Apparently George is criticizing the film for being a “retro movie”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/31/george-lucas-attacks-retro-star-wars-the-force-awakens
Well, you can’t really say he doesn’t have a point there.
Edit: and I only mean it being a somewhat “retro”, not all the crap he’s saying about SW being a soap opera etc.
Well let’s be fair, George didn’t even go ‘retro’ when he blatantly should have (in the films set before the OT) so I find it very hard to take the guy seriously. He just seems bitter.
Why exactly should he have gone retro in the PT though?
It’s set thirty-ish years earlier, so naturally it should look very different. He may not have made the best design-choices but at least he wasn’t just copying himself completely. The failure of those films were the horrible writing and contrived plots, not that it wasn’t OT enough.
I agree with you to an extent. Those films are broken in terms of writing right out of the gate. But even if they weren’t, it would still have a problem with the lack of connections. They should have had the same “used universe” feel, but they didn’t. But it’s not all about aesthetic. It’s to do with ensuring that your story, setting and key plot points have a direct connection to the ‘Retro’. For instance…
Alderaan should have featured more prominently (not just in a brief montage at the end of the 3rd film) so the audience would give a shit about its destruction in ANH. That would have allowed the story to flow organically from one trilogy into the next, rather than feeling entirely separate.
Speaking of planets though, Tatooine actually featured too prominently. How many times did we need to go back there exactly? It would have been enough to establish that Owen lived there and urged Anakin to “stay there” with him rather than go with Obi Wan on the “idealistic crusade”. It would have been up to the writer the circumstances of how Anakin and Owen found themselves on Tatooine. But no, let’s make it so that Anakin only met him once AFTER having gone away and there was no “crusade” at all, and it wasn’t even Obi Wan that took him. It was Qui Gon.
Likewise, let’s replace a “great starpilot” with a little kid who drives a ground-level chariot.
Yoda trained Obi Wan? Nah. Let’s just switch it so that Qui Gon did.
Anakin was a good friend? Let’s make him an asshole.
He was “seduced” by the dark side? Let’s make it a conscious decision to save his wife.
Leia remembers her mother, you say? Well we can’t have that. Let’s kill her during childbirth!
I’m not averse to there having been new stuff in the Prequels. Of course, there had to be. But the overall aesthetic as well as specific details ought to have connected with ANH. at least a bit. There was none of the ‘used universe’ in the Prequels, and as mentioned above, key details just didn’t align. The term ‘retro’ doesn’t just apply to the look of it.