I promised an SW post the other day. Now that the weekend MMO-grind is over and I’m at work, I have time for things like this. Well, I *mostly* have time.
I won’t browse Reddit either, I swear.
So about a week or more ago I watched (as it turned out, for the second time) Red Letter Media’s Star Wars review. The prequel trilogy. Yeah, the awful one. I’ve seen several of these kind of reviews, all had soooo many ideas, that ultimately made me think about the “what if” scenario. What if the movies didn’t suck? What if the plot was good? How about I try to write a new story?
Sadly I’m not too good with these monumental sagas, I can’t write, I hardly can make my RP characters different from each other… but I think even I could do better, than Lucas. I won’t write a fanfiction, rest assured, just some sketch, and throw ideas in the wind.
Since the original trilogy was an end point, where the prequel story should conclude, many things were set in stone. Let us see a list of these:
– Anakin Skywalker:
— was a promising jedi, who was SEDUCED by the Dark
— was a great pilot during the Clone Wars
— was Obi-Wan’s best friend
— may has been disfigured by Obi-Wan, but at least they fought a long time ago
— Obi-Wan was his master/mentor/a jedi who ranked higher
— born on Tatooine
— had a brother, named Owen, who might know about Anakin’s turning
– There had been something called Clone Wars. This could mean anything, but would suggest that these clones were the bad guys. Warring with clones. In war with clones. I would think that wars are named after when or where they were fought, for how long, or between or against whom. For a long time I was convinced that the clones are the bad guys.
— This war was epic. Not just the first battle and the last couple.
– Leia remembers her mother
– The (Old) Republic stood for a thousand generations. That means tens of thousands of years.
Other interesting points:
– At the beginning of ANH the Galactic Senate is still a thing. Not too much, but it means that it took quite a long time for Palpatine to achieve emperor…dom.
– Vader is more like an officer, a “background villain”. Not an Emperor kind of “epic monster”, but something more… I don’t know, real. Physical form of evil, but by being this, he is “less evil”, than for example the Emperor, or the whole idea of Big Evil Empire.
– A “more civilized age” was just like that.
– The Emperor dismisses the idea of a lightsaber
What do we need in this new prequel?
One of the biggest thing that Lucas’ little playground missed dearly (aside from the likable characters and believable love story) was the rules of the world he created. Who the hell are the jedi? How does the republic work at this scale? Who are the bad guys? Why are they considered bad? Metric fuckton of definitions, reasons, and for Christ’s sake, plot are missing, yet we are spoon-fed with the little unimportant details and thing we’d want to see, not to hear about.
We need a story arc for the three movies.
We need one main guy and two or more important side characters (as Luke was our hero, Han and Leia were the secondary main characters).
We need definite rules about things we see. We need to know why things happen, and not (or not just) how.
We need to move from a simple story to a complicated one, and despite the ending can’t really be a happy one, it have to be at least satisfying.
We need to work on epic scale. Space opera. Fairy tales recycled in space. It still works.
The good old “Show, not tell”. Remember how Obi-Wan recapped to Luke what happened in the last ~40 years in a couple of sentences? That was an outline for us, where are we in this conflict, who we are supposed to relate to. Gave us a ground, but didn’t steal the limelight.
Next we can move on the movies!
