Brain Fertilizer

A few very important points about telling a story:

1) Decide where the story starts and ends. It starts when you set up a problem, and ends when you resolve it. Anything else will leave your audience disappointed.

2) Know what to leave out. Leave in the exciting stuff, the important dialogue, the things that the audience must know in order to understand the story.

3) Have a fully-dimensional world/universe.

4) Stay consistent.

He did a great job (apparently with help) on these issues in Episodes IV-VI. Sort of. Star Wars: A New Hope was nearly perfect in and of itself, in that the story started with "The Princess is in Peril", and ended when the threat to her was defeated. And the whole trilogy did a fairly good job, in that the problem established at the beginning of the trilogy was that the Emperor had dissolved the Senate and begun ruling directly and ruthlessly, and the trilogy ended when the Emperor was killed.

But the problems started in The Empire Strikes Back, don't they? Suddenly, we have new issues introduced that weren't in the first episode: redemption from evil. It's rather grafted in. And the evil in Star Wars is in the senior military leadership and Darth Vader. I remember feeling a little miffed that Vader kowtowed so much to an Emperor who really didn't do much at all. If the Emperor was such a powerful and complete evil, why wasn't he in on any of the decisions made by the principals in the first two movies? As in, executing generals for failure, destroying Alderaan, etc? Again, the Emperor as a player seemed grafted into the story, to the stories detriment. Especially because the story ends when the Emperor is killed, right? His death alone doesn't settle the destructive capability of the Empire, right? They still have generals and governers and tax collecters throughout the galaxy, so all that happened is the top guy was killed. That leaves a power vacuum that any individual could step in and replace without skipping a beat. Sure, the logical #2 guy, Vader, had also been removed...but here's the first real problem with the series: the most interesting part of Return of the Jedi should be how the Empire was fully defeated and replaced. Maybe that could be handled in Episodes VII-IX, perhaps, but still: if the death alone of the Empire's leadership resolved the problem, then the Emperor should have been involved in the storyline from the very beginning, as the person obviously making decisions to put the Princess (and freedom) in peril.

Now, Mr. Lucas did a pretty good job on the other parts in the original trilogy. He particularly did a good job on "leaving out the stuff that should be left out" in the first movie: that movie is incredibly packed with action and information. I can't think of a single thing that could be left out without altering the storyline or obscuring character. Even the moment that Chewbacca scares the little droid as he's being escorted to the detention center helps establish his character more fully, off-setting the hindrance that he can't speak. Every character gets attention and opportunities to reveal themselves. This is absolutely important.

The back-story is also wonderful: Clone wars, a Jedi order wiped out, a father betrayed and killed, destiny, obscure powers, a Senate dissolved, a rebel Alliance fighting for freedom...awesome stuff.

Consistency is pretty good, for the most part. It starts going bad in Episode VI, however, when the revelation of Luke and Leia's relationship makes several earlier romantic moments become stomach-turning events, in retrospect (as has been oft-noted).

But all these things go wrong when Lucas goes back and tries to do the prequel trilogy.

First, it becomes painfully obvious that although Lucas claims to have all 9 stories fully written from the beginning, it's only a very broad, general, and indistinct outline. I know I've felt that I had a story completely planned out and written in my mind, but when I actually start writing, I end up writing myself into a corner. Lucas doesn't seem to let that stop him, to our chagrin and misfortune.

Know where your story starts and stops: With the prequels, Lucas does a fairly good job of starting and stopping. He's fully embraced the story arc of Anakin's/Vader's fall into the dark side, and he sticks with it.

Know What to Leave Out: But he totally screws up the "what to leave out part". The movies aren't short, but they don't really have that much happen, to tell the truth. Compared to the "every moment necessary" jam-packed excitement of Episode IV, the prequels don't even come close. The Clone Wars could have, and should have been the highlight of the prequels. The name certainly inspires something more imaginative than someone using a clone army, doesn't it? War is interesting, because victory and defeat doesn't necessarily go to the "good guys", and Lucas could have set up some interesting battles and campaigns in which we actually cared about the result, in which the result and aftermath could have been uncertain, thus raising tension. We knew the Jedi would get destroyed in the process of the decline of the Republic...so each battle could have been set up that way: we want the good guys to win, but would this battle be their initial defeat? Or the ultimate? Since we know the Republic is going to decline (but not actually fall until just before the start of Episode IV, right? More in the consistency section), but not when the decline is going to happen, Lucas could have played that tension into an awe-inspiring trilogy. And why did he decide to elide over the destruction of the Jedis in a handful of vignettes? Heck, after the 2nd one, the rest were absolutely useless in adding any information, and so should have been left out. The love scenes between Anakin and Amidala were useless (and horribly unmoving, as has been pointed out). It would have been much better to show 2-4 scenes of Anakin sacrificing something for Amidala and vice versa. Show the love, not tell it in a sappy and useless 'romantic' scene, or "I love you" dialoges. The Jedi Council discussions were boring and added little to the story, as well. To tell the truth, it's impossible to really point out all the mistakes in this category, because the prequel trilogies are simply badly-written, so nearly everything should have been left out. Let me simply say that the most interesting parts of the prequel should have been the Clone Wars, the destruction of the Jedi, the decline of a once-noble Republic, and the fall of Vader, in that order. Lucas reverses that order, again, to our viewing misfortune. I would have made the first movie an action-packed adventure focusing on the clone wars and Anakin as a young man with top-notch piloting skills and how that resulted in his invitation to be trained as a Jedi (starting his training as a young man being the fatal flaw that results in his flaw, reinforcing why training Luke as a young man seems so risky). Then the 2nd movie could have been all about Anakin's problems in training, with several Jedi missions nearly failing because of his weaknesses, and maybe the first few Jedi being killed (leaving a dark ending appropriate for the end of a 2nd Act, just like The Empire Strikes Back). Then the 3rd movie would have dealt with the process of Anakin becoming Vader...maybe out of his frustration from failing to grasp what it is to be Jedi? ...or by seeing the Jedi losing and wanting to be on the winning side? I guess I can see it was a gutsy play by Lucas to have Anakin's fall be out of a distorted love (and that's a good and important lesson), but it is at odds with the other messages of the trilogy, so I think it should have been handled differently.

Fully Dimensional Universe/Backstory: This is what made the original trilogy. Again: Clone wars, a Jedi order wiped out, a father betrayed and killed, destiny, obscure powers, a Senate dissolved, a rebel Alliance fighting for freedom... These capture the imagination, demand in-depth storytelling. But when Lucas went back to tell these stories, not only did he not do them justice (they were all less compelling than they originally sounded), but he doesn't bother to go farther back with his universe. If you watch the prequel trilogy, nothing comes before. Why didn't he show more about the parts of the Galaxy not under full Republic control? Why didn't he hint about how the Jedi were established? Or how they became an integral part of the Republic? Or how the Republic was established? Or tell us more about how Jedi are discovered and trained? Or more about what function they actually perform? Are they warriors? Secret Agents? Generals? Advisors? They seem to be all of these things, and more...and yet he never shows them doing any of these things all that successfully (well, except maybe as a secret agents), so I'm left with wondering exactly why the Jedi hold such an important position. How did the rebels get their start? How did they develop all their own weaponry? Exactly how oppressive was the Empire? To tell the truth, it's almost as if Lucas never once considered the actual history of his galaxy; it's almost as if the galactic order sprung into being, whole-cloth, just in time for Anakin to show up. It almost makes me think that the best parts of the Star Wars story came from Alan Dean Foster (who ghost-wrote the original Star Wars novel), and Lucas lacked the imagination to that sort of thinking on his own.

Consistency: Whew, I could write a novel-length section on this issue. Metachlorians? Leia is Luke's sister? Obi-wan ages twice as fast as everyone else in the story? Most of the big issues have been covered more ably by others. But here's a few I haven't seen other people mention: If the Jedi are such a big deal, known throughout the galaxy, how come everyone else is so absolutely disdainful and disbelieving of the force and the Jedi just 20 years later? And didn't Episode IV start with Palpatine dissolving the Senate and declaring himself "Emperor"? How does that fit with Amidala's pronouncement of the Empire in Episode III?
If Anakin is such the prodigy in the Force, why did he not seem to advance in power at all from the end of Episode III to the beginning of Episode IV? If Obi-Wan Kenobi is such a sub-par Jedi, how come he is the one that survives? Would it have hurt the story at all for Anakin to have turned to the dark side in a quest for power, rather than respect? The way Lucas sets up the prequels, it makes it look like Obi-Wan's beating Anakin was a lucky accident. (And the last-minute mention of "holding the high ground" is ridiculous; just another thing that Lucas pulled out of his butt at the last minute like the 'metachlorians'.*)
I've discovered that the Jedi and their powers were originally remarkably similar to the "JiangHu" swordsmen/adventurers from Chinese stories and legends. As in, some guys have some special powers. Why they have these powers isn't really explained, except they've gone through some special training. Some use these powers for good, some for evil. You can change from one to the other, depending on your character. They work with the governmental authorities, but aren't really a part of the government. In fact, the JiangHu swordsmen of China are just like our comic-book superheros. And that's the way I thought Lucas originally presented them. So to me, it is a violation of consistency to make them be an official part of the government. It also makes them far less interesting and does much to make the prequels far less compelling. Had he continued to treat them as honorable but quasi-respectable vigilantes, the story of Anakin's fall to become Vader would have been far more interesting.
Would it have killed Lucas to find a better way to reinforce Obi-Wan's character than to just say, "How uncivilized" about blasters? How about showing us how a light-saber is more civilized, somehow...maybe by showing that despite their power, they are highly inaccurate, spray-n-pray weapons?**

If Obi-Wan Kenobi was hiding out on a planet (okay, it's been pointed out numerous times that it would be dumb for him to continue to use the same last name...unless "Kenobi" is the galactic equivalent of "Smith" or something), would he really have continued to wear the official Jedi uniform? For twenty years? And why, exactly, would the Jedi Uniform be so wonderfully appropriate for a desert environment? Meaning: flowing robes that help block the sun and enhance the cooling effect of perspiration. Deciding to make the official Jedi uniform the same as what Obi-Wan wore on Tattoine was a stupid choice from a consistency viewpoint.

I'm going to have to add more to this later.

*A well-known rule of story-telling is that if you have a gun appear in the first act, it must be fired before the end of the second act, or something like that. But too many writers fail to grasp the reverse: that if you have a gun go off by the end of the second act, it must be present at the beginning of the first act. Deus Ex Machina resolutions are widely derided...but they can be used if the writer carefully prepares the audience for its use. Lucas failed to do so with too many elements of his story, particularly the "high ground" travesty.

**People talk about the horrible accuracy of Storm Troopers compared to Luke, Han, and Leia...it seems to me that something with a micro-meter beam and laser-straight trajectory could conceivably be difficult to wield accurately...particularly since there does seem to be significant recoil in firing them...they aren't just laser weapons, but rather "blasters", an undefined term that might explain why it would be hard for a conscript to be that good, but someone with a strong ability in the Force might be able to minimize the inherent obstacles to accuracy?