Posted 2/15/2006 05:29:00 PM by Douglas

Interesting link about some sci-fi movies and where they went wrong. I link for one reason: George Lucas bashing:

It's not just that we knew how the story ended when we walked into the theater (me, I would have killed off Obi-Wan in Episode II just to fuck with you). It's that this isn't the interesting part of the saga. Adolf Hitler's childhood wasn't interesting. So Darth Vader used to be a wooden, whining kid. Fascinating. The pre-rebellion galaxy was embroiled in a series of boring bureaucratic disputes. Great, George. Tell me more!

He should have made the sequels, damn it. And he should have done them right away, when he had the original cast. With a good sequel, you can expand your universe, introduce new characters, explore more of the existing ones, take what we know and push it in radical new directions. With a prequel, all that imagination is devoted to devising ways to shoehorn the existing characters into the old story, to pretend they all knew each other back then. The universe gets smaller as we find out that every page of history contains the same dozen names. The fantastic, magical universe starts to seem like something some guy just sat down and wrote.

And I'll continue to link to these stories until Lucas apologizes or 'till those three dreadful movies are completely erased from America's collective consciousness.