LogFAQs > #945900802

Traitor Trooper
This was the only meme to come out of TFA, and one of only two in the entire ST. I appreciate the idea that this random Stormtrooper would be personally angry at Finn's betrayal. Like, we don't know who he is, maybe Finn doesn't know who he is, but his actions mean that Finn's betrayal has implicitly pissed off the entire Empire. I like it so much that I'll even give JJ Abrams the benefit of the doubt and assume that the electrical baton thing he uses is some kind of civilian crowd control weapon, and that this guy, upon seeing a possible Jedi, just gives no ****s and jumps into a fight against a ninja-wizard with the equivalent of a taser.

George Lucas
In the epic battle between George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry, I don't know. Roddenberry has the advantage of dying at a good moment where he would stop embarrassing himself. Lucas is clearly the guy who rolled a bunch of natural 20s in a row while making ANH, then benefited from other peoples' competence on ESB. But like I said before, I suspect he actually is some kind of secret business genius. He knew how to exploit the toy market, he knew how to make a ton of money on video games and books, and he knew to sell Disney his property for 4.5 billion dollars.

I can imagine Lucas not planning for Star Wars to completely consume his life. Before Star Wars, he was just a mildly rich director. He probably didn't plan for or want the silly space movie to become his entire life. But it's clear that he still cared.

Let me be clear here: I think Lucas' competence is at best questionable, but it's clear that he always cared. It's clear that he was putting his all into the prequels. They're terrible, but they've got actual soul to them. There's more pathos in PM or AotC than there is in all of the sequels combined. Lucas pushed the boundaries of what was possible with CGI far beyond his means, so much so that his movies looked like video games and his characters suffered and were written horribly so that more horribly-rendered Jedi Temples and space battles could be inserted. You can't write dialogue for Anakin and Padme so awful if you understand human communication at all, but you also can't screw up that badly without trying. You wouldn't include that one second of Jar-Jar Binks in RotS unless you were upset that people hated your character and you just wanted to stick it to them by including him. George Lucas was an artist. A terrible, insane artist who should have been restrained by his employees -- but an artist with ambition and ideas.

The real question is this: did Lucas know Disney would screw everything up? He must have known what he was dealing with. Disney is the definition of boardroom-approved film production.

Opening Crawl
There are four good uses of opening crawl narration in film history. One is Blade Runner, the other three are the OT Star Wars movies. It's amazing how a simple change like making the crawl go away from the audience instead of just up makes everything pop more.

Canderous Ordo
I like KotOR well enough, but more as a game than as a story. KotOR 1 is a very standard Star Wars-y story with one legendary twist, and the characters reflect that. But Canderous Ordo (and Jolee Bindo) is an exception. A mercenary of dubious morality, not Dark Side evil but definitely eviler than he is neutral. He's a fairly typical Proud Warrior Race Guy, but with the twist that he fought against you in the past and is impressed by you. It works well enough, even if he's not the more complex character.


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Not changing this sig until I decide to change this sig.
Started: July 6, 2005