Servii

SparkySywer said:

Add a framing device to the framing device of R2 telling Poe about the time he told Luke about the prequels.

That’s some big brain, Wes Anderson level filmmaking.

Digitally insert CGI Sy Snootles and Joh Yowza into the entire latter part of RotJ. After Jabba’s death, they jump ship together with our heroes and join the Rebellion in its strike on the Forest Moon. Also, the scene of Leia getting shot and Han telling her he loves her will have the actors replaced with Snootles and Yowza, respectively. And, in an emotional moment, Luke will reveal to Snootles that she is his long lost sister.

Instead of Yub Nub or Victory Celebration, Snootles and Yowza will give us a rowsing encore of Jedi Rocks as the film ends.

SparkySywer said:

I really think that they should loosen up on canon, or have multiple different continuities or something like that. Not in the same way as Marvel or DC, though. Maybe they should have no official canon, but a few continuity projects. I don’t know.

But with a fandom so big and so diverse as the Star Wars fandom, having one official continuity is an awful idea. I mean, for one, there might not have been such a poor reaction to the prequels or TLJ if they weren’t the only backstory for Darth Vader, or the only continuation of Luke’s story. If other people could try their hands at those stories, people wouldn’t care if this one particular one wasn’t right for them.

Especially if Lucasfilm wants to treat Star Wars like a modern mythology. There is technically a Sherlock Holmes canon, and a Robin Hood canon, and a King Arthur canon, but they don’t behave the same way that Star Wars’s canon does. They’re a central group of ideas and stories from which other stories radiate out from.

I like what you’re thinking. Really, what we have right now is the worst of both worlds. We have a bunch of content that’s all considered hard canon, yet is rife with contradictions. Either Star Wars should have an airtight canon, and if it can’t accomplish that (which it can’t), then it should open itself up fully to alternate interpretations and retellings, like actual myths and legends. That looser approach might even help bring some of that old fantasy element back to the franchise.

I like what you’re doing here. It looks like you’re creating a chronology using the OT as your basis. It’s a neat idea.

Were the Sith being persecuted by the Jedi or just the Republic in general?

I like the idea of Palpatine not being a Sith. He strikes me as someone who is so egotistical that he wouldn’t hold allegiance to any religion or culture at all. He would see himself as above that sort of thing.

To be honest, I’m not totally sure about the name “Xim the Despot.” Maybe something a little more grandiose sounding. I’d like to hear more about his character, though.

That’s an interesting choice to have the Calamari as the second most developed species. I don’t remember which species has that position in canon, but I had assumed it was something like the Muuns or the Bith. I’m not an expert on that, though.

They’ll keep doing soft reboots (I count TFA as a soft reboot), but I highly doubt a hard reboot or official multiverse will ever happen. They’ll just play around with different parts of the timeline. The traditional story structure and tropes will mostly remain the same, though. Some “new” Sith or offbrand Sith will emerge and the Jedi will be sparse or almost extinct, being still regarded as mythical figures of the past.

Well, that’s a shame. I had a suspicion it wouldn’t really be free to play.

Yeah, I suppose it could have just been a quick way to quietly subdue the guards. Perhaps there was no intent there to hint at the Dark Side for Luke. It’s just a moment that made me raise an eyebrow a bit.

It’s weird to have Mind Tricks as a Dark Side power, though. I figured the Dark Side equivalent of it would be something like the Imperius curse from Harry Potter: invading someone’s mind and taking away their free will completely.

I’m guessing that Lucasfilm will move away from numerical films in the future. I do think, eventually, we’ll get a set of films set in a post-TRoS galaxy (probably much further in the future) and those will basically be considered sequels to the Sequels, with the events of the nine episodes having all passed into legend. I’m betting the cast will be all new, but the story will likely fall into the same tired mold of “Dark Side rises again in some new form, heroes rise up to defeat it and restore balance.” The tone will probably start to move closer to the tone of the MCU, and the galaxy will be depicted as run down and fractured and Wild West-like rather than having a successful Republic.

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

How’s it going, theprequelsrule.

In a way, Luke is like the Clark Kent of Star Wars. He’s a paragon of virtue with a humble upbringing. Rey definitely had the potential to be a darker, more interesting character, since her backstory gave her basically the perfect recipe for the Dark Side. Someone with incredible Force potential and unwieldy power, abandoned by her parents, having no friends or family to fall back on, stuck on an impoverished planet all but abandoned by the Republic. She’s worse off than even Anakin was. Both Rey and Finn have troubled backstories that should drastically shape their personalities and worldviews, but they just act ordinary.

As for Luke’s risk of turning, I’d keep in mind that the criteria for falling to the Dark Side in the OT seemed much quicker and easier than it was in the prequels. According to Palpatine, all it would have taken for Luke to fall was just one act of murder, even killing someone who deserved to die, and the Dark would have consumed him. (So going by the OT’s rules, Anakin should have turned right after he murdered a whole village.) Being a Force user seemed like a much more difficult balancing act that an emotional young man like Luke could easily fail at.

Its going okay Servii! The point I was trying to make is that although we are told about how seductive the Darkside is, we are never really shown it. So it is sort of a failure, for me at least, to set up some sort of tension that Luke might become a bad guy. I never felt that way, even once, about Luke. The prequels could have shown us this - so that younger people who maybe saw the PT first would have the same worry about Luke. Am I being clear about what I mean?

Yeah, I get what you mean. Watching RotJ as a kid, I did genuinely feel scared that Luke might turn because of what Palpatine was saying to him, but watching as an adult, he really seems like the least likely character to actually fall. The only thing he has going against him are his attachments to his friends, but besides maybe his choking Jabba’s guards, there’s no real dark streak to him. He was always upstanding. And I love Luke for that, but it makes the danger of him falling more difficult to take seriously. That, and we really never got to see the Dark side’s corruption at work in any major way.

That’s interesting how Obi-Wan was intended to be older. It sort of reminds me of Aragorn. Ewan McGregor did a good job in the role, but it was an odd choice for George to cast someone so young.

I do wonder what George was picturing when he thought of the Clone Wars. I suppose he just came up with the name as a way of intriguing the audience with unseen backstory, giving us a sense of some crazy wars off in space back in the olden days of the Republic. And when the time came to write the prequels, he had to figure out what the term “Clone Wars” actually entailed. I doubt he intended back in the 70’s for the clones to be the army protecting the Republic. I do wonder, though, at what point he came up with the idea that the Clone Wars were orchestrated by the Emperor to gain power, since there’s nothing to suggest that in the OT. Maybe originally, the Clone Wars were just a series of conflicts unrelated to the rise of the Empire, which just happened to occur around the same time.

How’s it going, theprequelsrule.

In a way, Luke is like the Clark Kent of Star Wars. He’s a paragon of virtue with a humble upbringing. Rey definitely had the potential to be a darker, more interesting character, since her backstory gave her basically the perfect recipe for the Dark Side. Someone with incredible Force potential and unwieldy power, abandoned by her parents, having no friends or family to fall back on, stuck on an impoverished planet all but abandoned by the Republic. She’s worse off than even Anakin was. Both Rey and Finn have troubled backstories that should drastically shape their personalities and worldviews, but they just act ordinary.

As for Luke’s risk of turning, I’d keep in mind that the criteria for falling to the Dark Side in the OT seemed much quicker and easier than it was in the prequels. According to Palpatine, all it would have taken for Luke to fall was just one act of murder, even killing someone who deserved to die, and the Dark would have consumed him. (So going by the OT’s rules, Anakin should have turned right after he murdered a whole village.) Being a Force user seemed like a much more difficult balancing act that an emotional young man like Luke could easily fail at.

Smart man, that Tolkien.

I think part of the problem of the prequels is that they couldn’t commit to being one of two things. They could have been either:

a) A mature, political, character-driven story about the fall of democracy.

or

b) A fun, swashbuckling space adventure for kids

George had his basic outline for the fall of the Republic all the way back in the 70s and 80s. The original opening crawl for Star Wars was going to be much longer and more detailed about the political backstory of the galaxy. Lucas trimmed it down for the sake of streamlining the story and not overloading the audience with too much exposition at once.

So, when the time came to make the prequels, George had still kept that outline of a deeply political story in his head all those years, but now he wanted to make it a kid-friendly action romp with goofy aliens. So the prequels suffered an identity crisis where they tried to be both things at once.

George was definitely inspired by real world events and politics to a large degree. Not to the point of outright allegory, in my opinion, but enough for people to see allegory if they looked for it. I remember, when RotS was coming out, there was a news story suggesting that the film’s plot was a critique of the Bush administration. It’s interesting what people see when they want to.

JadedSkywalker said:

That was Rey being the new Luke, being the only one who thought Kylo could be redeemed.

Like Luke was the only one who believed Anakin could return from the darkside.

Rey was right by the way they won the war because Ben Solo was redeemed. He saved her from dying and traded his own life.

I guess you could complain they just recycled episodes IV-VI and the Disney movies offered nothing new.

Ben turning to the light restored the Balance.

Except Rey has only known Kylo for a few days. Vader was Luke’s father, and Luke knew Vader had once been that great Jedi and friend Obi-Wan told him about. Rey and Kylo have basically only just met, and the fact that her feelings toward him go from seething hatred to seemingly having feelings for him to the point that she’s willing to basically ship herself in a box to the First Order flagship to try to redeem some awful man she recently met is stretching my belief.

Simply, Rey is not Luke, despite the films treating her like she is, and I honestly think it’s a reductive treatment of her character. She has a different personality, different goals, and different relationships. Given the circumstances, Luke’s behavior towards Vader in RotJ is believable. Rey’s behavior towards Kylo is not.

Also, the fact that Luke saw no hope for redemption in his nephew, despite Kylo being much more openly conflicted than Vader, is not something I can believe. Neither is Luke trolling his nephew and deliberately trying to get a rise out of him rather than earnestly trying to talk him down.

I should stop.

Also, I find it really messed up that TLJ has Rey falling for the man who just put her best friend in a coma and slashed his spine. As far as Rey knows, Finn might still be in that coma, and she’s getting cozy with his attacker and lifelong oppressor without ever even bringing that up.

I’ll have to stop for now, but it was good talking with you.

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

I like you too. I definitely plan to keep checking back and posting regularly. It’s good to talk this stuff out with people in a place that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.

That’s really interesting to know about the 2001 books. I had never heard before about him saying that. That’s a great way to explore alternative stories branching from a single point of origin, and I would love to see Star Wars do something similar to that. I like to view the unaltered OT as existing in its own bubble of canon, while the Special Editions and the Prequels and Sequels are all off in a different timeline, essentially.

SW77 is partly my favorite because of how well it stands on its own. The franchise could have ended after one movie and it would still be considered one of the great science fantasy classics.

The issue I have with the ST is that they got the original staring actors back. It makes it tough to see them like that, you know? The PT did not have them so it is easier to dismiss.

Yeah, I know what you mean. They really wanted to give the ST this outward sense of legitimacy by bringing everybody back. It felt like the old gang was coming back together. Lucasfilm had one chance to reunite them and give them a worthy sendoff. They couldn’t afford to just “wing it” with the plot or settle for a mediocre story. If you’re going to continue the stories of those beloved characters post-RotJ, it had better be respectful to those characters, and it had better be worth people’s time. And I don’t think it was.

Michael Arndt struggled with the TFA script because it kept morphing into being about Luke! Disney did not want that - there was almost certainly a mandate to introduce new characters (especially a female protagonist) that younger people could “identify” with.

This is a classic case of a corporation underestimating it’s audience. You really think that a trailer featuring Luke, Han, Leia (even old) kicking ass and taking names would make younger people not want to see a NEW Star Wars? Luke Skywalker is cool because he has a lightsaber. Toy sales reflect this; the kids don’t want Rey and Finn toys.

The way I see it, if you write new characters that are compelling enough, then you wouldn’t have to worry about the OT characters overshadowing them. If the OT heroes keep having the spotlight gravitate back towards them in your script, then maybe that’s a sign you need to improve your new characters. It’s not that hard to have the audience care about new people while still getting a thrill out of seeing the old cast back in action. Just have Luke be a Dumbledore or Gandalf-like figure to a new generation of Jedi. It’s not that hard.

Agreed. Instead they just settled on rehashing the OT with Rey as Luke. So who cares? Been there. Done that. Now your main protagonist is the least interesting character. Oops.

Having Finn as the protagonist would have been much more interesting.

Absolutely. Finn was by far my favorite character in TFA. It’s a shame what they did to John Boyega. His character had so much potential. Plus, who better to fit the message of “Heroes can come from anywhere” than a former Stormtrooper?

What happened to Boyega?

I just mean the way they deliberately sidelined his character, in later drafts of TFA as well as in the next two sequels, after JJ initially cast him to be the male lead. There’s a great video that goes into detail about it by this guy called Okiro. The video’s called “Finn, the Lost Protagonist.”

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

I like you too. I definitely plan to keep checking back and posting regularly. It’s good to talk this stuff out with people in a place that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.

That’s really interesting to know about the 2001 books. I had never heard before about him saying that. That’s a great way to explore alternative stories branching from a single point of origin, and I would love to see Star Wars do something similar to that. I like to view the unaltered OT as existing in its own bubble of canon, while the Special Editions and the Prequels and Sequels are all off in a different timeline, essentially.

SW77 is partly my favorite because of how well it stands on its own. The franchise could have ended after one movie and it would still be considered one of the great science fantasy classics.

The issue I have with the ST is that they got the original staring actors back. It makes it tough to see them like that, you know? The PT did not have them so it is easier to dismiss.

Yeah, I know what you mean. They really wanted to give the ST this outward sense of legitimacy by bringing everybody back. It felt like the old gang was coming back together. Lucasfilm had one chance to reunite them and give them a worthy sendoff. They couldn’t afford to just “wing it” with the plot or settle for a mediocre story. If you’re going to continue the stories of those beloved characters post-RotJ, it had better be respectful to those characters, and it had better be worth people’s time. And I don’t think it was.

Michael Arndt struggled with the TFA script because it kept morphing into being about Luke! Disney did not want that - there was almost certainly a mandate to introduce new characters (especially a female protagonist) that younger people could “identify” with.

This is a classic case of a corporation underestimating it’s audience. You really think that a trailer featuring Luke, Han, Leia (even old) kicking ass and taking names would make younger people not want to see a NEW Star Wars? Luke Skywalker is cool because he has a lightsaber. Toy sales reflect this; the kids don’t want Rey and Finn toys.

The way I see it, if you write new characters that are compelling enough, then you wouldn’t have to worry about the OT characters overshadowing them. If the OT heroes keep having the spotlight gravitate back towards them in your script, then maybe that’s a sign you need to improve your new characters. It’s not that hard to have the audience care about new people while still getting a thrill out of seeing the old cast back in action. Just have Luke be a Dumbledore or Gandalf-like figure to a new generation of Jedi. It’s not that hard.

Agreed. Instead they just settled on rehashing the OT with Rey as Luke. So who cares? Been there. Done that. Now your main protagonist is the least interesting character. Oops.

Having Finn as the protagonist would have been much more interesting.

Absolutely. Finn was by far my favorite character in TFA. It’s a shame what they did to John Boyega. His character had so much potential. Plus, who better to fit the message of “Heroes can come from anywhere” than a former Stormtrooper?

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

I like you too. I definitely plan to keep checking back and posting regularly. It’s good to talk this stuff out with people in a place that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.

That’s really interesting to know about the 2001 books. I had never heard before about him saying that. That’s a great way to explore alternative stories branching from a single point of origin, and I would love to see Star Wars do something similar to that. I like to view the unaltered OT as existing in its own bubble of canon, while the Special Editions and the Prequels and Sequels are all off in a different timeline, essentially.

SW77 is partly my favorite because of how well it stands on its own. The franchise could have ended after one movie and it would still be considered one of the great science fantasy classics.

The issue I have with the ST is that they got the original staring actors back. It makes it tough to see them like that, you know? The PT did not have them so it is easier to dismiss.

Yeah, I know what you mean. They really wanted to give the ST this outward sense of legitimacy by bringing everybody back. It felt like the old gang was coming back together. Lucasfilm had one chance to reunite them and give them a worthy sendoff. They couldn’t afford to just “wing it” with the plot or settle for a mediocre story. If you’re going to continue the stories of those beloved characters post-RotJ, it had better be respectful to those characters, and it had better be worth people’s time. And I don’t think it was.

Michael Arndt struggled with the TFA script because it kept morphing into being about Luke! Disney did not want that - there was almost certainly a mandate to introduce new characters (especially a female protagonist) that younger people could “identify” with.

This is a classic case of a corporation underestimating it’s audience. You really think that a trailer featuring Luke, Han, Leia (even old) kicking ass and taking names would make younger people not want to see a NEW Star Wars? Luke Skywalker is cool because he has a lightsaber. Toy sales reflect this; the kids don’t want Rey and Finn toys.

The way I see it, if you write new characters that are compelling enough, then you wouldn’t have to worry about the OT characters overshadowing them. If the OT heroes keep having the spotlight gravitate back towards them in your script, then maybe that’s a sign you need to improve your new characters. It’s not that hard to have the audience care about new people while still getting a thrill out of seeing the old cast back in action. Just have Luke be a Dumbledore or Gandalf-like figure to a new generation of Jedi. It’s not that hard.

theprequelsrule said:

Servii said:

I like you too. I definitely plan to keep checking back and posting regularly. It’s good to talk this stuff out with people in a place that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.

That’s really interesting to know about the 2001 books. I had never heard before about him saying that. That’s a great way to explore alternative stories branching from a single point of origin, and I would love to see Star Wars do something similar to that. I like to view the unaltered OT as existing in its own bubble of canon, while the Special Editions and the Prequels and Sequels are all off in a different timeline, essentially.

SW77 is partly my favorite because of how well it stands on its own. The franchise could have ended after one movie and it would still be considered one of the great science fantasy classics.

The issue I have with the ST is that they got the original staring actors back. It makes it tough to see them like that, you know? The PT did not have them so it is easier to dismiss.

Yeah, I know what you mean. They really wanted to give the ST this outward sense of legitimacy by bringing everybody back. It felt like the old gang was coming back together. Lucasfilm had one chance to reunite them and give them a worthy sendoff. They couldn’t afford to just “wing it” with the plot or settle for a mediocre story. If you’re going to continue the stories of those beloved characters post-RotJ, it had better be respectful to those characters, and it had better be worth people’s time. And I don’t think it was.

I’ve made my peace with the prequels by tucking them into their own continuity with the SEs. I try not to think about the ST when watching the OT. It may have the same actors returning, but it no longer feels like proper Star Wars to me. Lucasfilm will try to double down and further cement the ST in canon through expanded material, but I don’t really care if they do anymore.

I like you too. I definitely plan to keep checking back and posting regularly. It’s good to talk this stuff out with people in a place that doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.

That’s really interesting to know about the 2001 books. I had never heard before about him saying that. That’s a great way to explore alternative stories branching from a single point of origin, and I would love to see Star Wars do something similar to that. I like to view the unaltered OT as existing in its own bubble of canon, while the Special Editions and the Prequels and Sequels are all off in a different timeline, essentially.

SW77 is partly my favorite because of how well it stands on its own. The franchise could have ended after one movie and it would still be considered one of the great science fantasy classics.

I always liked the idea of the 6 films being Anakin’s story, but after rewatching the OT, it became clear that that was never meant to be the case originally. If the prequels had been made first, the OT would have been written extremely differently, especially the character of Vader. Vader in ANH is not really at the center of the story. And there’s nothing in the OT to suggest that Vader is a child of prophecy. He was simply a powerful Jedi who betrayed the Order to the Empire, and also had a son and daughter that were hidden from him and the Emperor. His importance to the story came from his high ranking in the Empire, his status as a traitor to the Jedi Order, and his relationship to Luke. It was the prequels that tried to attach much greater importance to Anakin and to make him the center of the story and main character of the saga. But the Anakin we were given wasn’t strong enough to really fill that role. Even George himself at one point said that Vader was meant to be ultimately a pathetic character. A sickly, deformed man in a metallic suit who betrayed everything he’d once stood for and made enemies of his best friend and his own children. The prequels had a chance to make us sympathize with Anakin and help us feel pity for Vader, but I don’t think they did a very good job of that.

The 9-part saga feels very disjointed now, because the PT and ST both try to redefine the saga in ways that don’t line up with each other or the OT. Lucasfilm has tried to push the idea that the saga is about the Skywalker family as a whole, but in the end, they’re mostly irrelevant to the final outcome of Episode IX.

In terms of the actual physical fighting, I’d agree the ESB duel is better. Plus the whole atmosphere of the fight feels like something out of a horror movie, with Luke descending deeper and deeper into Hell throughout the fight until he can’t escape.

Personally, however, I prefer the RotJ duel because of what’s at stake in the moment. The scene isn’t really about the physical fight itself. It’s a spiritual battle between Light and Dark. The sword swinging is really just a backdrop to the struggle in both Luke and Anakin’s hearts against the absolute evil of the Emperor. And I always get chills when Luke shouts “Never!” and the chilling music starts. The choir that sings both during Luke’s outburst and when Anakin is about to save his son is really stunning.

In hindsight, I really wish the Anakin-Dooku fight in RotS had been able to rise to that same dramatic level. Anakin really has two pivotal moments in that movie where he starts his fall: killing Dooku, and stopping Mace from killing Palpatine. If I were a script doctor for the prequels, I probably would have tried to find a way to combine those two pivotal moments into one event, and tried to give that scene the same emotional gravity that Luke-Vader in RotJ had.

TLJ Luke would have been fine if it was an alternate timeline/interpretation of the character, rather than being labelled as the definitive, hard canon Luke. The Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ was very controversial among Christians for its depiction of a flawed, confused, very human Jesus. But the film goes out of its way to make clear to the audience that its an alternate interpretation of Jesus as a way of exploring deeper concepts through the character. The film doesn’t claim to offer the definitive, most Biblically accurate version of Jesus that everyone must accept as canon. It’s just one director’s hypothetical take on the character in a standalone film. The divisive reaction to that movie reminds me a lot of the divisive reaction to Luke in TLJ. But the difference is that TLJ is a sequel, and it leaves no alternative versions available. It’s been set in stone as the official canon fate of Luke Skywalker. That’s a big part of why so many people have rejected that version of Luke.

In theory, many of the Special Edition changes are fine. The problem is just that they are poorly implemented and that the mid 90’s CGI has aged so badly. If there was any time that Lucas should have made and released the Special Editions, it should have been after the prequels were made instead of before, with the original version of the OT ideally being shown in theaters a year or so before TPM as a sort of recap.

Each trilogy is best treated as its own complete story rather than lumping them all together as a Saga that often contradicts itself with very different creative visions. (Even young George Lucas and old George Lucas aren’t really in accord with one another on a lot of things.)

Lucasfilm should loosen its approach to canon, so that the franchise can be treated as more of a loose mythology rather than a definite sequence of hard canon events. In fact, it might be a good idea to bring back the idea of “levels of canon” like we had with the old EU.

TFA was honestly almost painful for me to sit through. Partly because I dislike JJ Abrams’ frenetic directing style, and partly because the film felt so transparent. It was a carefully crafted recreation of Star Wars, like a theme park ride, but it never felt like a true sequel to RotJ. So many of the creative choices in TFA only make sense from a meta perspective, not an in-universe perspective. And the film couldn’t justify its own existence, nor could it justify its undoing of RotJ’s happy ending.

TLJ was definitely a more intriguing film to watch and analyze. I don’t like the film, but it felt more genuine and less corporate than TFA. TFA had Bob Iger’s fingerprints all over it. TLJ felt like Rian was really trying something more meaningful. I don’t think he succeeded, but the effort was apparent. I do think that fan edits can help TLJ a great deal to work as a coda of sorts, if much of the filler and bloat were removed and it was cut down to just Ahch-To, the Supremacy, and Crait. All in all, it’s definitely the most worth watching of the trilogy.

fmalover said:

My unpopular opinion on the ST: TLJ will be redeemed by the passage of time and stand out as the only worthwhile entry of the ST.

I’ve heard quite a few fans express a similar opinion. It will certainly be the most remembered and discussed (and argued about) of the three in the future. TRoS, on the other hand, will age like milk as just another forgettable holiday blockbuster. Still, there’s the issue that TLJ is the middle film of a trilogy and picks up right where TFA leaves off with its characters, so it can’t really stand on its own.

Also, I think that the original version of the celebration scene is edited better than the new version. The Special Edition cuts back and forth a lot more and doesn’t focus on the characters for as long, while the original version has more lingering shots that let you feel more present in the moment. On top of that, the way the shots of the ghosts are edited was made a lot more awkward and abrupt, in my opinion, while the original version takes its time more with that moment and doesn’t rush it.

If he had been given more creative control, Lawrence Kasdan would have ruined RotJ. Kasdan is a better dialogue writer than Lucas, but ultimately, Lucas was always bound to understand his own story better, and he was right to stick to his guns on giving RotJ a happy ending rather than the darker one Kasdan wanted. (Kasdan always seemed to have a more grimdark, bleaker vision for Star Wars than Lucas did, and I think a lot of the choices made in TFA reflect that.)

Rogue One was probably better before the reshoots. The reshot ending was most likely conceived based on “rule of cool” and doesn’t really line up with ANH. I suspect the original ending was more consistent and thought out, only being changed at the last minute to make it “punchier.”

The sequel trilogy won’t age well. Partly because it lacks a distinct identity and tries too hard to be just a modernized version of the OT. Also, if the poor toy/merch sales for ST characters and content are any indication, it hasn’t captured the attention of a new generation to the same degree that the first two trilogies did (OT, PT, and Mando-themed toys are all selling great, by comparison). The ST started with a very strong first impression because of the novelty of seeing a more old-fashioned Star Wars movie again, but it will lack long-term staying power.

Also, I want to make an amendment to my earlier take about how Han should have died during the freezing process. Having thought about it, I realize now that would’ve been a mistake as well, since Luke and Leia would never have forgiven Lando if he had caused Han’s death. Taking part in rescuing Han was what redeemed Lando in the eyes of the other characters. So, basically, there wasn’t really any good window of opportunity to kill Han, and I’m glad he survived.