xhonzi said:
Señor Spielbergo said:
I've just written a treatment. It's here for all to read: http://kinoflim.blogspot.com/2012/02/alternate-star-wars-prequels-first.html
Truth be told, as soon as I read Maul, I almost bailed. And then I read Amidala and I totally bailed.
I started to take a look and liked the intro, but I have to offer the same advice I've offered many times before.
Offered many times before:
Please, for the love of Mike, don't reuse Prequel specific names!
Especially when the entire character has been changed. It is so very distracting.
Also, many people will be reading your work to forget the offical Prequels, so don't jump right in and remind them of them.
I think we can all agree that the problems with Lucas's PT wasn't that there weren't enough new places and characters, but that all the fundamentals were done poorly. Nobody came in anticipating Dooku, Gungans, Battle Droids, The Trade Federation or any of that. We came in expecting to see and have answered that short list of things we know from the OT that I include in my preface. We wanted to know about Obi-Wan, Anakin, and the Empire.
That being said, I am tackling my version from a film-critical perspective. We need a name for our villain, so I give it as Maul. We know Luke and Leia have a mother, so I name her Amidala. These names weren't the problems in the PT. Their characters' flatness and poor motivation was. If I had known how much PT-SD (see what I did there?) there exists from PT names, I wouldn't have named the Vice Lord of the Exchequer Jar-Jar Binks (<-- this is a joke).
I also think it's slightly arrogant to automatically throw out everything Lucas did in the PT (except for Jar Jar). He had some good ideas, but they mostly got lost in the noise.
So, for example, we know from ANH that Anakin and Obi-Wan fought for an idealistic crusade in the Clone Wars. So in my interpretation, I write the clones as slaves grown in the Outer Rim territories. The Clone Wars are the Republic's crusade to abolish this practice, which is something Obi-Wan and Anakin can believe in idealistically. I also write Palpatine as emerging onto the scene as a mutated slave clone that first helps the Republic eradicate slavery and whose mistreatment eventually leads him to become corrupted by power.
If you can, read it while in your mind you substituting the offending names with others. I hope you do. However, I'm leaving the PT names that I've used so that other film nerds like myself can have context while reading my blog.
http://kinoflim.blogspot.com/2012/02/alternate-star-wars-prequels-first.html