yotsuya

SilverWook said:

IIRC, Lucas was trying to differentiate Star Wars from hard science fiction, like 2001. Magazines like Cinefantastique took issue with the term, possibly because they felt the movie was a step backwards from THX-1138.

Flash Gordon is definitely space opera, and we all know Lucas originally wanted to make an FG movie, but couldn’t get the rights.

Yes, while Flash Gordon predates the term, it definitely is. In fact, according to Wikipedia, Star Wars is considered a space opera. It came as part of a movement in the 70’s that asserted that space opera was not just the old stuff, but was still being produced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera

And being in the writing and publishing business, one of the things I have spent a lot of time on is what is a genre and how to define it. Part of that is sticking to what is in use and not inventing your own. Book sellers don’t want new genres, there are enough already. Unless that new genre comes with something very popular and can sell books. Science Fiction and Fantasy are pretty stuck. Even the Vampire craze has been confined to the urban fantasy genre title.

Currently Amazon has no genre called Space Fantasy. Star Wars is listed under Space Opera, which is under science fiction.

DominicCobb said:

yotsuya said:

And the difference between science fiction and fantasy can be summed up by Arthur C. Clarke himself. Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear a magic. Soft science fiction leans toward assuming we will find those advances and tries to not explain them very clearly (often not explaining typical tropes at all). When the tech is low and you still have magic, that is when you have fantasy. That is the line between science fiction and fantasy. If you provide tech to do the things that seem magic or provide even a quasi scientific explanation for it, it is science fiction. If there is some mystical source of the power - some deity usually - then you have fantasy.

Even by your arbitrary definition, Star Wars is still fantasy. The only time in the films provide a “quasi scientific explanation” for the force is TPM, and it’s no surprise that that’s one of the things people hate the most about that film.

You can split hairs any way you like, but the fact of the matter is simple. Star Wars does not care about how tech works. It never has. How does a lightsaber work? Oh, a crystal of course. A fucking magic crystal. The laws of space physics are completely irrelevant. It’s not just ‘sound in space,’ it’s how the ships move, it’s how an asteroid field is dangerous to traverse when in reality it never would be, it’s how long it takes to get from place to place, and yes, it’s whether or not you can see a beam shoot across the galaxy. When a new piece of tech arrives in the Star Wars universe, checking to see if it fits into how things work in reality is the exact wrong way to do it. Whether you think it’s fantasy or not (it is), you cannot disagree that is is a significantly fantastical world, where tech and physics follow a fundamentally fantastical set of rules.

Ben called it an energy field. Try finding that term in fantasy. That is an SF quasi scientific description.

Most space operas don’t care how things work. Most things just work. Read some of the classic space operas. Does Isaac Asimov ever explain how a force field belt can have an atomic power unit the size of an almond? No. Does he explain how the force field works? How it covers the body while not extending to other things? No. That is space opera - a long standing and respected genre of science fiction, not fantasy. You are looking at this through the eyes of hard fantasy. For many of those writers/readers/fans, most things that are called science fiction are fantasy, but theirs is the minority opinion. Fantasy doesn’t claim it, science fiction does. And in truth, both are part of the larger speculative fiction genre and share many of the same awards. Both came from the old romance adventures, such as Ivanhoe. Science fiction just introduced science to the mix and was pioneered by many as far back as Cyrano de Bergerac, then Mary Shelly, and most famously Jules Verne - considered the father of modern science fiction. Fantasy was born out of the Arthurian legends and then exploded after The Hobbit. But the big difference is science and technology vs. magic and myth. Star Wars falls on the science and technology side and is not claimed by the fantasy side at all. Where is the magic? If you say the Force and the Jedi, you aren’t up on what cuts it as magic. As early as 1977, Lucas had Ben explain it away. Yoda further explained it away. As simple as that may see, that is more than Tolkien ever did. Magic needs no source or if it does, it has a source that science can’t explain. But the distinction between science fiction and fantasy is magic vs. science and there is way too much science in Star Wars for it to be fantasy. It isn’t hard fantasy by any stretch, but it is soft fantasy - specifically space opera.

The real point is that science fantasy isn’t a modern genre term. It is not in use at all. It is championed by some hard science fiction people, but most of the science fiction publishers and writers put out soft science fiction that is very similar to Star Wars. Some people have called out Star Trek as science fiction while saying Star Wars is science fantasy. Sorry, but they are the same. While the stories they tell have some differences, both rely on the same tropes. Sound in space, telepathy, telekinesis, instantaneous intergalactic communication, faster than light travel, artificial gravity. energy weapons with visible beams, people shooting lightning out of their hands, people controlling other people, robots, questionable science (at times Star Trek has been better, but when they aren’t they are worse than Star Wars). In fact, Star Trek features beings who could beat any Jedi or Sith with little effort. Some of the beings featured on the original and next gen were so powerful they really couldn’t be beat. Not by force anyway. So there is no more magic in Star Wars than there is in Star Trek. Are they both science fantasy? Well, the proper genre term is space opera. Has been for 70 years. (Space Opera - a novel, movie, or television program set in outer space, typically of a simplistic and melodramatic nature.)

OutboundFlight said:

yotsuya said:

OutboundFlight said:

In A New Hope, all of a sudden there was sound in space.

Not the first SF film to do that.

Fair, but it still contradicts real life. Therefore, star wars physics is not equal to real life physics. So you can’t say SKB contradicts star wars physics, unless at some point in the franchise they say "it is impossible for a red planet destroying beam to be seen throughout the galaxy. > >

In Empire, all of a sudden you could fly to other planets without the need of hyperspace.

Not the first SF film to do that. Besides, if you consider each system named to be a planetary system rather than a star system, all those planets could easily be circling the same star and no laws of physics are broken.

But that’s not the case: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bespin_system. According to Wikipedia, Bespin and Hoth are three systems away, which is impossible to reach at regular speed.

In Return of the Jedi, all of a sudden a moon sized space station can be flown through under the span of a couple minutes, besting even an explosion.

They aren’t flying faster than light so what’s your point?

The Death Star 2 is 200 kilometers in width, about 100 to the center. How does a ship fly through all that in a couple minutes? It’d have to be very fast, and in that case crash into something.

In The Phantom Menace, all of a sudden every star system in the galaxy could meet in one room.

This is just silly - not SF at all and not the first council of many civilizations seen.

A New Hope stated there were thousands of worlds under the Empire’s rule, and that fear will keep the local systems in line. That means all the tiny local systems must all be present at the senate meetings, and that is just impossible given what we were shown.

In Clones, all of a sudden you can erase the existence of a planet and no one will notice.

Well, as this was just in the Jedi Archives, this is hardly SF related in any way.

So no one in the Jedi Order didn’t stop and think "hey wasn’t there a planet here? Or just go on the regular republic database and notice a planet?

In Sith, all of a sudden the galaxy will just unanimously join a new Empire led by a scary guy making contradictory claims despite a prior civil war having just ended.

Now you are stretching things. It is based on 1930’s Germany and many other countries that have let a dictator/emperor take over.

Right after the CIS finally surrenders and joins back to the Republic, they notice exactly what they feared was going to happen and just roll with it? If they went into action beforehand why not now? This is like if a bunch of German Socialists rebelled against Weimer but then just didn’t care when the Nazis rose to power.

Star Wars physics have been contradicting themselves since day one.

Well, as a lot of those had nothing to do with physics, that really isn’t a point. Shall we talk about how Star Trek constantly broke the laws of physics? Don’t pretend any hollywood SF franchise or film was truly faithful to physics. They take short cuts and break the rules all the time. Constantly. That does not make Star Wars some other genre besides science fiction. But even so, most do a pretty good job of not being too obvious or providing some in-universe explanation to gloss over the errors. TFA didn’t even bother to do that.

Umm… Star Trek redesigned their species for the sake of looking cooler. If they changed the look of Chewbacca and the Wookies in Ep 7 I think JJ. Abrams would have been assassinated by the purist Star Wars Fandom.

My point with this is to bring up that the PT and to an extent the OT are just as guilty as the ST is. Would you have preferred if Finn and Rey had not seen Starkiller, and someone just tell them instead? There’s a little thing called show, don’t tell, which people love to say about TLJ but criticize TFA for accomplishing.

A system is never defined in any Star Wars film. 3 systems away means nothing unless you know what system refers to. It is like sector or quadrant. Either you use a standard term of measure or you define it. Sure, most people assume system means star system, but that is never explicitly stated and you can use that to refer to a planetary system as well, such as Jupiter and its moons.

And I’m still confused by why you think a gathering of all the senators of the republic must have a representative from every planet present. The US Senate has two representatives from every state, but our states are a political construct and we don’t have representatives from every city, town, or village. Just what the political constructs are that a senator represents is never indicated so there is no reason to think that the meeting is impossible. Plus we never see the entire senate chamber, only from a certain level down, so we don’t know how vast it is. The building is quite large on the outside so there could be a lot more than you are seeing.

And your complaint about how fast the Falcon exits the Death Star is a bit unfounded. If you go by screen time, they exit in 40 seconds. Based on the 160 km diameter of Death Star 2, that works out to be about 4500 miles an hour. Or about twice as fast as the SR-71. That is assuming it isn’t time compressed for drama. That also works out to be about 1/4 escape velocity for and Earth sized planet. So not all that fast.

My point is that your list of complaints is not a valid list of breaking the laws of physics. The parts that break the laws of physics lie in instantaneous holographic communication across the galaxy, hyperspace travel, telepathy, telekinesis, calling something that can be seen moving a laser, calling it a laser sword, ships flying though space like they fly through air, sound in space, and the list goes on and on. But none of these is unusual in soft science fiction. They are the norm. Star Trek did most of these first (except flying through space like flying through air - they skipped that one as well as light sabers). It is obvious that a lot of of the science gaffs in Star Wars can be fixed by terminology. Blasters do not fire lasers, but bolts of glowing plasma. TFA pretty much establishes that the word system does not refer to a solar system but a planetary system (fixing the gaff in TESB). Isaac Asimov even came up with a propulsion system that would explain the way ships fly - gravitic propulsion. Definitely not hard science fiction, but he used it in his later novels. It is also consistent with the use of anti and artificial gravity in the Star Wars universe.

The difference in some of these can be clearly differentiated by watching Babylon 5. The Earth tech is very much in keeping with hard science fiction. Rotation for gravity, fighters that obey the laws of physics in combat. But the aliens who are more advanced have the typical soft science fiction tech of FTL via hyperspace, artificial gravity, powerful energy weapons, etc.

And the difference between science fiction and fantasy can be summed up by Arthur C. Clarke himself. Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear a magic. Soft science fiction leans toward assuming we will find those advances and tries to not explain them very clearly (often not explaining typical tropes at all). When the tech is low and you still have magic, that is when you have fantasy. That is the line between science fiction and fantasy. If you provide tech to do the things that seem magic or provide even a quasi scientific explanation for it, it is science fiction. If there is some mystical source of the power - some deity usually - then you have fantasy. Lucas gave us a quasi scientific explanation for the force in 1977. He dredged up an out of date genre description that everyone in the science fiction entertainment industry ignored because what he created is space opera. Not space fantasy, but space opera. It amounts to the same thing and it is firmly science fiction, not fantasy. I’ve read some of the stuff that actually crosses the SF/Fantasy genre line and Star Wars is way to the SF side of that line.

This idea that it must be realistic to be science fiction is laughed at by science fiction writers, most of whom write soft science fiction. Only hard science fiction authors and fans make the claim that space opera is more fantasy than science fiction. Hard science fiction is only about 10% of the entire science fiction side. And the fantasy people laugh and say that it has spaceships so it isn’t fantasy.

Anyway, end of discussion here I think. I made a new thread if anyone cares to continue this conversation.
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Science-Fiction-or-Space-Fantasy-what-is-Star-Wars/id/62732

This is to continue a conversation that started in the ranking thread. Lucas called Star Wars Space Fantasy, but that is not a current genre of science fiction or fantasy, so what is it really. Does the force and lightsabers and the weak science make it fantasy, or does it fall in line with classic science fiction tropes and belong in Space Opera? Share your opinion.

Anakin Starkiller said:

Science fantasy is an oxymoron. Star Wars is fantasy. Space fantasy if you want to be specific. The problem is people tend to equate fantasy to the past and sci-fi to the future, and see them as otherwise interchangeable. In reality, sci-fi is more like a historical story set in the future. It’s supposed to be believable as something that could happen in our world.

That is the definition of Hard Science Fiction. Most science fiction does not fit that definition. Arthur Clarke wrote hard science fiction. Isaac Asimov wrote what gets called soft science fiction. The distinction is scientific accuracy vs. science inspired. All of Lucas’s inspirations in the science fiction genre are soft science fiction (Dune, Foundation, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon). The emphasis is not on science but on using what science can project to tell a story of adventure. Lucas sets his as a fable by placing it a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, but he is not the first to do that or the only one.

DominicCobb said:

yotsuya said:

snooker said:

It’s not sci fi! Just because it shares elements of the genre doesn’t mean it’s sci fi!

I’d suggest moving this argument to a different thread.

Starting it elsewhere might be good, but if you do, I challenge you to name one aspect of Star Wars that can’t be found in something clearly acknowledged as science fiction. Find one thing. I’ve read science ficton that goes back to the 30’s and you can’t do it because everything Lucas did has been done before in science fiction. Everything.

I don’t think you’re looking at it the right way at all. We’re talking about a genre here. A genre is more than just a collection of components that are found in the story, it’s how the story is told.

Not to mention, if I said “look at Braveheart and tell me one thing it does that can’t be found in Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings,” that doesn’t make Braveheart a fantasy film. There’s a lot of things that sci-fi does that SW doesn’t.

Well, as both science fiction and fantasy were born from the old Romance (not to be confused with the modern Romance genre) tales, the flaw is not in the way I am looking at it. Science fiction and fantasy are part of a larger genre called speculative fiction. They share a huge amount, especially in how they tell the stories. What has become known as Space Opera is virtually the same as epic fantasy except for the science/magic aspects being interchanged. Experts at genre classification label Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, Foundation, Babylon 5, Stargate, Doctor Who and John Carter of Mars as Space Opera. It involves long, epic tales, magic with a scientific explanation, faster than light travel, and many other tropes. It is what makes good movies and TV. Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings are Epic fantasy which has the exact same type of story telling. Space Opera by its nature contains many implausible things that have, in that universe, been found to work. Faster than light travel and teleportation are two of the biggest with telepathy and telekinesis not far behind. Artificial gravity being another.

This is different from urban fantasy, high fantasy, fairy tales, dark fantasy, gothic fiction, hard science fiction, cyberpunk, dystopian, alien invasion, or the true crossovers between fantasy and science fiction. Lucas made up Space Fantasy in 1977. Star Wars is space opera. It fits that sub-genre of science fiction in every single way, from the tropes to the story telling. I think Lucas was trying to say Star Wars was different, but as it turns out, he is very much a copy cat and nearly everything he included, especially in OT, was borrowed from one of the pillars of science fiction. He added campbell’s heroes journey and mixed in some samurai (neither of which have nothing to do with fantasy). But plenty of science fiction is based on retelling those ancient legends from which Campbell drew his theories. The place you will find reference to a space fantasy is Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series (John Carter), but that is an old genre category before any of the modern categories were defined. Lucas may have dredged up the old label, but in modern genre classification the Barsoom series is Space Opera. Hard science fiction purists like Arthur Clarke claim that all Space Opera (see the list above and he specifically cited Star Trek) is space fantasy. But the problem is that fantasy doesn’t claim those stories and rejects them as fantasy because they don’t fit. But when you look at the big names of science fiction, you find space opera after space opera. They are the stories that capture the imagination and sell books. And there is a real crossover area where you have science and magic (not explained away with science) in the same stories that borrow from both fantasy and science fiction and merge the two. Star Wars doesn’t fit that category at all.

So if you must insist on calling Star Wars Space Fantasy, that is a sub-sub-genre of Space Opera which is a sub-genre of Science Fiction, not fantasy. That is where Star Wars fits in the slew of genres and sub-genres. The key is in Star Wars itself when Ben talks of the force. He calls it an energy field created by all living things. Fantasy would never use the phrase “energy field”, but science fiction would. That is a classic Space Opera explanation of something that is beyond science.

snooker said:

It’s not sci fi! Just because it shares elements of the genre doesn’t mean it’s sci fi!

I’d suggest moving this argument to a different thread.

Starting it elsewhere might be good, but if you do, I challenge you to name one aspect of Star Wars that can’t be found in something clearly acknowledged as science fiction. Find one thing. I’ve read science ficton that goes back to the 30’s and you can’t do it because everything Lucas did has been done before in science fiction. Everything.

OutboundFlight said:

In A New Hope, all of a sudden there was sound in space.

Not the first SF film to do that.

In Empire, all of a sudden you could fly to other planets without the need of hyperspace.

Not the first SF film to do that. Besides, if you consider each system named to be a planetary system rather than a star system, all those planets could easily be circling the same star and no laws of physics are broken.

In Return of the Jedi, all of a sudden a moon sized space station can be flown through under the span of a couple minutes, besting even an explosion.

They aren’t flying faster than light so what’s your point?

In The Phantom Menace, all of a sudden every star system in the galaxy could meet in one room.

This is just silly - not SF at all and not the first council of many civilizations seen.

In Clones, all of a sudden you can erase the existence of a planet and no one will notice.

Well, as this was just in the Jedi Archives, this is hardly SF related in any way.

In Sith, all of a sudden the galaxy will just unanimously join a new Empire led by a scary guy making contradictory claims despite a prior civil war having just ended.

Now you are stretching things. It is based on 1930’s Germany and many other countries that have let a dictator/emperor take over.

Star Wars physics have been contradicting themselves since day one.

Well, as a lot of those had nothing to do with physics, that really isn’t a point. Shall we talk about how Star Trek constantly broke the laws of physics? Don’t pretend any hollywood SF franchise or film was truly faithful to physics. They take short cuts and break the rules all the time. Constantly. That does not make Star Wars some other genre besides science fiction. But even so, most do a pretty good job of not being too obvious or providing some in-universe explanation to gloss over the errors. TFA didn’t even bother to do that.

Besides, that is just the worst of Abrams many failings in TFA that I feel eclipse those of Lucas in the prequels. Lucas’s main failings were in dialog and directing actor. Abrams main failings are in story and editing and that is far more serious as far as I’m concerned.

snooker said:

Yeah, Star Wars is Sci-Fantasy. It has more in common with The Hobbit than it does with Star Trek (in terms of theming and ‘realism’).

Star Wars isn’t realistic, nor is it trying to be realistic.

Name me one force power that Gary Mitchell didn’t use in the 2nd Star Trek pilot. And if not him, some other seemingly humanoid being in another episodes. Star Trek is no more realistic than Star Wars. not one bit. The stories differ with Star Trek being based on a variety of topics, from current issues to myths while Star Wars was based on some other very classic SF franchises, Samurai movies, and Cambell’s Heroes’ Journey.

And if you recall how much magic is in The Hobbit, there isn’t much. Most of the story is just a good, down to earth adventure. While Gandalf is a wizard, he much display his power in The Hobbit. Most of what he does is on display in Lord of the Rings so your argument doesn’t really hold up. Gary Mitchell used more powers in one Star Trek Episode than Gandalf does in the entire series.

The fantasy genre is based on magic. Science fiction is based on science. Typically you get horses or space ships, wizards or telepaths. Star Wars has as much science in it as Dune (which a lot of Star Wars was based on).

Now many may be confusing the narrower sub-genre of hard science fiction for science fiction in general. In hard science fiction everything must be scientifically possible, but the wider spectrum of science fiction does not follow those rules. It doesn’t now and it never has. Hard science fiction does not include faster than light travel, laser swords, telepathy, telekinesis, transporters, or anything that isn’t solid science. The rest of the field, which is the majority, doesn’t care and will include whatever the writer wants to make the story work. Lucas thought he was being clever by inventing the name space fantasy, but what he created in Star Wars is just part of the overall science fiction genre. Most people ignore his label and file it under science fiction. After all, people with telepathy and telekinesis are a standard trope of science fiction, as are princesses, pirates, farm boys, laser guns, space ships, hyperspace, galactic empires, and strange aliens. The lightsaber was a new one, but not totally original. Just about everything in the saga was borrowed from either myths (a favorite source for science fiction stories) or other science fiction franchises. Well, some history as well, but again, a favorite source for science fiction stories. Nothing in Star Wars can’t be found in a thousand other science fiction stories.

I have an extensive background in science fiction. I have read most of the great masters of the mid 20th century. I have read Dune, Foundation, watched Star Trek, and there is absolutely nothing in Star Wars that isn’t in classic science fiction. The Force is not fantasy, it is science fiction. Not so different from Paul Attredies or The Mule or Gary Mitchell. There is no genre called space fantasy. That is something Lucas made up and what he created fits snugly into science fiction as it was written at that time. And he knew it.

I am quite aware of that. I’m also aware not all costumes and props are identical. Not all the information from the R2 builder’s club is accurate. In one of my conversations with one person, I was told in AHN R2’s blue panels should be dark purple - always. And while I do think the first ones were painted as they say, in the bright sunlight it washed the purple out and it was very blue. There are some shots in ANH where the sun makes them almost royal blue. So if you make R2 completely consistent throughout the film, you’d get it wrong. Ben’s brown cloak seems almost gray at times on Tatooine, but in Mos Eisley and on the Death Star it is dark brown (as in the costume photo above). So you have different costumes and different lighting and the variations are endless.

In the scene we have been discussing, I think it is more important to get the hard colors right - the rocks, dirt, and flesh tones. I think R2’s blue panels should be dark and lean to the purple side, Ben’s cloak to the gray side, and Luke’s pants should have a slight green cast, but those aren’t as important.

And anyone should know that if you don’t own something and it isn’t available any longer, ebay is a good source. I got my UK 2 disc DVD sets that way. But I bough the 2004 DVD, the 2006 US DVD, the 2011 Blu-ray 9 disc set, and the newer Blu-ray/DVD trilogy box sets (I wanted the 5.1 mix off the DVD’s).

Colors are odd things. But thankfully there is solid evidence for the more puprle tone to R2 in ANH. I took this pic at the costume exhibit in Denver. At least one of the R2 costumes/props, was very purple, as you can see from the eye surround in the middle.

I took a lot of pictures with color correcting the films in mind.

Not a lot from ANH, but a few. And they put forward a single costume as representative while one exhibit showed just how many version of Obi-wan’s costumer there were for ROTS. So while I think Red Leader only had the one helmet, there were many R2 costumes/props and I’m sure multiple version of Ben’s costume and I think I heard there were 2 for Chewy.

Possessed said:

RogueLeader said:

But the better answer is that it’s just Star Wars, the same galaxy where starships fly like there is air friction, where you can hear sound in space, and giant worms live in asteroids. Did I forget to mention the space wizards with laser swords?

It’s this

Is it? It shows a lack of background in science fiction and what the genre covers. Sure, they bend the laws of physics all the time, but the thing you don’t do is throw it in the audiences faces. Lucas managed to do that in 6 consecutive films. Abrams comes in and breaks that cardinal rule right off. The glaring issues with the final cut of the film are why I rank TFA last - below ATOC. It is such an basic rule of filmmaking in the science fiction genre.

NeverarGreat said:

yotsuya said:

Anakin Starkiller said:

yotsuya said:

MalàStrana said:

For myself I would say I don’t hate any of them and I would, some day, rewatch every single one of them, but I can’t pretend that I like TPM, AOTC, R1, Solo, TFA… (I like some of them when propertly fan edited though) I can enjoy them, find qualities, rewatch a few sequences and be glad to see the “SW soul” supplement in them compared to the average blockbuster, but I honestly don’t like all of them. As a whole, it’s different, and maybe the “I-IX” experience may give the Saga something more as a complete movement than what just separate entries do.

ATOC and TFA are the only ones I did not fully enjoy on my first viewing. Both have segments that just took me right out of the film and derailed the story for me and I have never been able to recover from that. Both need a good fan edit (I would do it very lightly with as few changes as possible) to bring them up to the nearest stories. I cannot say I hate any of them, but those two I have the most profound issues with. Though in contemplating it, one of my issues with TFA has led to a personal retcon that solves a lot of issues for the entire Star Wars universe. Still, it would be a better movie if that was not needed. And the sections of ATOC are just bad and need to be axed.

Indeed AotC’s bad bits, while pretty bad, are relatively harmless. It doesn’t uproot the story or universe. It’s just bad scenes and/or dialogue that can easily be cut. It’s not the same as the problems some people have with TLJ or that I have with RotJ that come from taking the saga in an infuriatingly terrible direction. Granted, some of the problems are also the sort of harmless, easily removed, stuff with no implications down the line, like AotC, which just makes them even worse.

Out of curiosity, what is the headcanon you mentioned concerning TFA?

Both TFA and TESB have some issues with the use of the word system. Take it as it is typically meant, that of a star system, and both those movies are derailed by science. But if you take that to be a planetary system (a planet and its moons) you can have the Millennium Falcon fly from Hoth to Bespin in a reasonable amount of time and you can have the people on Takodana watch the destruction of the Hosnian system without it being completely impossible. But even in the same system, watching the destruction of the Hosnian system stretches believably too far for me.

That would mean a weapon designed to destroy an entire system is actually not destroying the entire system, and also begging the question of why a pirate hideout is right next door to the Republic capital.

Well, first off, what we see destroyed is a planetary system, not a star system. We see a planet and its moons destroyed. No star visible on screen or indicated at all. The phrase system destroying would thus be defined as a planetary system, not a solar system. As for a pirate hangout right next door, its not like that is unusual in real history or the Star Wars universe. Capitals seem to be a good place for crime.

Anakin Starkiller said:

yotsuya said:

MalàStrana said:

For myself I would say I don’t hate any of them and I would, some day, rewatch every single one of them, but I can’t pretend that I like TPM, AOTC, R1, Solo, TFA… (I like some of them when propertly fan edited though) I can enjoy them, find qualities, rewatch a few sequences and be glad to see the “SW soul” supplement in them compared to the average blockbuster, but I honestly don’t like all of them. As a whole, it’s different, and maybe the “I-IX” experience may give the Saga something more as a complete movement than what just separate entries do.

ATOC and TFA are the only ones I did not fully enjoy on my first viewing. Both have segments that just took me right out of the film and derailed the story for me and I have never been able to recover from that. Both need a good fan edit (I would do it very lightly with as few changes as possible) to bring them up to the nearest stories. I cannot say I hate any of them, but those two I have the most profound issues with. Though in contemplating it, one of my issues with TFA has led to a personal retcon that solves a lot of issues for the entire Star Wars universe. Still, it would be a better movie if that was not needed. And the sections of ATOC are just bad and need to be axed.

Indeed AotC’s bad bits, while pretty bad, are relatively harmless. It doesn’t uproot the story or universe. It’s just bad scenes and/or dialogue that can easily be cut. It’s not the same as the problems some people have with TLJ or that I have with RotJ that come from taking the saga in an infuriatingly terrible direction. Granted, some of the problems are also the sort of harmless, easily removed, stuff with no implications down the line, like AotC, which just makes them even worse.

Out of curiosity, what is the headcanon you mentioned concerning TFA?

Both TFA and TESB have some issues with the use of the word system. Take it as it is typically meant, that of a star system, and both those movies are derailed by science. But if you take that to be a planetary system (a planet and its moons) you can have the Millennium Falcon fly from Hoth to Bespin in a reasonable amount of time and you can have the people on Takodana watch the destruction of the Hosnian system without it being completely impossible. But even in the same system, watching the destruction of the Hosnian system stretches believably too far for me.

This is where I have the color correction for the Blu-ray…

RogueLeader said:

Okay, so unsurprisingly that’s not my actual ranking. My real ranking is as predictable as you can expect, probably. Just trying to play advocate for a perspective rarely scene, for whatever value that could add to the conversation.

I do like all of the films, though. They’re not all perfect, but I think they all add something of value to the saga.
The guy I quoted, I personally think he sounds super pretentious, but I am fascinated by his own perspective on the franchise.

I appreciate you guys being so respectful of my faux opinions though! Good group right here.

That’s a relief. Some of the reasoning you posted did make sense. I personally consider ATOC a better than average movie, but it has the biggest script failings of any of the films. But I could see someone who was young when the PT films came out having these opinions.

You tube would be the worst source to use. There are better out there. Rips of the BR for instance. I personally have the BR set.

Collipso said:

are those from the blu-ray? i seem to recall the first dvd release to have the best colors for raiders.

Not sure. I just google them and pulled a couple of high-res examples.

I have been working for 3 years to figure out how to correct ANH from the Blu-ray and I only hit on the solution a couple of months ago. They need more yellow. Not a shift in the hue, but an added hue. There is not enough yellow while there is plenty of red. The results for both the skin tones and the rocks (at least in this sequence) is that both should be peachy/orangy. Trying to make it either red or yellow can only be done by removing color that is supposed to be there. You have to balance it. I’ve bugged DrDre about this before and his has refined his tools to come closest to the original colors as he can. I think some of the shots need a touch more yellow, but definitely no desaturation or removing other colors. Definitely not a shift to the yellow or anything.

And you have to look at skin tones, costume colors (especially compared to how the costume appears in controlled lighting), set lighting, set colors (mostly lost but in the case of natural features we can go visit them and photograph them with modern cameras and see them with our own eyes), etc. Some of my scene corrections in TESB are almost imperceptible while others really stand out. You have to make final corrections with a light hand. I have learned this from being far too heavy handed myself. I’ve had to undo a great many corrections because they went too far the other way.

Yes, but like so many attempts to fix a small issue, you have overdone it. Your corrections are far to yellow.

And as for R2 - are you aware of how many of them were made and that they had to make new ones for each film? They were able to improve them greatly for TESB. So it isn’t a matter of repainting the old ones (they didn’t), it is making new ones for each film. For the first film the blue was more purple. For the rest it was more of the dark cobalt. So removing the purple hue from R2 is a mistake.

And since you mention Raiders… how about these…

Anakin Starkiller said:

There is no truly bad SW movie. Solo is really mediocre, though.

As a fan of Brain Daley and Ann Crispin, I loved it and thought they did a fantastic job. It rewrote the legends origins, but kept some of the highlights. I’m a huge lover of Han’s corner of the Star Wars universe and so having a movie devoted to him is about the most exciting thing for me since learning Lucas was making the Prequels. It was the movie (since Disney acquired Lucasfilm) that I was most anticipating and it did not disappoint me.

MalàStrana said:

For myself I would say I don’t hate any of them and I would, some day, rewatch every single one of them, but I can’t pretend that I like TPM, AOTC, R1, Solo, TFA… (I like some of them when propertly fan edited though) I can enjoy them, find qualities, rewatch a few sequences and be glad to see the “SW soul” supplement in them compared to the average blockbuster, but I honestly don’t like all of them. As a whole, it’s different, and maybe the “I-IX” experience may give the Saga something more as a complete movement than what just separate entries do.

ATOC and TFA are the only ones I did not fully enjoy on my first viewing. Both have segments that just took me right out of the film and derailed the story for me and I have never been able to recover from that. Both need a good fan edit (I would do it very lightly with as few changes as possible) to bring them up to the nearest stories. I cannot say I hate any of them, but those two I have the most profound issues with. Though in contemplating it, one of my issues with TFA has led to a personal retcon that solves a lot of issues for the entire Star Wars universe. Still, it would be a better movie if that was not needed. And the sections of ATOC are just bad and need to be axed.

RogueLeader said:

Worst to Best: Explained

8. A New Hope

"I was utterly underwhelmed by “A New Hope,” impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of “American Graffiti” could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie.” - Richard Brody, The New Yorker

The palette of Hollywood in the 70s, that had for the past few years been introducing avant-garde storytelling to a wider audience, now was doomed with the release of Lucas’ original space-fantasy. Being one of the first blockbusters, it became such a phenomenon that it laid the groundwork for all of the mind-numbing films that we associate with the term “blockbuster movies” for the next 40 years. Lucas, ironically, played a part of the banality of modern Hollywood, filled with dull stories, like seeing the same superhero plot with a new coat each year, and actions films that try to numb the mind with the overstimulation of the senses.

7 & 6. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi

“Empire” and “Jedi” had nothing parodistic; their absurd earnestness and the bombastic banality of their direction (by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively) are a perfect match for the oppressive, hectoring John Williams scores that accompanied them. If there was nostalgic, faux-naïve whimsy in Lucas’s inaugural installment of “Star Wars,” it was gone from “Empire” and “Jedi,” replaced by a hegemonic bellow for devotion and belief.” - Brody

ESB can’t decide if it is a serious movie or a silly one. It is sort of a mess with no solid conclusion, making a film that can’t really stand on its own. I tend to agree with the thoughts here if you’d like to know more: http://www.simplysyndicated.com/why-empire-strikes-back-sucks-gundark-poodoo/

ROTJ, while repeating many of the same mistakes as the original Star Wars film, this is really where the idea of Vader as a sympathetic character is developed.

The only redeeming quality of these films are the elements of Darth Vader’s redemption the introduced to the saga, a twist that made the films grow beyond mere “adventure films”. They really have nothing else to offer beyond this, save for some of Yoda’s philosophical preaching.

5 & 4. Force Awakens and the Last Jedi
With The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, they’re both just okay. No strong feelings either way about them. They are not as imaginative as Lucas’ prequels, but there is considerable effort to address the legacy of a character like Vader. Even though that twist allowed for the beautiful tale Lucas created in his prequels, they did present a problem with the idea that only one family could really effect the destiny of this galaxy. But with the new character of Rey, we have a character who is clearly a nobody in Episode 7 and we get to see her come to accept that she has no destiny. But, it is a strong message that she has to make her own destiny, and Rey, just like anyone, can make a real difference. The story of Rey and Kylo Ren are the most interesting aspects of these new films, with Finn and Rose being my second favorites if they can conclude their arc in 8 appropriately in the next film. I’m sure IX will fit into the middle of my list as well, especially if they can devise a conclusion with Ben Solo returning to Leia that reflects Anakin leaving his own mother at the beginning of this saga.

3. Revenge of the Sith

"The labyrinthine opening shot of “Revenge of the Sith”— of Anakin and Obi-Wan giving chase to Dooku through the space vehicles on the planet of Coruscant—is a mighty and audacious gauntlet-throw, the digital equivalent of the opening shot of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” It wheels and gyrates and zips and pivots with a vertiginous wonder that declares, from the beginning, that Lucas had big visual ideas and was about to realize them with a heroically inventive virtuosity. And the rest of the movie follows through on that self-dare.

If I had seen “Revenge of the Sith” in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), “Power! Unlimited Power!,” I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement. The entire movie is filled with an absolute splendor of the pulp sublime, and that moment is its very apogee. Lucas reaches historic heights in the filming of action: the martial artistry of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s double duel versus Dooku, the gaping maw of outer space and of the airshaft into which the heroic duo drops, Obi-Wan’s light-sabre fight with the four-armed Grievous, and, above all, the apocalyptic inferno of the confrontation of Obi-Wan and Anakin (which, regrettably, cuts back to Yoda and Emperor, a much duller battle). I watched these sequences over and over—happily, with the sound off to get rid of the musical score—and was repeatedly and unflaggingly amazed by Lucas’s precise, dynamic, wildly imaginative direction.

The scripted politics of the conflicts have a grand imagination to match. What Lucas brings to the script of “Clones” and Sith” is a quasi- (or pseudo-) Shakespearean backroom dialectic of power-maneuvering. The dialogue is just heightened and sententious enough, just sufficiently rhetorical, to convey the grave moment of ideas in conflict and the grand mortal results of that dialectical clash—the making of a villain and the unmaking of a republic.” - Brody

Also, see Camille Puglia’s thoughts on ROTS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibkmh72_1pw

2. The Phantom Menace
   Phantom Menace evolved the franchise in a way that other franchises seem to fail at. Unique and imaginative, instead of giving us more of what “the fans” wanted, George decided to tell a story that grew beyond what the original Star Wars was meant to be. Instead of being a Flash Gordon-ripoff that tells an over-simplistic fairy tale, George set out to decontextualize this saga as a tragedy on the scales of Othello or Faust. He planted the seeds of a “Citizen Kane” in space. A young Anakin, bright-eyed and full of optimism, is taken away from his mother. The Jedi Order was nothing as fans had expected, instead, Lucas decided to portray them as a flawed order that practices non-attachment and have them represent a very unhealthy version of masculinity that inevitably leads Anakin to give in to his own fears and turn to evil.

#1 Attack of the Clones

"This peculiar contradiction began to resolve itself with the pleasures of “Attack of the Clones.” There, Lucas’s force awakens. The movie’s rich-hued palette alone is a jolt from the start, and the movie’s action scenes have an alluring, entrancing kinetic vigor and texture. The speeder chase with the paid assassin, with its swoops and spins and drops; Obi-Wan’s fight with Jango Fett; and the serial duels with Count Dooku—all of these display balletic gracefulness and dazzling rapidity along with closely-textured compositions in depth, surprising pictorial imbalances, and angles that are as expressive as they are surprising. The colossal scale of the assembled clones toward the end of the film has an awe-inspiring power greater than anything in any of the four films that preceded it. My hypothesis is that digital technology caught up to Lucas’s imagination. Finally, by 2002, digital technology, which he had begun to use in “The Phantom Menace,” liberated him from the limits of optical effects and, by means of C.G.I., could create the fusion of live action and animation that was implicit in the project, and in his vision, from the start.” - Brody

This film is the epitome of what George Lucas always wanted, being able to tell a story that his completely his own, separated from Hollywood and with technology that was finally able to bring his wildest dreams to life. With it being the first major feature film completely shot on digital, it paved the way to the democratization of filmmaking, and now anyone can make a movie and find an audience online. Lucas was never able to successfully create his American Zoetrope he envisioned, a place for filmmakers to tell their stories away from Hollywood, but in a way, he succeeded through the breakthroughs that truly began with this film.

While I can understand some of what you are saying, you are definitely in a minority around here. You are likely to get some very strong reactions. As a long time SW fan (one of the original 1977 fans), I can’t agree with your assessment of the PT. I watch a lot of moves from all decades (not a huge fan of silent movies, but they are great if you can get used to the format, especially Chaplin’s comedies), and being familiar with what a great movie is, I cannot rate any of the Prequels as great films. The stories a cluttered and the writing is off (especially the dialog) and some of the characters are just annoying.