Star Wars Universe Thread: May The 4th Be With You

[CP1708]

George Lucas is not involved with the creation of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. When interviewed by Stephen Colbert about the forthcoming sequel, the now-retired filmmaker said "I'm excited, I have no idea what they're doing"—they being director J.J. Abrams and his team.

But according to Bruce Handy's new Vanity Fair cover story on the creation of Episode VII, Lucas at one point did have a vision for the story that the new Star Wars film would tell. By the time he sold Lucasfilm and related properties to Disney for more than $4 billion, he’d “sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX,” writes Handy, and had already approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fischer, and Mark Hamill about being involved. Once the property was in Disney’s hands, though, the company and executive producer Kathleen Kennedy mostly scrapped Lucas's ideas. Why? Apparently, people involved may have been getting flashbacks to child actor Jake Matthew Lloyd’s performance in the first prequel:

[Abrams] said Lucas’s treatment had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 13-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”

Handy’s article drives home just how much the Force Awakens came out of the idea of getting to fill an entirely blank space with new Star Wars story. Luke, Han, and Leia are back and are 30 years older, but other than that, the filmmakers had to fabricate something completely fresh. The initially reluctant Abrams says this feeling of open-ended possibility is what brought him on board: “This idea of what’s happened in these past 30-something years. Where is Han Solo? What happened to Leia? Is Luke alive?”

The writing process apparently was somewhat tortured, with the Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt making a first attempt but ultimately failing to pull together a script in time. As of early November 2013, the studio walls and whiteboards were filled with ideas, but the actual narrative hadn't been set in place. Abrams and the Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi co-writer Lawrence Kasdan took over, starting from something very close to scratch. “We didn’t have anything,” Kasdan told Handy. “There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things, and you couldn’t tell them anything except, ‘Yeah, that guy’s in it.’ That was about it. That was really all we knew.” The two men then hashed out the story in conversations as they walked around Santa Monica, New York City, London, and Paris, and kept refining the script even as production began.

Abrams keeps talking about wanting to evoke the feel of the originals rather than the prequels—in the Vanity Fair story, he says he considered putting Jar Jar Binks's bones in the background of a Force Awakens scene. But perhaps an even bigger part of the reason for the fervent fan interest in every drib and drab of info about the Star Wars sequel is that its out-of-whole-cloth nature differs fundamentally from other big-budget franchise reboots. The Marvel universe is raiding published comic books for a years-long master narrative; other based-on-previous-films films, from Abrams’s take on Star Trek to recent updates of Robocop and Terminator, often retread familiar stories and feature old characters recast with newer actors. By contrast, Star Wars, for the most part, has the potential to be an all-new vision in a familiar setting. It probably can't blow minds as thoroughly as Lucas did in 1977, but at least fans don't have to worry about spotty child-acting derailing the story that defined their own childhoods.

This ******* guy.


God bless you Disney.

 

[danger style]

JJ bouta drop a classic on us

 

[firstclass]

I would assume those teenagers would be Skywalker kids.

No problem with that.

Edit: Apparently Lucas said in the final draft that those "Teens" would be 20

*Ye shrug*

 

[jaypesoz]

JJ bouta drop a classic on us

Truth

 

[clarkkent415]

JJ bouta drop a classic on us

Truth

I believe so too.

He did a great job on the Star Trek movies IMO and he didn't grow up liking it.

What influenced him was Star Wars. Knowing that makes me believe that this movie will not fail...














But I've been disappointed in many films the last 2-3 years.

 

[...So]

.

 

[hybridsoldier23]

There is a theory out there that Mace somehow survived the fall out the window. Ended up hiding in the lower levels of Coruscant, grew a fro, went crazy and became homeless.

I mean if Maul survived being chopped in half I can buy this.

 

[davinci]

JJ hasn't let me down yet

i think this trilogy is gonna be amazing

 

[...So]

.

 

[ryda421]

no more sam jackson. he already ruined one genre for me

 

[danger style]

Im more mad at how Kit Fisto and the other dudes died of seemingly one slash from Sidious in ROTS. There's no way

 

[firstclass]

Kit Fisto was in TCW

But it's Sidious dude Beat Yoda in a LightSaber battle

 

[danger style]

Kit Fisto was in TCW

But it's Sidious dude Beat Yoda in a LightSaber battle

Not saying Fisto and the others shouldn't have lost eventually. But the way they went down was too easy.



I mean come on



The choreography was WOAT in this. Sidious' facial expressions were comedy too. Actually Sidious is responsible for most of the unintentional comedy in ROTS

Spoiler

 

[sunshineblotters]

They put my girl Lupita in mocap

 

[CP1708]

God ******* damn that scene.

For as much as I like that film, it's **** like that that has filled this thread (and many others) with anti Lucas speak.

The Obi-Wan/Qui Gon/Maul duel was so fantastic, the Sidious/Mace/3 random dead in 7 seconds Jedi was just


He always tinkered with the OG's, I wish someone could get their hands on the prequels and "update" those.

 

[firstclass]

What could they update?
Cgi
??

 

[CP1708]

What could they update?
Cgi
??

Naw, CGI is still up to snuff these days.

I was thinkin, delete like 70% of the first two films, film some new scenes, new characters, change about 93% of the dialogue, eradicate Jar Jar entirely, get rid of 3-P0 being built by Anakin for absolutely zero reason, get rid of the Pod Races, add maybe, Iono, 45 more minutes of Maul, don't kill him, bring him into the second film, erase Dokuu or however you spell that worthless character, add in about 2 hours worth of Vader killing real Jedi and not children, lose this Jango Fett guy, and bring in the OG Boba to run alongside Vader

Iono, that's just off the top of my head without really thinkin on it. Surely there's something they can do. I mean, the OG was flawless and they screwed with that thing forever. Surely they can work on the garbage ones and make them better. Would be like tinkering with the OG's but in reverse. Make the OG's worse, but the Prequels better. I'd settle for that.

 

[firstclass]

As expected you basically want completely new movies come on CP

 

[danger style]

Naw, CGI is still up to snuff these days.

I was thinkin, delete like 70% of the first two films, film some new scenes, new characters, change about 93% of the dialogue, eradicate Jar Jar entirely, get rid of 3-P0 being built by Anakin for absolutely zero reason, get rid of the Pod Races, add maybe, Iono, 45 more minutes of Maul, don't kill him, bring him into the second film, erase Dokuu or however you spell that worthless character, add in about 2 hours worth of Vader killing real Jedi and not children, lose this Jango Fett guy, and bring in the OG Boba to run alongside Vader

Iono, that's just off the top of my head without really thinkin on it. Surely there's something they can do. I mean, the OG was flawless and they screwed with that thing forever. Surely they can work on the garbage ones and make them better. Would be like tinkering with the OG's but in reverse. Make the OG's worse, but the Prequels better. I'd settle for that.

 

[CP1708]

Hey, I said only change 70%, that's not whole movies. I left some stuff in there. The credits, both at the beginning, and the end. The music. Would still have Obi Wan. And Yoda. And some Jedi. Someone named Anakin . I left all that stuff in there. I'm just sayin, we could work on some of the other stuff.

 

[noblekane]

Prequels had too much cgi

Had the prquels looking like they were 30 years after return of the jedi

 

[danger style]

The cgi has not aged well at all either. ROTS is still somewhat passable but AOTC is :x

Thank god for JJ being a real one and using as much practical effects as possible.

 

[jaypesoz]

Interesting speculation that's been around for awhile.

Spoiler

A reliable source has confirmed that Max Von Sydow's character in The Force Awakens is none other than the infamous Boba Fett. Sources state that the reveal will come later in the third act, and tie into the events after the Battle of Jakku. His identity is hidden by cybernetic modifications, and the fact that he doesn't wear the Mando armor until his true identity is revealed. The cybernetics are due to the damage done to his body by the Sarlaac. This leak is the same source that originally informed us that Kylo Ren was indeed played by Adam Driver.
http://moviepilot.com/posts/2015/05...16815?lt_source=external,manual,manual,manual

 

[CP1708]

 

[GL Rayner]

If that rumor is true, then JJ can have all my money.