Does anyone else just not want to see ANYTHING of this?


For fear of literally the ultimate childhood rape. They've ruined everything else in life. The backstory of Star Wars, Star Trek, Steven Spielberg, film scores, even Indiana Jones. I don't know how they even pulled off that last one. Did anyone see that shit coming? Indiana Jones not even using a gun and killing people? What in the fuck?

Yet, despite this...despite the ruining of Anakin, Obi-Wan, the robots and everything else. Despite all those shitty designs of aliens, planets and technology that looked nothing like Star Wars.

Despite the changes to the old movies with all that bogus CGI, Han not being allowed to murder in cold blood and Jar Jar hopping around in Return of the Jedi, our beloved Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, Yoda, Ben and Vader were not ruined.

Now here we are (how many years later??) with modern Hollywood just manufacturing total shit and suddenly our childhood heroes are being brought out of retirement for more movies.

DO. NOT. WANT.

I honestly don't think I can take it. Dear God, this will be all you hear from me. I will stay away from anything. If I have to avoid certain aisles in the grocery store when the movie comes out because of promotional packaging, I will.

I'm not afraid about the movies being well-made: I think at their respective stages of their careers, JJ is a better filmmaker than George Lucas. He pays more attention to detail, is a better writer, knows how to get the best out of his actors, manages visual effects better and is a better editor. I can almost guarantee we won't get as many cringe-inducing moments or a hacked up John Williams score like we did in the prequels.

What I am worried about, as Longtime_Sunshine said, is the purpose of the sequel trilogy. I'm not convinced that there is a compelling story left to be told. Retreading Vader/Palpatine with a new cast of characters isn't going to do it for me and I'm going to dislike anything that has to do with clones.

My bad.

Lucas had already built his figurative kingdom by the time he returned to filmmaking in the late 90s. So there's not as much ground-breaking and necessarily clever maneuvering going on. But many of the creative traits I've laid out live on rapturously in the prequels.

I'm not prepared to attempt to persuade anyone tonight about what I feel is a second renaissance for Star Wars with the prequels. Maybe I'll bare my soul and attempt it one day. But I don't agree that Abrams could top a Lucas-directed sequel trilogy. Abrams is a passable filmmaker with, as you said, an increasingly impressive oeuvre of films. But he lacks those formally economic, visually inclined, subversive, avant-garde, family friendly, simultaneously low and high brow leanings that Lucas' more involved directorial work has always been infused with.

A shining example of what I'm talking about is the unlikeliness that Abrams would ever engineer anything remotely like the delightfully incongruous, mechanically sonorous and fiercely kinetic pod race in TPM, one of the prequel's best features. Find Lucas' student film, 1:42.08: A Man and His Car (1966), below and you'll see that the much maligned prequel-era Lucas has been here all along.

[flash width=560 height=315]http://www.youtube.com/v//WPtuWnsftlc?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&hd=1[/flash]

But I'm still excited and rooting for Abrams to pull off something grand. I think he will. Even though a small part of me thinks we're getting two hour-long Old Republic cut scenes.

Sign me up for this shit.

I am curiously optimistic about what JJ can do. No way am I prepared to throw the toys out of the pram and have a big dummy spot 2 years before the movie even comes out

Hate to continue this Lucas circlejerk (even though I'm enjoying it and kinda started it) but the below video, featuring Lucas addressing the idea of happiness, sums up my understanding of Lucas' basic philosophical approach to filmmaking:

[flash width=560 height=315]http://www.youtube.com/v//CnHyStDZ3_U?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&hd=1[/flash]

This may seem a bit abstract but Lucas succeeds on levels many others don't because he's not solely striving for throwaway, disposable, emotional, one-trick peaks of pleasure in his work. As weird as that sounds. The formal restraint, stylistic austerity and consumate care he also endows the totality of his more involved directorial body of work with is about capturing the joy he describes in the above video. "[Joy] is in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure."

I love that clip. He can be really profound, and I think he does his best to carry those ideas over into his filmmaking. His creative mind is really second to none, even Spielberg.

What was missing perhaps from his later films is a decent writer who could really translate those ideas to screen. So he did it all himself, and as he's said in interviews, he doesn't enjoy that process. I think that's why there are scenes in the prequels that make me cringe. The ideas are in there, even more so the right ideas, they were just executed a bit clumsily.

Whilst I realise he has his detractors and the "lens flare" aspect upsets many I do think J.J. Abrams has served the Star Trek franchise very well in terms of fidelity to the originals.


So.... I am HOPING that this translates to the saga.

I'm hoping we get more information about this motion picture sometime in 2014.

I bet we will see some sort of teaser trailer in December.

http://www.empireonline.com/features/st ... rain-trust