Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Bingowings said:
That's what Star Trek is meant to be for.Exploring an expanding universe.
Star Wars is space opera.
It's conflict focussed on a series of characters who are to some degree related to each other (like real Earth Opera without the singing).
No. The 1-2-3-4-5-6 "saga" is a space opera. More specifically, the 4-5-6 sub-segment is a pretty good space opera, and the 1-2-3 sub-segment is a crappy space opera.
BUT, in my personal opinion, Star Wars (SW-the movie- the movie subsequently known as IV, to use "Prince" lingo) is an expanding universe, told through the eyes of a boy. That's what made it so intriguing. It started becoming an opera in ESB, but it still had the expanding universe feel - particularly with the travel to meet Yoda, the exotic new planets, etc - heck we didn't even revisit Tatooine!
It was the conversion to a full-blown saga/opera when things started falling apart, and ultimately became boring and crappy. Star Wars needs to get back to what made it great.
Really?
To me Star Wars (1977) is the least Luke centred film of the whole OT.
The first characters we meet are the droids, then Vader, then Leia it's ages before we meet Luke and he is pulled into the story by the droids and Leia to Ben who makes the quest personal by underlining how horrible Vader is by telling him he killed Luke's father.
The locations are telegraphed throughout the film.
The Death Star and the Rebel base are mentioned in the opening crawl.
Tatooine is in the opening frame and Alderaan is mentioned in the first few minutes.
It's a great film but it's not about exploring places.
It's about exploring the networked connections of a small group of people.
The scenery is epic but the saga could very easily be transplanted into a soap opera (owing what story it does have to courtly mannered stage plays of the sort Shakespeare pinched ideas from Sophocles to write).
Star Trek is more like Homer.
You have a defined group of characters who come from a stable republic who journey from one savage land to another and we learn more about the crew through how these strange new worlds change them.