Star Wars - More than a Saga - Episode III - The Great Experiment.
Episode III – The great experiment and how the word Prequel was ruined forever.
1999 was a year of great expectations. From the moment the first trailer landed on Entertainment Tonight…I don’t think anyone would ever have thought that Star Wars and especially; Star Wars helmed by George Lucas could go wrong. This seemed like such an easy lay-up and no doubt would be the greatest chapters of the greatest film saga of all time.
Boy…we got that wrong.
I touched on it in the first chapter about my experiences with the first trailer for Episode 1. The excitement it generated as it FELT like Star Wars. The chills I got when Qui-Gon says “Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi Wan Kenobi” knowing how Obi-Wan was destined to die at this little boys hands. I mean…the viewing of this trailer made me WATCH and RECORD Entertainment Tonight. It made me go and BUY QuickTime so I could download a copy of the trailer to my computer and watch it repeatedly. The ideas shown: a double bladed saber, a bad ass character who was sure to trip up our heroes for many movies, a real star with Liam Neeson and a young Anakin Skywalker. I will admit some trepidation for seeing Matilda playing the female lead (if you haven’t seen Leo’n The Professional….you MUST go watch it now. It’s FANTASTIC film making and Natalie Portman steals that movie from Gary Oldman…and that’s hard) and the idea that this obviously 20 something would one day marry and mother Luke And Leia with this 9 year old DID lend me some weird feelings of ‘really???’ but it was Star Wars. They’d built up a brand and I trusted it.
Sure the last movie hadn’t aged well. In fact in the last fifteen years…many felt that Return of the Jedi was a stumble and I found myself among them. As I’d gotten older I’d seen the issues. The re-release of the Special Editions made it more glaring. The ‘ewok’ problem and the idea that they could stop a technologically and numerically superior force with trees was a bit laughable. The ‘conceit’ of making Leia Luke’s sister to end the love triangle started in A New Hope and other plot holes became glaring to a more mature eye. Still…it was easy to overlook. It was Star Wars after all. It helped that the extended universe was chugging on all cylinders by this point. The fact they’d taken the Luke/Leia sibling relationship and expanded it made it a bit easier to swallow now. The addressing of the Ewoks was handled and I was just so in love with the characters that I was ready to see how it all started. I was primed for the next (beginning) chapter.
Now I wasn’t one of those “gonna wait in line a month outside the theatre to be the first one to see it” types. This was pre-fandango and so some die-hards felt that they wanted to sit outside the theatre in a tent for weeks at a time to be the first ones into see the movie. Local and even national news covered these Darwin Award winners and to be honest as a geek, I hated it. These guys didn’t realize they looked like loser basement dwellers because inevitably someone would ask “don’t you have a job?” and the answer was always “I did…but this is Star Wars Man…when could I do this again?”. My personal translation was “Yeah I had a job…but I quit without notice because ya know…sitting outside in a tent and pretending to be a homeless person seemed fun and I think my parents could use the break from me hogging the phone line sitting on AOL chat rooms with my buddies planning this…by the way you gonna eat those fries?” I don’t mean to disparage those people…but even by this time only in my late 20’s and working at a call center and just starting my IT career…I felt that sitting outside waiting for a movie I’d go to on day one anyway felt silly.
A few buddies and I decided to go to the Friday show right after work at a theatre about 20 miles away. These had the nice leather seats and stadium setup that was new for the time so we drove out about 2 weeks before release, walked by the smelly weirdos waiting outside and pre-purchased for the 6:00 show of Phantom Menace. We then drove back to a friend’s, stopped for beers, played some cards then went home and took showers, slept in our beds and enjoyed the life of a 20-something. I have no regrets.
So the time came and early reviews had started to come in and some were somewhat negative. I’d decided to AVOID reviews if at all possible and spoilers. I just wanted to enjoy it. We left work early and still had to wait in line awhile…but we got in and got great seats. The room was electric. There were people in costume (including one guy in a bike storm trooper outfit who was so large…there was more BLACK showing than white…which gave me endless jokes to pass the time on line), lightsaber battles, giveaways, speculation and it was just cool. It was my first experience being in a room experiencing a ‘geek’ moment. We were all excited. Most hadn’t seen it (though a few liked to announce they’d taken the day off work and bought tickets back to back for the full day…and I did the math and realized what true ‘disposable income’ was…and I suddenly felt better about not having as much of it) and so the room was abuzz with what we might see. Then the trailers start and for the first time I’m annoyed. I just wanted it to get going. Didn’t they know there was a new chapter just waiting for this stupid movie trailer to finish?
The lights go down, and I hear the drums. The 20th Century logo was changed…but there it was and the familiar fanfare afterwards as the Lucasfilm logo appeared. Oh my GOD! It’s gonna happen.
The screen goes black…for what seemed like 17 years…and then
Horn blast, and yellow letters fly away from me with the familiar star wars logo…and I (and everyone) applaud…
The Episode 1 starts to crawl and I’m 10 years old again. If I’m being honest…even writing I’m getting goosebumps because it was that emotional of a moment for me. It was a perfect seat…in a perfect theatre…with three great friends…and Star Wars was back. This was going to be amazing.
And it was.
The power of Star Wars I think at that moment was unlike anything experienced. It could not go wrong. In the pre-prequel era…Star Wars was a known commodity and here it was expanding the saga. Sure it could go wrong. I think we all knew it could…but it wouldn’t. Not with George Lucas at the helm. This was going to be epic…and amazing.
And it was. That first time.
I remember loving the movie the first time. Walking out talking about it. The epic final lightsaber battle, the gungan fight, the space battle. The beginning droid fights. These were what I focused on and remembered. My one buddy Mark Bowman was saying though “I Don’t know…I’m not sure I liked it…it seemed to drag?” and I almost wanted to punch him in his head. How could he say that?
Did we not watch the same movie?
I had already planned to see it again the next day with some family. I was SO excited.
So we went. My little cousins (Matthew and Mark) and I. This time we were in a smaller theatre and it was nice and I was experiencing this with them and sharing it with them. They were enraptured.
However…I started to see the flaws.
I noticed…there was an action piece…followed by a meeting…then another action moment…followed by a meeting…then an escape…followed by a whole BUNCH of meetings…then a podrace…then flying to a planet where we have a TON of meetings…then we leave…go to Naboo where the movie FINALLY seems to start. It was that moment I said to myself “Oh god…this actually kinda sucks”.
I was crushed. I’d still go to see it twice more in the theatres. Once with my Dad and one time with a date who wanted to go…but the damage had been done. By my fourth viewing I’d fallen asleep through the entire Coruscant part. Actually…looking back..that made the film MORE enjoyable.
It was then I realized that Lucas had lost it. That he had LITERALLY caught lightning in a bottle with the first Star Wars…and somehow had the sense to realize that writing AND directing Empire and Jedi couldn’t work. He wasn’t ready as a filmmaker. He let others take the lead…and THEY created the universe I’d grown to love. However…like a supervisor with little self-awareness…he’d taken the successes of those people and applied them to him in his mind. He thought he could do it. Maybe in 1987, he could have. But a 1996-9 George Lucas had been living in ‘LucasLand’ a long time. If I had to guess I’d say he surrounded himself with sycophants and people who’d drunk his particular kool-aid. In some ways I’d wondered too if money had somehow removed his ability to empathize with those who didn’t have it. His characterizations of Shmi, Anakin and even Watto seemed to be more caricature than deep. The characters of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon were wonderful and seemed to have a depth to them…but that was more a result of the actors I think than what they had on the page. Jar Jar was an obvious ploy to generate money and written as such. However the characters of the Viceroy and Palpatine seemed to work. Lucas knew how to write greedy and vain with Palpatine and even though we weren’t SUPPOSED to know he was the emperor, the performance by McDiarmid was dripping with malevolence. The character of Chancellor Valorum likewise seemed to fire. Lucas could write rich but somewhat arrogant very well. Again he had been ‘in touch’ with those characters given his place in life. I realized that the characters and writing just wasn’t there. The flashing laser bolts and lightsabers had entranced me…but that as a grown man now I needed more. I hoped beyond hope that Lucas would realize he was out of his depth and go back to just producing and co-writing the followups.
No Such luck.
The follow up movies in the prequel trilogy were not as bad…but were very sub-par. It wasn’t just the acting by Hayden (a horrible miscast if I ever saw one…), but the dialogue seemed to lose something. It was like trying to convey emotion while at the same time, sucking it out of the room like hard vacuum through an airlock. The “humor” was forced and so not Star Wars as to be distracting and while the action pieces (Battle of Geonosis, Space Battle/Palpatine rescue of Revenge of the Sith etc) were decent…it seemed to be all spectacle with no real heart. Attack of the Clones I think we were all hoping would be the ‘Empire’ of this trilogy and while again…it was better, it misfired. I still can’t help feeling that had we started the prequel trilogy with Attack of the Clones, told Anakin’s story in flashbacks, had a pod race as the opening set piece, and just had him and Padme meet and fall in love (as opposed to re meeting after her first impression of him was as a preteen boy with bad hair) as adults and then move on to a second movie outlining the battles and set pieces of the Clone Wars while ending with the Revenge of the Sith and thereby have us invested in not just the heroes but the villains of the prequel saga, I can’t help feeling we’d all feel a bit better about things.
Even the main point of the trilogy, the fall of Anakin, while the best part of the entire prequel trilogy fell flat because of the horrible casting of Christiansen. He couldn’t convey the gravitas, or the angst without looking like a whining crybaby. In some ways like a character postulated in Chasing Amy, “Vader’s visage was sullied when his mask was removed to reveal a feeble old man” (paraphrasing of course). The mystery of Vader’s persona under the coolness of that first costume caused issues. Frankly…from the moment we heard James Earl Jones speak as Vader…I realized that in my mind I’d never been able to reconcile Anakin with Vader. The performance was not enough. Hayden tried to make the role his own, without looking at what came before. It didn’t work.
Still…I thought “This is the last film…Ok. Maybe it’ll be back someday but I’m ok with this” I was still reading the novels and even though I felt that the Yuuzhan Vong war was a bit overdrawn out and somewhat hard to navigate due to inconsistent writing…I was happy to have my EU and figured I’d only visit this galaxy in paper form from now on.
Again I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when just 7 short years later, Disney would march in and resurrect a dear world in a galaxy far far away.
And change it forever.
Thanks for Reading.
1999 was a year of great expectations. From the moment the first trailer landed on Entertainment Tonight…I don’t think anyone would ever have thought that Star Wars and especially; Star Wars helmed by George Lucas could go wrong. This seemed like such an easy lay-up and no doubt would be the greatest chapters of the greatest film saga of all time.
Boy…we got that wrong.
I touched on it in the first chapter about my experiences with the first trailer for Episode 1. The excitement it generated as it FELT like Star Wars. The chills I got when Qui-Gon says “Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi Wan Kenobi” knowing how Obi-Wan was destined to die at this little boys hands. I mean…the viewing of this trailer made me WATCH and RECORD Entertainment Tonight. It made me go and BUY QuickTime so I could download a copy of the trailer to my computer and watch it repeatedly. The ideas shown: a double bladed saber, a bad ass character who was sure to trip up our heroes for many movies, a real star with Liam Neeson and a young Anakin Skywalker. I will admit some trepidation for seeing Matilda playing the female lead (if you haven’t seen Leo’n The Professional….you MUST go watch it now. It’s FANTASTIC film making and Natalie Portman steals that movie from Gary Oldman…and that’s hard) and the idea that this obviously 20 something would one day marry and mother Luke And Leia with this 9 year old DID lend me some weird feelings of ‘really???’ but it was Star Wars. They’d built up a brand and I trusted it.
Sure the last movie hadn’t aged well. In fact in the last fifteen years…many felt that Return of the Jedi was a stumble and I found myself among them. As I’d gotten older I’d seen the issues. The re-release of the Special Editions made it more glaring. The ‘ewok’ problem and the idea that they could stop a technologically and numerically superior force with trees was a bit laughable. The ‘conceit’ of making Leia Luke’s sister to end the love triangle started in A New Hope and other plot holes became glaring to a more mature eye. Still…it was easy to overlook. It was Star Wars after all. It helped that the extended universe was chugging on all cylinders by this point. The fact they’d taken the Luke/Leia sibling relationship and expanded it made it a bit easier to swallow now. The addressing of the Ewoks was handled and I was just so in love with the characters that I was ready to see how it all started. I was primed for the next (beginning) chapter.
Now I wasn’t one of those “gonna wait in line a month outside the theatre to be the first one to see it” types. This was pre-fandango and so some die-hards felt that they wanted to sit outside the theatre in a tent for weeks at a time to be the first ones into see the movie. Local and even national news covered these Darwin Award winners and to be honest as a geek, I hated it. These guys didn’t realize they looked like loser basement dwellers because inevitably someone would ask “don’t you have a job?” and the answer was always “I did…but this is Star Wars Man…when could I do this again?”. My personal translation was “Yeah I had a job…but I quit without notice because ya know…sitting outside in a tent and pretending to be a homeless person seemed fun and I think my parents could use the break from me hogging the phone line sitting on AOL chat rooms with my buddies planning this…by the way you gonna eat those fries?” I don’t mean to disparage those people…but even by this time only in my late 20’s and working at a call center and just starting my IT career…I felt that sitting outside waiting for a movie I’d go to on day one anyway felt silly.
A few buddies and I decided to go to the Friday show right after work at a theatre about 20 miles away. These had the nice leather seats and stadium setup that was new for the time so we drove out about 2 weeks before release, walked by the smelly weirdos waiting outside and pre-purchased for the 6:00 show of Phantom Menace. We then drove back to a friend’s, stopped for beers, played some cards then went home and took showers, slept in our beds and enjoyed the life of a 20-something. I have no regrets.
So the time came and early reviews had started to come in and some were somewhat negative. I’d decided to AVOID reviews if at all possible and spoilers. I just wanted to enjoy it. We left work early and still had to wait in line awhile…but we got in and got great seats. The room was electric. There were people in costume (including one guy in a bike storm trooper outfit who was so large…there was more BLACK showing than white…which gave me endless jokes to pass the time on line), lightsaber battles, giveaways, speculation and it was just cool. It was my first experience being in a room experiencing a ‘geek’ moment. We were all excited. Most hadn’t seen it (though a few liked to announce they’d taken the day off work and bought tickets back to back for the full day…and I did the math and realized what true ‘disposable income’ was…and I suddenly felt better about not having as much of it) and so the room was abuzz with what we might see. Then the trailers start and for the first time I’m annoyed. I just wanted it to get going. Didn’t they know there was a new chapter just waiting for this stupid movie trailer to finish?
The lights go down, and I hear the drums. The 20th Century logo was changed…but there it was and the familiar fanfare afterwards as the Lucasfilm logo appeared. Oh my GOD! It’s gonna happen.
The screen goes black…for what seemed like 17 years…and then
Horn blast, and yellow letters fly away from me with the familiar star wars logo…and I (and everyone) applaud…
The Episode 1 starts to crawl and I’m 10 years old again. If I’m being honest…even writing I’m getting goosebumps because it was that emotional of a moment for me. It was a perfect seat…in a perfect theatre…with three great friends…and Star Wars was back. This was going to be amazing.
And it was.
The power of Star Wars I think at that moment was unlike anything experienced. It could not go wrong. In the pre-prequel era…Star Wars was a known commodity and here it was expanding the saga. Sure it could go wrong. I think we all knew it could…but it wouldn’t. Not with George Lucas at the helm. This was going to be epic…and amazing.
And it was. That first time.
I remember loving the movie the first time. Walking out talking about it. The epic final lightsaber battle, the gungan fight, the space battle. The beginning droid fights. These were what I focused on and remembered. My one buddy Mark Bowman was saying though “I Don’t know…I’m not sure I liked it…it seemed to drag?” and I almost wanted to punch him in his head. How could he say that?
Did we not watch the same movie?
I had already planned to see it again the next day with some family. I was SO excited.
So we went. My little cousins (Matthew and Mark) and I. This time we were in a smaller theatre and it was nice and I was experiencing this with them and sharing it with them. They were enraptured.
However…I started to see the flaws.
I noticed…there was an action piece…followed by a meeting…then another action moment…followed by a meeting…then an escape…followed by a whole BUNCH of meetings…then a podrace…then flying to a planet where we have a TON of meetings…then we leave…go to Naboo where the movie FINALLY seems to start. It was that moment I said to myself “Oh god…this actually kinda sucks”.
I was crushed. I’d still go to see it twice more in the theatres. Once with my Dad and one time with a date who wanted to go…but the damage had been done. By my fourth viewing I’d fallen asleep through the entire Coruscant part. Actually…looking back..that made the film MORE enjoyable.
It was then I realized that Lucas had lost it. That he had LITERALLY caught lightning in a bottle with the first Star Wars…and somehow had the sense to realize that writing AND directing Empire and Jedi couldn’t work. He wasn’t ready as a filmmaker. He let others take the lead…and THEY created the universe I’d grown to love. However…like a supervisor with little self-awareness…he’d taken the successes of those people and applied them to him in his mind. He thought he could do it. Maybe in 1987, he could have. But a 1996-9 George Lucas had been living in ‘LucasLand’ a long time. If I had to guess I’d say he surrounded himself with sycophants and people who’d drunk his particular kool-aid. In some ways I’d wondered too if money had somehow removed his ability to empathize with those who didn’t have it. His characterizations of Shmi, Anakin and even Watto seemed to be more caricature than deep. The characters of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon were wonderful and seemed to have a depth to them…but that was more a result of the actors I think than what they had on the page. Jar Jar was an obvious ploy to generate money and written as such. However the characters of the Viceroy and Palpatine seemed to work. Lucas knew how to write greedy and vain with Palpatine and even though we weren’t SUPPOSED to know he was the emperor, the performance by McDiarmid was dripping with malevolence. The character of Chancellor Valorum likewise seemed to fire. Lucas could write rich but somewhat arrogant very well. Again he had been ‘in touch’ with those characters given his place in life. I realized that the characters and writing just wasn’t there. The flashing laser bolts and lightsabers had entranced me…but that as a grown man now I needed more. I hoped beyond hope that Lucas would realize he was out of his depth and go back to just producing and co-writing the followups.
No Such luck.
The follow up movies in the prequel trilogy were not as bad…but were very sub-par. It wasn’t just the acting by Hayden (a horrible miscast if I ever saw one…), but the dialogue seemed to lose something. It was like trying to convey emotion while at the same time, sucking it out of the room like hard vacuum through an airlock. The “humor” was forced and so not Star Wars as to be distracting and while the action pieces (Battle of Geonosis, Space Battle/Palpatine rescue of Revenge of the Sith etc) were decent…it seemed to be all spectacle with no real heart. Attack of the Clones I think we were all hoping would be the ‘Empire’ of this trilogy and while again…it was better, it misfired. I still can’t help feeling that had we started the prequel trilogy with Attack of the Clones, told Anakin’s story in flashbacks, had a pod race as the opening set piece, and just had him and Padme meet and fall in love (as opposed to re meeting after her first impression of him was as a preteen boy with bad hair) as adults and then move on to a second movie outlining the battles and set pieces of the Clone Wars while ending with the Revenge of the Sith and thereby have us invested in not just the heroes but the villains of the prequel saga, I can’t help feeling we’d all feel a bit better about things.
Even the main point of the trilogy, the fall of Anakin, while the best part of the entire prequel trilogy fell flat because of the horrible casting of Christiansen. He couldn’t convey the gravitas, or the angst without looking like a whining crybaby. In some ways like a character postulated in Chasing Amy, “Vader’s visage was sullied when his mask was removed to reveal a feeble old man” (paraphrasing of course). The mystery of Vader’s persona under the coolness of that first costume caused issues. Frankly…from the moment we heard James Earl Jones speak as Vader…I realized that in my mind I’d never been able to reconcile Anakin with Vader. The performance was not enough. Hayden tried to make the role his own, without looking at what came before. It didn’t work.
Still…I thought “This is the last film…Ok. Maybe it’ll be back someday but I’m ok with this” I was still reading the novels and even though I felt that the Yuuzhan Vong war was a bit overdrawn out and somewhat hard to navigate due to inconsistent writing…I was happy to have my EU and figured I’d only visit this galaxy in paper form from now on.
Again I was wrong. Imagine my surprise when just 7 short years later, Disney would march in and resurrect a dear world in a galaxy far far away.
And change it forever.
Thanks for Reading.
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