Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

He stopped the sentence without completing it because he knew it was going no place good and it's telling that instead of elaborating on his point to shape it into something not quite to shitty he opted to just stop and let the thought hang out there for people to finish on their own. Everyone would know what he meant but he could always just say "Well I never really said that". All the while he would feel better both from having gotten a little of it off his chest and telling himself he stayed on the high road.

Azrayne_sl said:

So your whole "resentful fans/vocal minority" theory is a pile of shit.

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I literally don't know anyone in real life who legitimately loves the prequels. I know a couple people (including myself) who enjoy parts of them to a degree, but who also recognize what disjointed, Lucas CG wankery they were (and how uneven the CG was across all three movies). And I know TONS of people who think they all fucking suck. "vocal minority" lol. But hey, at least we got some George Lucas Fan Fiction out of Edge

From Metacritic:

Episode I - 51%
Episode II - 54%
Episode III - 68%

After almost 4 decades, Lucas still thinks he is God and no one knows more about SW than him. Only HE can do great things with it.
Unfortunately for him, the best movie had little interference by his great intelectual wisdom.

There is a saying in my country "He thinks he is the last coke bottle in the desert". And this is Lucas in a nutshell.

You can tell Lucas is massively butt-hurt over them not using his ideas for the new trilogy. It seems like I read somewhere that his ideas for the new trilogy involved using a bunch of teens and pre-teen characters and building a story around them. Basically the same type of shit he did with Phantom Menace.

Blakkheim_sl said:

You can tell Lucas is massively butt-hurt over them not using his ideas for the new trilogy. It seems like I read somewhere that his ideas for the new trilogy involved using a bunch of teens and pre-teen characters and building a story around them. Basically the same type of shit he did with Phantom Menace.

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That was my biggest fear for the new trilogy after first hearing they were sold to Disney. How horrible would it have been if all the new main characters were teenagers to appeal to a younger audience? Say what you want about the story, but JJ nailed the tone of the originals

Royal_sl said:

If you watch the making of for Crystal Skull you'll see that Spielberg was basically "George wants to do what? Fuck it. Let's do that." for that entire process. A Hollywood legend turned yes man. He has more than enough clout to eat a stinker with his name on it here and there so he ate one for George. I guess they're just good friends. It mystifies me though.

He (Spielberg) loved TFA to. Abrams let him have an advanced viewing and he came back and asked him to watch it again two more times.

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I wish the prequels were as good as Crystal Skull. It might not be a great movie but it still had the feel of a Indiana Jones movie. It was good enough for me to watch again whenever its on cable.
I have never re-watched Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith. It was a little silly but i loved the fact that it had aliens,russians and a long lost son.

Drakain_sl said:

This post makes me sad. I tend to forget because I grew up with the Original Trilogy and had Star Wars toys, clothes, sheets, etc... but there are generations of people out there who don't like or don't care about Star Wars because of the prequels. I guess to be fair, to not be exposed to the OT and it's significance falls at the feet of parents and family, but for George to knock JJ and Disney for TFA is ludicrous.

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It's not that I don't like or care about it. I enjoy the original trilogy as solid, if not perfect, movies, and I recognize the massive pop culture/cinematic influence they've had. And like I said I think they somehow struck on something unique with the scifi meets western meets kung fu movie mashup, the setting has a unique vibe to it and the original trilogy definitely has a real life to it that the prequels lacked.

But they just don't hold any special place in my mind from a nostalgia point of view - I didn't play with SW toys or read the EU books or spend hours on the wiki or anything like that, it's not a franchise where I'll immediately look into something just because it's related to the franchise. On the flip side, that could be because the low quality of the EU stuff I did encounter turned me off pretty permanently.

I wouldn't say the prequels ruined the OT for me or people in my generation, more or less everyone I know saw TFA in the first week of it coming out, enjoyed it, and is passingly familiar with the franchise and the characters/story of the original trilogy. Mostly everyone I know ignores the prequels except to mention how much of a waste they were or crack jokes, if the subject comes up. I know I had more fun getting high with friends watching the Plinkett reviews on the prequels a few years back than I did actually watching them as a child/young teen.

Jive Turkey_sl said:

That was my biggest fear for the new trilogy after first hearing they were sold to Disney. How horrible would it have been if all the new main characters were teenagers to appeal to a younger audience? Say what you want about the story, but JJ nailed the tone of the originals

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Like hunger games or some shit like that.

Jive Turkey_sl said:

I literally don't know anyone in real life who legitimately loves the prequels. I know a couple people (including myself) who enjoy parts of them to a degree, but who also recognize what disjointed, Lucas CG wankery they were (and how uneven the CG was across all three movies). And I know TONS of people who think they all fucking suck. "vocal minority" lol. But hey, at least we got some George Lucas Fan Fiction out of Edge

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Particularly with all of the watching and re-watching going on right now, I haven't talked to a single person over the holidays who didn't categorize the prequels as anything other than a pile of shit. These folks have ranged from having little/no exposure to Star Wars to people who were reliving it all inMachete orderto 'get the most' out of TFA.

Everybody gives respect (even if its reluctant) to the original series because of how they stood out for their time, but Phantom Menace came out in 1999 ... the same year we got The Matrix, a couple of years after The Fifth Element and so on. By then, folks knew that sci-fi didn't need to come with dogshit acting and writing. Phantom Menace was way closer to Star Trek Insurrection (1998) and Wing Commander (also 1999 - my god that was bad) than ANH.

Blakkheim_sl said:

You can tell Lucas is massively butt-hurt over them not using his ideas for the new trilogy. It seems like I read somewhere that his ideas for the new trilogy involved using a bunch of teens and pre-teen characters and building a story around them. Basically the same type of shit he did with Phantom Menace.

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well, to be fair. I would be ok with that in theory. Rebels, etc. 90% of the EU stuff.
I would rather further Starwars had NOTHING to do with Luke, and friends. Like, I said saying I was more interested in Rogue One.

TFA would have been better 100-200 years down the line, and everyone involved was renamed. no luke, leia, han. Chewie still chewie. Any characters, just being descendants. Leaving the actual fates of all involved up to people to guess at.

Regime_sl said:

Lucas ex wife got shit done and that chaps Edge's hide?

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It wasn't just his ex-wife. He gave one of the later revisions of the script to some of his friends from film school, the husband and wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, to go over and polish up. It was their treatment that added all of the comedic bits to the script because they felt it was too serious in tone.

Lucas later claimed they had some good ideas and that in spite of not using any of them they had reinforced his confidence in what he was trying to do with the film. In point of fact they wrote about a third of the final revision of the script, including entire running exchanges word for word, which publicly released annotated copies of the scripts clearly show. They were never listed in the film credits.

I think it is quite telling and important that this is known as Star Wars : The Force Awakens and not Star Wars Episode VII. Much of the prequel trilogy was marketed as and known as the episode number, in this case you don't see Episode VII much of anywhere save the opening crawl itself.

That's Lucas/Charlie Rose interview was an HOUR LONG. If you were outraged by his hypocrisy from that ONE line, wait till you get a load of an hour of him comparing himself to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and regarding himself as an "outsider" artist. With a straight fucking face the whole time.

Qhue_sl said:

I think it is quite telling and important that this is known as Star Wars : The Force Awakens and not Star Wars Episode VII. Much of the prequel trilogy was marketed as and known as the episode number, in this case you don't see Episode VII much of anywhere save the opening crawl itself.

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yeah, but he is also right in that it is eps VII. although my answer would be the same.... I would rather it wasn't. And was in fact, a full reboot. Starwars: The Force Awakens Episode 1.
I do almost wonder if that was the argument. and if Lucas was not making that argument? If there is one element of "those are my babies you can't touch them" its Luke/Leia, etc. you can have the universe, and any of the secondary characters, but not them.. that makes sense. Was Lucas saying, lets do something new, with a clean break, and it was Disney/JJ saying, no we want to continue with Luke/Leia/Han?

khorum_sl said:

That's Lucas/Charlie Rose interview was an HOUR LONG. If you were outraged by his hypocrisy from that ONE line, wait till you get a load of an hour of him comparing himself to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and regarding himself as an "outsider" artist. With a straight fucking face the whole time.

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Wow... I could only make it through the first 15 minutes of that cringe-worthy mess. He tries so hard to be smarter than he actually is. What a pompous, arrogant ass.

khorum_sl said:

That's Lucas/Charlie Rose interview was an HOUR LONG. If you were outraged by his hypocrisy from that ONE line, wait till you get a load of an hour of him comparing himself to Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and regarding himself as an "outsider" artist. With a straight fucking face the whole time.

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The sad thing is, he could easily get away with that...had the interview taken place in the early 1980s. I'm not sure if it was his divorce, his kids, his sudden and massive financial success, or a mix of it all, but at some point he just flew off the rails and never got back on track. Bummer.