A final thought on Star Wars for the year, if you can stand it:
It seems to me this series always worked best when it was explained least. Lucas forgot that when he made the Prequels. The Sequels were made by creators who confused random nonsense with elegant fantasy.
It seems to me this series always worked best when it was explained least. Lucas forgot that when he made the Prequels. The Sequels were made by creators who confused random nonsense with elegant fantasy.
The great thing about the OT was how it extended a playful invitation to the audience to use their imaginations and fill in the blanks. Every frame was full of details that made you wonder about history and side stories. It was almost *interactive* long before that was a thing.
Original Star Wars wasn't sloppy or half-baked. All those implied stories, that rich barely-mentioned history, felt solid and real. The creators painstakingly crafted a world that felt like it had a thousand sagas before the one we were watching.
The achievement was diminished when Lucas decided to tell the stories he previously invited us to imagine on our own. For fans of the original, it felt a little like being told that YOUR idea of what the "Clone Wars" meant, YOUR vision of Anakin's fall, was wrong.
This triggered a recursive loop of Star Wars endlessly inspecting itself and coloring in those wonderful sketches that used to fill the margins. A story that once blossomed in the imagination collapsed into a black hole. It became so much less primal and mystical.
Then we got the Sequel Trilogy, which essentially retells the same story as the original (with the same ultimate villain!) and sorely lacked that same feeling of building out sideways with carefully crafted, intriguing details.
That's what the two most creatively successful installments of New Star Wars, Rogue One and The Mandalorian, do: they build sideways. They're stuck in the middle of the saga timeline, but they open a few intriguing paths to the side of the main narrative.
Not much in the Sequels is intriguing or has that sense of graciously inviting us to use our imaginations and become part of the story. Its creators misunderstood that idea and wrote random nonsense, insulted us for noticing it was random (TLJ), then clumsily apologized (RoS).
The creators of the Sequel Trilogy never even really explained who the enemy was, what the war was about, or how everything went so wrong after the Empire fell. You must provide a firm creative skeleton for your story to get the audience interested in fleshing it out.
I hope Disney remembers how Star Wars at its best was an invitation to dream, not a lecture or lesson. It felt old and solid and *right* but also new and bold and unpredictable. It was crafted, not calculated. I didn't watch Luke go from Tattooine to Endor. I went with him. /end
