Star Wars has always been the space opera of my life. After seeing the original trilogy when I was about 4 years old, I’ve seen the first six movies each about a hundred times. Though people hate on the prequels, and not without good reason, I like them anyway. I have read a good half of the hundred-odd books in the Legends timeline, which was canon before Disney. However, I have had mixed feelings about the new films. At first, I thought it was only that I had to get used to an alternate timeline, and I would grow to love them just as much as all of the other Star Wars stories. But I am finding I like them less as time goes on, not more, and I am starting to see it is because the stories really are bad.
First, the new movies ignore everything else that has happened in the Galaxy. There is a vast and rich world built up, with plenty of planets available to choose from. In the first six movies, Tatooine appeared in four of them, Coruscant in three, Naboo in two, and Dagobah in two. Yet in the new movies, none of the planets the characters visit have been mentioned before (excluding Rogue One). It is as if the new writers want everyone to forget that all of the other Star Wars stories existed.
Second, the new movies run hard into the scale-magnitude problem. The dialog would aim to convince us that the fight between the Resistance and the First Order is on par with, and in some cases greater than, the struggle between the Rebellion and the Empire. But there is no effort put into showing this, and instead everything looks tiny, like it could have been a squabble between two small countries. In order to write a satisfactory story where the entire galaxy hangs in the balance, you have to interlace the presentation with hints of the scale of the galaxy that is supposedly hanging in the balance. The original trilogy did this well by dropping mention of things like the Senate and the Clone Wars, and the prequel trilogy did it better by having much of the action take place at the Republic capital with political drama in the background. In the new trilogy, there is simply nothing there to care about.
These problems got my imagination spinning, and I found that with just a few tweaks, Episode 7 could have fit in much better. Here is my version of an alternative Episode 7, in a form similar to a title crawl:
It is a tenuous time in the Galaxy. The Empire has collapsed, and in its place two powers have arisen: the New Republic, and the Imperial Remnant. Furious at the New Republic for claiming what they perceive to be rightfully theirs, the Remnant has been building a secret weapon, a cannon that can fire deadly beams of energy through hyperspace and has such great accuracy that it can pinpoint any city on any planet in the Galaxy. After a demonstration, they have turned their eyes to the city-state of New Alderaan on the planet D'Qar in the Ileenium system, the New Republic’s symbol of hope and renewal, where Queen Leia struggles to rebuild her people. Meanwhile, the New Jedi Order has fallen, and Luke Skywalker has vanished, leaving only a map with an old friend on the backwater world of Jakku.
As you can see, not much has changed. I’ve thought since the beginning that Starkiller base was a stupid idea, especially since it took the economic power of the entire galaxy to build the death stars. The events of the story could play out mostly the same, just on a smaller scale and with ties to the rest of the series. This time, it is not the galaxy that is threatened, only a single city, but by making it the revival of Alderaan, whose destruction had been the symbol of the Empire’s power, the stakes feel momentously higher.
No comments:
Post a Comment