‘Star Wars’ was only ever 5% about movies
The reason so many fans find so much to dislike about Star Wars, especially recent contributions and revisions, is that in our hearts it was only a very small part about movies.
Star Wars was always about PLAY. The toys, the endless toys and the thousands of hours of our own adventures. Playground and street play, for those of us who lived in a time and place where that was accepted behaviour, roleplaying characters. X-Wing game onward allowing us to immerse in the worlds. Roleplaying games for those of us of a mind to play that way; West End Games TTRPG brought Star Wars back to life.
So when the prequels came along, so many of us recognized that the Star Wars in our heads was vastly superior to the one in George Lucas’ head.
If GL had had the ability to project his actual thoughts onto a screen, it would never have become the phenomenon it was. Collaboration allowed other creatives to play with ideas. We end up with X-Wings which look like they could actually exist (though aerodynamic modelling shows they are less efficient than a housebrick), R2D2 seems like an actual piece of equipment, and so on… so many things made to work became ‘real’ in our minds and we filled in the rest. ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ is the truest movie, it does not have a simple high-concept description like ‘heroes destroy baddie’s superweapon’, it is just perfect story and character.
So in some ways, any further screen presentation needed to be ‘Empire’ not ‘Jedi’. It was always up against perhaps 10,000 hours of non canon daydreams and what we needed was, more fuel for those.
As soon as we get a movie with Jar Jar – a character designed to appeal rather than earning appeal through the story – and baby Anakin ‘oops’ destroying a battleship instead of a more biting characterization, all this avoidable dross – it is not just being judged against other movies, it is up against the Star Wars in our own souls. When it could have listened to that world and become something so much grander.
The movies were in the minority portion of the franchise from around 1982, when they thought they were the masters of it!
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