Would you rather have George back??

No

 

The thing that amazes me is that some people think Lucas would have respected the old EU had he made a sequel trilogy. This website alone demonstrates dozens of examples of how he had no regard for the old EU when it came to the prequels:

http://deckplans.00sf.com/Research/Prequel.html#AaOoCEU

Hell in the Clone Wars, he wouldn't even keep the name Korriban as the Sith homeward.

I guarantee he'd have done his own thing; there'd be no Solo twins, no Mara Jade, no Thrawn etc. He wouldn't have allowed himself to be limited by what other writers decided for his characters and would have continued down his own road and very likely one comprised of stilted dialogue, bad acting, poor direction and over-reliance on CGI sets and characters.

And we'd have millions of Star Wars fans begging for the franchise be sold to someone else to create and we'd be in the exact same situation of disgruntled fans moaning they didn't get what they had spent 30 years waiting for.

And irrespective of sequel trilogy opinions, we'd also definitely never have got Rogue One and Solo and I for one am very grateful we did.

 

I agree very much with this.

I often end up finding myself reminding people, especially in person, that Lucas openly considered the films as entirely separate but related canons and that it was a one-way relationship. The films were never obligated to follow anything other than what the films wanted to do. The media canon could do whatever as long as it did not conflict with the film canon...which caused for awkward retroactive editing at times to the media canon after the prequels.

There's, so far as I've counted, four Star Wars universes and each has a fanbase.
1) Films
2) 90's Zahn and EU
3) Post Prequel EU
4) Lucas' whole-view Narrative ideas

The confusion, as far as I can tell, is between some universe 1-3 fans assuming the 4th universe relates back to universe 1, 2, or 3...which isn't exactly accurate.

Universe 1 splits into two universes where one version leads to Universe 4 (what Lucas would have done), and one continues on as Universe 1 (what Disney is doing).
This is where I see issues happen.
Some folks seem to think that what Lucas was going to do (4) would have been in alignment with either 2 or 3 ... which. Kind of...? But not really.
It would have been some of the same names, but how things worked and what they mean, and who's involved would be rather quite different from eith 2 or 3 if Lucas had held on and delivered Universe 4 as Universe 1.

Personally...I like what we're getting in Universe 1 right now, I've never been a fan of 2 or 3, and Universe 4, the more I read on it, really doesn't sound good to me.

This entire mess, imo, is all on Lucas because it was his choice to allow media culture stories to be perpetuated which were always going to be ignored by him; making the film plots always disappointing to a number of people who were fans of various media culture stories.

I think, if Disney keeps things, this could be an old problem that won't happen in the future since Disney moves its world's contents across multiple media, but in one Universe pretty regularly...it's kind of their thing.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I wish we could have GL back. Just for me personally, I like his vision a lot better than Disney’s. I do feel like R1 captured GL’s vision, but not the ST.

Solo is kind of a “maybe”

 

Yesss.

 

Just so I understand here...
You wanted the Luke and Rey TLJ story, but with a focus on how the Whills drive people around, via midichlorians, like cars instead of having absolute free will?

Also...R1 has nothing of what Lucas put into every film.
It hasn't any symbolism, metaphor, or soap opera.
It's quite exactly the extreme opposite of the OT or the PT. It's not even much of a fantasy.
It's the closest to a straight scifi Star Wars has ever been.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I have tried to explain why I don’t agree with the direction of the ST, and why I don’t think it fits GL’s vision. Quite frankly, it just generates a huge amount of unfavorable rep, even if I try to make it clear that it is just my opinion. I am just going to have to agree to disagree, and leave it at that.

 

I can guarantee that it doesn't fit with what Lucas had in mind.

Lucas had a story in mind that started with a grumpy Luke refusing to train a teenaged girl, or young adult woman, then eventually training her, and the story being about the Whills and how they actually run the fate of the universe and use people as their vehicles that they drive around by hooking into people via midichlorians, and then Luke would die somewhere along the way and the story would focus on the girl.

That's what Lucas was interested in exploring for 7 through 9.

So...Luke being a grump, training a girl or woman reluctantly, and Luke dying is a vague match, but everything else is a WIDE miss in terms of being alike.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Or maybe: “SOME of those that weren’t, were calling for George’s head.” I very much dislike the prequels. Always have. I never held that against George though. He made a thing. I didn’t like that thing. I wish it had been better. Such is life.

Nah. Instead of people saying he ‘ruined their childhood’, they’d be saying he ‘ruined their aduthood’.

To be accurate, ESB started as a privately financed film, like his buddy Coppola had done with ‘Apocalypse Now’. The shoot went immediately over schedule and budget. Damn straight George was pissy about that. The bank was set to take the guy’s house and forced him to delegate Fox as a guarantor for the loan - the last thing he wanted.

I think it’s likely the other way around. He got himself knee deep into it with the guilds. He burned some bridges and they weren’t inclined to let him recruit the talent he’d wanted.

Amoral - “Good guys, bad guys...made-up words.” The DJ character lacks a moral compass altogether. Which, yes, is definitely an innovative approach to a series with very clearly defined messaging on morality. Great point!

Wasn’t a ‘Solo Spinoff’ one of George’s ideas pre-sale? That’s what I recall.

Holocron database and canonicity

I don’t know how much of what he told James Cameron was sincere and how much was just him farting out ideas with another creator, but I for one was instantly entranced by the idea. It reminded me of one of my favorite TNG quotes from the finale.
____________________________________________
Q: We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons ... and for one brief moment you did.
Picard: When I realized the paradox.
Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you: not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
____________________________________________

For that one fraction of a second, when George mentioned the grander scale he was envisioning, I was open to options I had never considered and it excited me. And brought me right back to the beginning.
____________________________________________
Obi-Wan: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.
Luke: You mean it controls your actions?
Obi-Wan: Partially. But it also obeys your commands.
____________________________________________

I have zero faith that GL could have wrapped that esoteric concept around a satisfying narrative, but oh the endless possibilities. For that brief moment, he made me feel like a kid again.

Thank you, George Lucas

 

I don't consider it amoral because from the lens of Star Wars' allegorical narrative, his actions aren't amoral; they're immoral. It's just that DJ sees them as amoral.
We expect that his immoral actions will suffer consequences, but DJ doesn't and in so doing shows the audience (who are Rose and Finn at that moment) that Star Wars does indeed have an amoral existence - that it's not strictly a universe of white and black. It's a Star Wars moment of Matrix's leaping the roof, which defies all physical possibilities we know about our accepted reality; in this case, our accepted reality is that of Star Wars, where there is no such thing as amoral...or, at least; that's what we've assumed until now.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Regardless, the character introduces a refreshing element of ‘chaotic neutral’ that’s new to the SW framework and I also very much appreciate that. I guess you could argue ‘bounty hunters’ fulfill a similar function, but there’s been a pretty heavy stress made there on comeuppance until now. It is unique and I enjoyed the inclusion. I wonder if JJ will explore that further.

 

I don't know, and I also don't know if it will fit in again.
The only reason that DJ pulled that off is because it served the allegorical message by pushing the message towards nihilism, which set things up for Rey to answer the topic with optimistic existentialism. DJ does his bit at the narrative middle (not run-time middle), when all the good guys have done bad things which are in line with their standards for good reasons and had them explode in their faces, and the bad guys have done good things against their standards for bad reasons and had successes, and then right after this, and the Rey/Kylo stalemate, Rey accepts her convictions, while everything flips the other way around. Good guys start doing good things against their standards for good reasons and have successes, and the bad guys start doing bad things in line with their standards for bad reasons and have failures.

DJ is the lay-up to Rey's conviction moment. I don't know if that kind of set up will be needed again (maybe yes/maybe no), because we weren't left with an amoral message - it's just that DJ had to be purely amoral for Rey's topping off of the message to work.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

What I feel is profound about the character is that had the wind blown the other direction, had the mission been successful, the eyeline for the story would have considered him, in utility, heroic. The explicitly immoral characters implicitly condone his actions while the explicitly moral characters dramatically condemn his actions. While the figure himself is unaffected either way, demonstrating the theme that the value isn’t in WHAT you do, but WHY you do it (“That's how we're going to win.”).

The story doesn’t feel the need for us to learn a lesson through him, but in reaction to him. Karmic retribution would be redundant and Finn’s arc progresses - the path of noninvolvement has very real and dire consequences. Some nifty writing.

 

Quite so!
DJ is quite the Ghost of Christmas Future for Finn.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I heard it from somewhere (I think it was the Resistance Broadcast or somewhere on this forum, but don't quote me), but someone once said that George and Filoni work best together. Filoni curbs Lucas' worst desires and George pushes Filoni to the limit of what he can do creatively. I liked Filoni's work on Rebels, but I think if George was there it could have been even better.

Would I want George overseeing the ST? ...probably not. His later ideas as to what the Force was and what he wanted to do with it were really, REALLY weird and didn't mesh well with the world he set up. I'd like to see them someday, but I don't think Star Wars would be the place for all of them.

 

He should put his midichlorian concepts into a different sci-fi world and it would be a hit IMO. It just wouldn't work in Star Wars.

 

YES.

This Sequel Trilogy proved that to me, the PT had proved great characters and a great story . . . some that Disney and Kathleen Kennedy had missed.