Chen G.

Oh, he definitely would! Not just on the level of this "rhyming" business, either. For instance, after 1980 George Lucas was all about his hi-flautin sources and "reading the epics." And then, by the time we get to the prequel trilogy you see that there IS a bit (but never more than a bit!) more of an attempt to channel Kurosawa in Episode I, and there are suddenly more nods to "prestigious" historical epics, and by the time we get to Episode III there are also absolutely shades of Oedipus Rex to the thing. So he definitely felt he needs to "own up" to some extent. And the "yeah, I definitely wrote it all out of one giant script." Again, when Lucas started scripting the prequels he DEFINITELY and for quite a long period of time intended the write them all at once and shoot them back-to-back. It didn't pan out, but he still wanted to at least deal with Episode I and then do the other two back-to-back (which also didn't pan out). But you can see the attempt. And then you have the "rhyming" business. I think you could make the argument it started in a way in Return of the Jedi, which absolutely replicates large portions of Star Wars - either Star Wars as we have it, or early drafts thereof. Heck, the opening shot is recreating the shot compsition at the beginning of the original (with a Death Star replacing a moon). While I think the primary reason is a creative low-ebb, I think the argument could be made that Lucas like the idea of creating "book-ends" to the trilogy, partially because that's what also happened (however serendipitously) in Indiana Jones. I think the notion of a more rigorous "ryhming" came after Lucas mapped-out Episode I, which was basically ported over from an early draft of the original. So its something you mostly see in Episode II, strictly (to my mind) to the extent that its also a love-story, and in that for inspiration Lucas turned to ideas from the Empire Strikes Back story conferences in terms of planets (that's where an ocean planet first emerges) and certainly in inserting an asteroid chase into the piece. Then, in Episode III, originally the big confrontation between Sidious, Dooku and Anakin was going to rhyme very overtly with the confrontation in Episode VI, a symmetry that was broken when it was moved to the film's opening.

Okay, lets have a show of hands: who here thinks this rigorous kind of "rhyming stanzas" - controling basically the structure of the entire film - is or isn't reading too much into this? I'll start: Reading WAAAY too much into it.

Oh, for sure! But on the level of isolated beats, not to the extent that it dictates the structure of entire swathes of the individual entries, as is suggested here:

Star Wars (I refuse to call it Episode IV) and Episode VI also "rhyme" extensively, which kind of mucks things up... All this basically amounts to is building a grand theory out of the use of callbacks, and a wonky one at that: looking especially at Episode III, I see just as many callbacks to the previosu two prequels as to anything in the classic trilogy. And some of it is just generic similarities. Curious to see if anyone else here believes in this rigorous "Ring" theory, especially to the extent that you propose Lucas implemented it as.

You know what this rhyming stanzas remind me of? In the 1930s there was a music theorist called Alfred Lorenz who decided to analyse The Ring (and also Tristan, Meistersinger and Parsifal) as a huge, 16-hour AAB structure based around key centers. Guess how highly those theories are thought of today?

Well, I mean... Coruscant is a city-planet, and strictly speaking, Bespin is a huge city, too. But I'm afraid our esteemed colleague is looking at it in terms of rhyming stanzas with Episode II, which... yeah, I don't buy it.

I'm less taken with the extended sequence following the Cloud car around the cityscapes. Comes out of nowhere. The original shot, which was an establishing shot of the city with a cloud car zooming right past camera, while it looked a little phony, was more interesting, frankly.

On that account, I do appreciate that Kershner was notified and indeed approved of some of the special edition changes: he wanted windows in Cloud City, and I remember reading an interview where he clearly approved of the addition.

Well, because we've seen McDiarmid without it just prior in the film, so we can really tell that his head got larger. Whereas, realistically, if lightning-bolts were carving up your face, they would etch down on it, not make bigger! Although I always felt you could chalk some of that up to swelling.

Also slightly different visual touches: the original composite for the skies above Yavin was quite different (and honestly better), and the flashes in the laser shootouts in space were less overpowering. In The Empire Strikes Back, off the top of my head, some frames were missing from Luke's recovery early on in the film, and the establishing shots for the final scene were absent.

Its not clear to me that they tried: first, because the nature of the Emperor's appearance changed from becoming consumed by his own malevolence (which was still the idea as late as Episode II: ever noticed how sickly McDiarmid looks in that film?) to the exertion of fighting Windu (as originally shot for Episode III) to the lightning being bounced into his face, as in the finished piece. And they definitely wanted the prequel Emperor to be more nightmarish.

Oh, I agree! I think the film should be released in the form in which an audience will have first laid eyes on it. There were some (fairly minor, but not insignificant) changes implemented into the film within weeks of its release, and I think those should be taken out, too. Same with Empire, by the way: as first released, the film was missing a few shots that are now in the film. To be fair, there are lots of films from the 70s going back that we don't REALLY have the original cut of: Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind. They didn't think in terms of "historical" preservation at the time.

Yes. Clearly, the already had the idea of the decrepit-looking Emperor (at this point, due to malevolence rather than blunt trauma) already.

That and, for the DVD release, changing that...thing into Ian McDiarmid.

I do like certain things about the Special Edition: certainly, Lucas' attempts to "open up" the world of the films is often quite succesfull: the new wideshot of Ben's hovel, to a lesser extent the entrance to Mos Eisley, CERTAINLY the windows in Cloud City (they're all over McQuarrie's artwork) and the victory celebration montage in Return of the Jedi. The Jabba scene I could do without (although Marcia, who wanted to keep it in, does have a good point in that Han's entrance in the shot is pretty good), although I find the way they cut around it in the original edit to be a little klutzy. And, in the original Star Wars, there's some attempt to tone down what little violence there is in the film: its in getting Greedo to shoot at Han, but its also in other, little things: Lucas didn't like that a couple of imperial officers, who unlike the Troppers have their faces visible, are shot dead on-camera, so in some (but not all) of the shots he decided to snipe out a few frames that show the last blast hit them.

Well, I mean, EE Smith’s Lensmen series has a drug called Thionite that’s clearly an antecedent to certain elements of Herbert’s Spice, and Lucas was seemingly aware of it because in all the early drafts, Beru makes “Thanta sauce.” But certainly when the films mention Spice, Lucas is referencing Dune, and he wanted his audience to notice, too. Then again, at no point in the storytelling does Spice come into the story, so it’s fairly inconsequential. There’s other stuff from Dune: Crawlers, Moisture farms, Bedouin-like sand people (Vader was originally envisioned as Bedouin-like, as well), probably the siege on Naboo in Episode I, Ornithopters in Episode III, the increasingly Machiavelian trappings of the prequel trilogy, to some extent the "Chosen One" narrative, etc...

I think Braveheart is the greater score to the incomparably greater film (and I love Titanic), and while I think it’s also a great film to captivate normies, it was never ever going to be anything nearly as popular as Titanic and the song it spawned. Not ever.

Its funny how "brooding" Shore's oeuvre is, isn't it? Listening to him talking, you wouldn't think that would be his specialty.

That right there is the power of James Cameron! He makes movies for normies first and foremost! As well one should. I think its strikingly dangerous for art to crawl up its own posterior.

For the love of a princess is amazing.

Not to over-intelectualise a joke, but when Lucas talks about "non-character, non-narrative tone poems" he's talking about stuff like these two shorts of his:

Graffiti is good but does nothing for me. THX-1138...nah.

Not to hijack the thread at all, but...cough... Nevermind, what I was getting at is...cough...cough...Morfydd Clark's Galadriel...cough...

Ironically, I think Star Wars is now the third big comic-book superhero franchise. Not because its literally based on a comic-book (although many of Star Wars' antecedents - John Carter and Lensmen, most notable - are very comic-book like, and certainly their heroes are kind of proto-superheroes) but because with all those spinoffs its gradually turning more quixotic and picaresque...like a comic book. And certainly the Jedi had been superheroes since 1999, if not since 1983.

Sure, but its also a matter of taste. I've developed an extreme distaste for this kind of filmmaking, and honestly can't wait for it to go the way of the dodo.