NeverarGreat said:
This is so strange to me. Are aliens and clones not people to George? Besides, what about everyone Luke blew up with the Death Star? I guess as long as we don’t see their faces, their death doesn’t count. And what about the good dozen Rebels gunned down by Stormtroopers in the first scene, or Captain Antilles who had his neck crushed, or crispy Owen and Beru…Like, I don’t want to say this flippantly, but this seems like an artist in willful denial of the content of his art.
Long delayed response but only just saw the thread (and new to the forum in general) – but I wonder if it’s possible that when George was saying “we” only killed humans once, he was talking about the good guys. Yes, the Empire (especially Tarkin and Vader in the first movie) leave behind a huge body count…but they are evil. That’s kinda their thing. The good guys, however, should be more thoughtful about taking another life.
Or this is another example of his memory, um, evolving over time, and he now thinks that good guys don’t kill humans and never, ever shoot first.
As for the topic: it’s a good point that there have been a few divergent yet all definitive summaries of George’s ideas for the sequels. Yet, as noted in the thread already, the sketches of what we got are evident in the summaries of his ideas or the concept art done before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney. I think the biggest things that tripped up the execution of these ideas was the reactive stance Abrams and company took to the prequels. It seems strange now given the state of Star Wars discourse, but in 2013-2014, the prequels were still super toxic…and all the general public wanted from the sequels was a return to “real” Star Wars. As many have noted, the first spoken line of the trilogy carries weight here: “This will begin to make things right.”
Because of that, they shied away from key details and contexts necessary to understand the state of the galaxy 30 years after ROTJ: they tried to avoid galactic politics at all costs. The belief was rampant that the Senate scenes were not only dumb but an affront to the saga. So instead of a clear setup like “Leia is still building the Republic, there are remnant Imperials fighting like ISIS, and there is a criminal/dark-side faction consolidating power”…we have a Nü-Empire that no one thinks matters but also is clearly ready to take power, we have a Republic we see for ten seconds before it is blown up, and a Resistance that is resisting the Republic but also working with the Republic but not really because the Republic who won’t resist against the First Order.
Which, uh…huh? There are like four lines in TFA that try to get all this across. And, ultimately, they really just wanted to reset the galaxy back to where it was in A New Hope because “scrappy Rebels vs big bad Empire” is the only “real” Star Wars story they could think to tell. Now, I’m in the camp that TLJ rescued a bunch of the vague threads left out by TFA and set up the sequels to become its own interesting story that echoes the other movies without just repeating them. But then TROS…well…liked that repeating idea instead.
All of this is to say: would George’s version of these stories be better? Well, it would be more cohesive and thoughtful, for sure. But the execution might have been shakier. And I think that it’s good that people have come back around to embracing George and his approach to Star Wars in the wake of the sequels…but we should remember that Lucas was persona non grata to much of the public in the early 2010s after the prequels and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Instead of thinking “actual sequel trilogy vs. George’s,” the actual options were probably “actual sequel trilogy vs no more Skywalker saga.”