his sister, in some cases not, who would come in and help the Rebellion finally take down the Emperor and with Luke, at least part of the time, gone off on his own thing away from it all.

It is interesting that his 7-9 would seem to be sort of a combo of his second, force related sequel trilogy and parts of his original 7-9 plans combined with some later on 7-9 musings (also said to focus on a super powerful girl from far out there who would come in).

In the 7-9 we got, there is still lots of that to be seen in it other than Disney did seem intent and getting rid of all the micro-world of the Force stuff for the most part (still leaving in key bit with split Skywalker vergence) and all the much deeper and targeted focus on the workings of the Force and it's actions with Kira (Rey) and Luke and so on due to their initial cowering and fear of all the prequel-bashers and midichlorian trashers and 'boring' politics trashers (so we never really even saw the New Republic or it's struggles at all, in the films at least, a bit more in some books and such). But as one sees, it's a fools game to cater to the trasher bashers as they are generally not nearly as high a percentage of the public as it seems and when the fanbase is almost the entire population there will always be a large number (since even a modest % of almost everyone is a large number) who would be unhappy with anything that didn't match their exact head fiction or this or that particular thing. In the end, sadly, their sequels are now getting trashed just as much as the PT did by some.

I'm not sure I'd quite put it like that, I think goes a little too far.

 

"Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles for the Whills to travel around." - George Lucas.

You don't have to agree with his ontological view, but that it his ontological view of it.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I still think that could be too direct a reading. They can ride around with beings in a sense and they can give power potential and create and try to shift this and that but I don't think it's meant like pure 100% remote controls. Things the being thinks and does, what sort of training, what and how they listen, can still have a great influence. So I'm not sure that was really meant nearly as strictly as you are taking it.

 

Any reading of that is a dramatic regearing of the Throne Room's ontological value.

You either reject it outright, or accept that there is a moral muddying of the waters regarding one's will and fate to a degree much more than was previously dispositioned.

When people watched Luke choose to not kill Vader, no one was thinking about any sort of cosmic connection of symbiotic microbial relationship to the cosmic near-deities of the universe going on inside of Luke which was in any way influencing his choices even in the slightest of degrees.

No audience member was thinking about a hippy version of Jesus hanging out in Luke's microbial car seat. Passenger or driver. Neither were conceived of by anyone watching.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I realize that they needed a plot device to carry the discovery of Anakin by Qui-Gon Jinn. They had to put some kind of method into the process so they could build dialogue. It was generated as a tool for the writers to make the story move. That's the reason a lot of things come into being in sci-fi universes, and that includes Star Trek. At least in Star Wars, you're not dealing with hard sci-fi (so much as Star Trek is hard sci-fi anymore), but sci-fi fantasy - Lord of the Rings in space, more or less - so it's not so jarring, and if anything, it takes Star Wars - minutely - closer to the real of hard sci-fi. What other kind of phenomenon would explain why some people have the Force and others don't, especially if it exists to some degree in all living things (except, perhaps, force-null beings). I struggled with it for a time, but I got past it. There had to be some more exposition on the nature of the Force sometime, and I think it's the best they could do. Can you think of a better idea? Personally, I can't.

 

That's just about what I was going to say, it was probably George thinking he needed something tangible to point to Anakin being the Chosen One besides just telling Yoda "I saw him win a race". But I wasn't crazy about the Chosen One angle either so I'm not really applauding him for getting out of the corner he painted himself into. The idea never bothered me to the point of being put out or anything but I felt like it was an explanation of something that didn't need explaining. I don't think the Force ever really needed any in-depth exposition besides it being a mysterious Force. I don't really feel like it does a great job of explaining why some people have the Force any better than before. Some people having more Midchlorians for some reason doesn't seem any more satisfying an answer than some people just having the Force, it still boils down to some being gifted with it and others not.