Señor Spielbergo

McFlabbergasty said:

@Spielbergo: I am struggling to figure out what character context is provided by re-using Padme Amidala's name. She's a more interesting character in your treatment, to be sure, but sometimes I catch myself thinking of your new Padme as having that same drab monotone and *total* lack of any personality quirks or emotion, like in the Lucas films ("important Senator and mother of Luke and Leia" doesn't count as a personality)...though that does not seem to be your intention.

I do respect your insistence on trying to accentuate the elements of the PT that you thought were cool, and then crafting other stuff to go with it.

My treatment, though...the one name it has in common with the Lucas PT is "Coruscant".

I can see that. Then again, the films are really about Anakin and Obi-Wan. If you get their characters right, Amidala's character can be improved simply by how she reacts to them. 

I think the line goes that story is action, character is reaction.

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

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.

It is a rewrite. IMHO, even if the characters are different, I'd rather not have to ingest a bunch of made-up names of characters and planets. I'm working around the source material, not completely throwing it out. Familiar character names are for convenience and context.

I hope you can get past your initial presumptions and give my treatment a second chance. I think you'll find that there's some intriguing ideas.

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

Excellent topic, guys. I have to admit, I've thought about it quite a bit myself. I've put my treatment for a re-write here: http://kinoflim.blogspot.com/2012/02/alternate-star-wars-prequels-first.html

I'd love any feedback.

Thanko.