DJasonFleming
Movies • Books • Writing
In Praise of the Prequels
November 17, 2023
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© 2023 D. Jason Fleming, CC BY-SA 4.0

I started off wanting to be a screenwriter, the pursuit of which taught me story structure better than I ever could have learned otherwise. Now that I've been a structural editor to indie authors for several years, and having been a fly on the wall to how some major publishing houses operate, I have some insight into how stories can go wrong, and how they can be righted, that most people don't.

So when I say that I have never much liked the Star Wars prequels, but have always admired them, I hope that will be understood precisely.

At some point, some academic should do a study of the cultural reaction to the prequels, because having lived through it, and the shifts it took (although I was living in China by the time the third one came out, so I only saw the cultural reaction to that one at a distance), it feels like it would be a fascinating study in how "the consensus" is never particularly stable, and how eloquent individuals with visceral reactions can push the consensus one way or another.

When The Phantom Menace released, initial institutional reactions were ecstatic. Ron Howard was quoted the week before release as saying it was amazing and unlike anything ever seen on screen before. Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars because he had never seen a spherical senate chamber before. (No, seriously.)

Once the public saw it, there was a fair bit of backlash, mostly centering on Jar Jar Binks. In truth, Jar Jar was just the most obvious and convenient target for ire over a story poorly told.

Then Attack of the Clones, which was greeted more tepidly, because it was expected to be like The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the three, and... well, now it's considered (unfairly, in my view) as the worst. But do note that Lucas scaled Jar Jar back quite a bit, and made him into a political dupe, advancing evil by trying to do good. Lucas's relationship with fandom has always been somewhat strained, but the man listened to his fans.

When Revenge of the Sith released, it was seen as the best of the three, albeit that was by that time very left-handed praise, and people wondered why it wasn't the first in the trilogy, rather than the last. But overall, the prequels were viewed as a massive mistake, and as sullying the Star Wars legacy.

So before I get to the praise, let me be clear: This backlash and disdain was, to an extent, merited. The measure of that extent is arguable, but I am not here to claim that they are objectively good movies.

They are not. Dramatically, they are mostly inert. In terms of storytelling, they are deeply flawed. The actors are largely adrift, lacking both solid scripting and a director who is good with actors. There is quite a lot to criticize in the prequels, and over the years, most or all of it has been criticized.

But for all their flaws, and I admit the flaws are legion, they still have things that current Hollywood lacks. 

To begin with, they tell a new story, rather than rehashing some previous movie beat for beat. Certainly, there are parallels throughout the trilogy to the original trilogy. But those parallels are (at least mostly) not lazy, but done with intent and purpose within the story, rather than with the intent of supplying memberberries (gods I hate that term!) for "stupid flyover people".

Secondly, the new story that the prequels told was enormously ambitious. George Lucas, whatever his faults as a screenwriter, tried to tell the story not only of the turning of one man to the dark side, but also to dramatize the fall of a republic into tyranny, in parallel. He didn't do it mindlessly, either. There are deliberate parallels to many different historical contexts, from the Roman Republic to the Dutch East India Company to the First Opium War to colonial India. These parallels are deliberate, which you can tell from many, many choices made during production, such as the architecture and costuming of Naboo, which has obvious influences from both India and China.

Is that ambition elegantly or artfully executed? In terms of storytelling, no — I would say that in terms of set design, art direction, and other ways, it is achieved pretty well — but wouldn't you prefer ambition marred by clumsiness over slick technical brilliance with no soul behind it?

Thirdly, even taking into account that Lucas listened to and responded to fans, he told the story he wanted to tell, rather than treating it as a mix and match set of "elements" that were "commercially appealing" simply to garner more box office money.

One of the simplest ways to see how superior the prequels are to the DisneyWars trilogy is simply to compare what they are about.

The Phantom Menace is about the decay of a republic beginning to come to light, and (less engagingly) of a slave boy beginning the journey to become a jedi knight.

Attack of the Clones is about the republic's decay being manipulated and exploited, and the young jedi's growing disillusionment with the supposed wisdom of his superiors.

Revenge of the Sith is about the fall of both man and republic, the moments when decisions are made that are irrevocable, and unforgivable.

The Force Awakens is about mirroring A New Hope as closely as possible, without annoying fans too much. If you squint and turn your head to one side and ignore all the other threads that have nothing to do with this, you could also say it's about how far an imperfect parent will go to support a wayward child.

The Last Jedi was about destroying the chance at telling a three part story, and also figuring out what fans wanted, and deliberately doing the opposite in every way possible. Internal to the story, there is nothing. Sure, you can point to scenes that attempt to give the movie a theme ("We're going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love!"), but they connect to nothing else in the story, and don't even make sense on their own terms.

Rise of Palpatine was purely about trying to salvage something from the wreckage that the second movie left behind, and fooling audiences into thinking it meant something. 

(Also, apropos of that title, any time "Rise" or "Rises" or "Rising" is used in a Hollywood title, for the past twenty-five years, it's a sign that there are serious story problems with the movie. This was obvious so long ago that the direct-to-DVD sequel to Van Wilder made fun of it, for gosh sakes! The only movie that was not a complete creative blackhole that used it was The Dark Knight Rises, and even that one, ambitious as it was, had definite problems.)

If you are curious to see how even The Phantom Menace — my vote for worst of the prequels — has a decent movie lurking within it, track down and download the fan edit of it, The Phantom Edit. Even to someone like me, who had a decades-old bad taste in his mouth about that one in particular, it's eye-opening.

But even if you don't, at least realize that the prequels had substance to them, however inartfully executed and awkward they were. They were by no means perfect, but George Lucas aimed high. Which is more than Disney ever even thought of attempting.

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Inspiration

Here is the Table of Contents for an issue of Western Story Weekly from 1932.

Can you see what's funny and inspiring about it?

No?

The first three authors are all one author. Max Brand, Peter Henry Morland and George Owen Baxter were (just a few of the) pen names of Frederick Schiller Faust. That magnificent so-and-so was not only one of the best pulp writers, he wrote so stinking fast that he could take up more than half the issue of a weekly pulp, and do it on the regular.

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Free Culture Art

I generate a lot of AI art for potential book covers. Much of it will never get used, so I'm sharing things here that I have no plans for, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ) International License. One a day, every day, for as long as I feel like it.

(Cross-posted to Minds (https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1591570775834365956 ).)

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Classics, or Not?
Context matters in how you judge something

One way I blow off steam is watching people on Youtube react to movies. (Man, is the 21st Century weird, or what?) And one thing that has caused an itch at the back of my brain is that some people consider movies to be "classic" that... aren't.

Look, I understand that "classic" is what stands the test of time, and speaks to multiple generations, so there is a distinct possibility that I'm just a grumpy old man. Granted.

I further understand that, while I am a cinephile with a broader and deeper knowledge of the history of cinema than most people have, I also am blind to some things that are likely great. Akira Kurosawa (my vote for greatest filmmaker of all time) held that Andrei Tarkovsky was the greatest living director (before he died, obviously). I have bounced hard off of Tarkovsky's two science fiction films, though I have tried many times with each of them. I can see that there is serious intent there, skill and craftsmanship to kill for. But something about them eludes me, fails to draw me in. The fault in this case is all but certainly with me. (And watching cinephile video essays on his other movies does nothing to make me watch them, either.)

But I don't think that's operative in the examples I'm going to discuss here.

I felt when it came out, and still feel today, that Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a mid-grade Spielberg movie. (Given his output of the last twenty years, you can argue it's maybe in the top one-third of his movies, to be fair. But just barely, if so.) There are things about it that are amazing. The special effects still hold up today, thirty-two years later. There are at least two sequences that rank at the very top of "this is what Spielberg can achieve when he really puts his mind to it".

But unlike, say, Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Raiders of the Lost Ark, it is a seriously flawed movie. The story from the novel is not just simplified and condensed, it is dumbed down to the point of cartoonishness in spots.

Take Wayne Knight's disgruntled programmer character. If he announced "Hey, I'm the guy who's going to wreck the park for petty revenge" his course of action wouldn't have been any more obvious, and for the story to work, every single other character who meets him has to be too stupid to see that. (This is not Knight's fault; it's entirely on Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp.)

Sam Neill's Alan Grant doesn't like kids. (A trait he did not have in the novel, but Spielberg will forever work his daddy issues into any story he can. And, honestly, it was not a terrible arc to give the character, on the face of it.) But his dislike of kids is so over the top and cartoonish that only Neill's performance keeps it from being a parody of such characters.

The scene that introduces Alan Grant as a paleontologist does this, too. There's a very Spielbergian sequence of shots of brushes uncovering fossilized bones, leading up to a grand reveal of a full velociraptor skeleton in stone, worthy of framing on a wall. (In interviews at the time of release, Spielberg said he felt it was important to include "the thrill of discovery" in the film.) Problem being that, well, it compresses down to a few cuts a process that would take weeks or months of painstaking work. Which the book showed by showcasing Grant uncovering a single fossilized bone carefully, painstakingly, and ensuring that it was preserved at each moment by meticulous care. Spielberg had the chops to do the scene as it was written in the book and make it just as wondrous as anything he has ever shot.

Instead, he dumbed it down.

All of this is not to say that the movie isn't entertaining: it is, wildly so. It has a great cast, some sequences that, again, rank with anything Spielberg has ever made. But as a piece of cinema and storytelling, it is so inferior to Jaws that there is no comparison. (For what it's worth, it is also inferior to the very next film Spielberg made, Schindler's List, and that's got nothing to do with subject matter and everything to do with execution.)

So, why do people view it as a classic? Put a pin in it, we'll get there.

Tombstone is a beloved movie, and there are many excellent reasons for that. First, and by far the foremost, is Val Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday. It is one of the greatest screen performances, ever. If a movie can be a classic based on one performance, then everything else I have to say about it is pointless, because it qualifies.

And Tombstone has more going for it than just Kilmer. The entire cast is excellent, top to bottom; not one person phones it in, even if none of them can match Kilmer. (OK, I consider Dana Delany to be slightly miscast. But she doesn't do a bad job, at all.) It is also, and this is not even a close thing, the single most accurate-to-history film version of what happened in Tombstone with Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the shoot out at the OK Corral.

That accuracy to history is, in a way, one of the things that keeps me from thinking it should rank as a classic. Because history is messy and doesn't follow the norms or structure of dramaturgy. And Tombstone the film suffers, partly, from a story structure that's lumpy and a bit of a mess. (I haven't read Kevin Jarre's screenplay, so I don't know if that's the source of the problem, or the rather excessive behind-the-scenes drama and problems were the cause, or some combination of both.) In a real sense, it's a credit to the film that the OK Corral shoot out isn't the climax, because what happened after is damned interesting. But it's also a pacing killer, and only somewhat redeemed by the portrayal of the end of Wyatt's and Doc's friendship.

The other thing about the movie that harms it, in my judgment, is the look of it. The costuming is accurate, possibly for the first time in an Earp movie. But the cinematography is... uneven, is the best way I can put it. There are some scenes that are perfectly shot. And there are others that are overlit and look like a (high end) television show rather than a film, to me. (Some of this might also be due to film stock, I'm not sure.) And the overlighting of some scenes (and possibly the film stock) make the costumes look wrong, somehow. It just doesn't look like a movie (some scenes excepted, as noted). Compare it to other westerns around that same time. Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves, and Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp all look like films. Tombstone, at times, looks like a TV drama, or a lower-budget comedy send-up.

(This is another issue that may well have been caused or exacerbated by the chaotic circumstances of the production. I can easily imagine that, with all the pressure that was brought to bear, the mentality of "let's light the hell out of this scene, shoot it, get it in the can and move the hell on" took hold, and that's totally understandable.)

So, before we go on, I just want to make sure I am absolutely clear: I like and enjoy both of these movies, and think that both have some greatness in them.

I just think that both are too flawed to be considered true classics.

So why are modern reaction channels finding them to be classic?

There are probably several factors contributing to it. First, anyone's first reaction to something is going to be different from their long-term opinion after they've let a piece of art stew in their minds for a while. Some movies improve with reflection and life experience, many go the other direction. But first reaction, well, it can be very strong, but it's not necessarily where you end up overall.

Second, most movie reactors claim that they are watching these movies for the first time (and I tend to believe them, at least the ones I follow), or else tell you if they've seen something before, and explain why they're revisiting it. Not having seen a lot of movies, particularly ones that came out in your lifetime that you know to be considered classics, or at least quite good, suggests a certain lack of film background. If you've only seen a few dozen movies, that's less of a baseline for comparison than if you've seen hundreds, or thousands.

But I think that the above, and other reasons, are not the main thing that's causing this.

The reason these films are getting to be seen as classics is that Hollywood has forgotten how to tell a cinematic story competently. The better-than-average-but-flawed films of the '90s look like classics when compared to the garbage that's been passing for "good" the past decade, or more.

A couple of years ago, I went off on The Marvels and lamented how good it should have been, given the story materials it already had. But it seems to hold for everything made by Hollywood in the past decade or more. 

In the early 1990s, a routine summer release that got released to lukewarm reviews and vanished in a box office season of giants showed more craft, more care for basic storytelling, than today's quarter-billion tentpole releases.

The Rocketeer (a Disney release, no less!) hit theaters in the same summer as Terminator 2: Judgment Day and City Slickers and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Those movies were blockbusters, while The Rocketeer only managed to make $46 million against a $35 million budget, meaning that it lost money (the break-even point would have been around $70 million). It got mixed reviews, some very positive, a number vaguely disappointed.

Look at it today, and it's like watching a master class in filmmaking. The Red Letter Media guys did a re:View on the movie several years ago, and Mike Stoklasa quite rightly went on at length about how absolutely solid the script is. Everything paid off is set up, everything set up is paid off, and there is basically nothing extraneous in the story. No "actor's workshop" scenes, no pointless digressions, no storytelling blind alleys. Every scene serves the story.

Is it a perfect movie? Gosh, no. Due to budgetary limitations, for a movie called The Rocketeer, there is very little rocketeering in it, for starters. (Some reviewers at the time dinged it for that, and they weren't wrong.) And while it is a perfectly competent superhero origin story, nothing about it transcends that.

But it didn't have to be.

What it is, is a solid, well-made entertainment. Wouldn't it be nice if we had those again?

Because we mostly don't. And that's why I think there is an overreaction, so to speak, to movies that are good, even with greatness in them, but which fall short of great. By the standards of what's out there, now, they're like water to a man in the desert.

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"Where do you get your ideas?"

The other day I posted a meme on Minds. I've been making memes from quotes by genre authors about the value they found in genre writing, and this one got a question in the comments:

Reading and writing sci-fi feels like exploring endless universes. How do you come up with ideas for your own work?

Ignoring the AI-generated feel of the question, I gave a rather long-ish answer, and decided to revise and expand it for a wider audience. (If you go to the post, you'll see that the questioner responded with a wall o' text that reads an awful lot like the delusions of a schizophrenic. I am unsure if he's doing a bit, or genuinely delusional.)


Ideas are easy, it's writing the story and making it work that's hard. But here are a few ways to generate ideas for stories:

  • Mash together genres that don't naturally go together, and see what happens. There was an early 1990s HBO original movie called Cast A Deadly Spell that mixed together the hardboiled private eye archetype, the Lovecraftian mythos, and urban fantasy in general, and it's brilliant.
  • Take something that interests or bothers you, and play with it in your imagination. My novella Spring That Never Came started with reading a blog about a 1970s actress who had talent, but never found success, and ended up victim of a still-unsolved murder. That bothered me, and I took that, the 1970s Hollywood milieu, and another idea (or two) entirely, and made an urban fantasy that I'm still quite proud of.
  • Find a public domain story or novel that appeals to you, and use it as a springboard. SF writers do this all the time. Heinlein's Double Star is (partly) inspired by The Prisoner of Zenda. Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is a delirious, brilliant variation on The Count of Monte Cristo that aims far higher than Dumas's tale did, and hits the target. Asimov's Foundation stories famously began when he was pondering Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

    Though if you're going to do this, don't be boring about it and redo something everybody already knows, like Dumas or Walter Scott, find something obscure to launch from. James Grant wrote a lot of historical adventures, and very few remember him, as an example. I'm quite sure at least a few of them could be repurposed to a space opera setting, and the cruft (he wrote a lot of triple-decker novels) stripped away for a solid adventure story.

Another form of inspiration that seems to run more strongly in science fiction than anywhere else: writing a story (or series) to demonstrate how another SF author got something wrong (which follows from the fact that American science fiction has almost always been a conversation among authors, with ideas getting tossed back and forth all of the time).

  • Poul Anderson's short story "The Critique of Impure Reason" is a hilarious and brilliant roasting of Asimov's robot story "Reason", as well as an ode to pulp science fiction in general.
  • C.J. Cherryh was downright offended by Larry Niven's alien Kzinti being not only patriarchal, but literally only having the males be sentient, that she created her own matriachal cat-like race, the Hani, and wrote one of her best series, The Pride of Chanur and its sequels. (With the added bonus that the most alien character in those books is the sole human.)
  • My dear friend Sarah A. Hoyt has a book coming out this year that began as an idea when she was 14 and read Ursula LeGuin's prize-winning The Left Hand Of Darkness, and was furious because, as she puts it, "biology does not work like that!" No Man's Land is still being edited (I read it and gave her the editorial letter late last year, but the book is enormous, so it's taking time to make all the pieces fit and work together), but should be out by summer.

Ideas are easy to come up with. Original ideas that have never been done before, that's tougher. Original ideas that are good, and so intriguing that the reader will buy the book just to see how it plays out, even harder.

But nobody who writes fiction has any shortage of ideas. (Well, except William Gibson, maybe.) Ask any author if they need new ideas for stories and, unless they are blocked for some reason, they'll just laugh. Last I heard, Jim Butcher could easily write twenty more Harry Dresden books just on the ideas he had in a notebook ten-fifteen years ago. And that's not his only series, just his most successful. Larry Correia tosses off epic series of books seemingly as easily as breathing. (It's not that easy, but he makes it look so.) I myself have something like seventy folders in my Novels directory, and a fair number of those are for series, not one-offs.

But if these ideas for generating ideas aren't enough, go listen to John Cleese talk about creativity. (With lightbulb jokes.)

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All hook, no substance

I chanced to listen to the radio the other day, something I haven't done often in over twenty years. The radio in the car I was driving happened to be tuned to what used to be called an oldies station, but these days is kind of the same mush on every radio station—a blend of stuff from the '70s up to now, with recordings of the same "DJ" everybody probably hears across the country on some stations, because local broadcast radio is basically dead.

But that's a rant for another day.

As I drove, the unmistakable opening notes to a song I remembered fondly from my childhood started, and I thought something like "Man, I loved this, but I was a kid, rarely listened to the words, and can't even remember what the second or third verses might be." So I listened.

Turns out, there was good reason for that. The song doesn't go anywhere. There's the verse, the chorus, repeat, and done. It's literally three great hooks, some "deep" lines that don't add up to anything, and nothing more.

Now, the purpose of the song was to support a movie about a band, Eddie and the Cruisers. The song wasn't important, per se, to the movie except to have something cool, rocking, and distinctive for the band to play. Those hooks, that feel, was what was important, really. But as a song, it falls apart because it's not about anything, and the melody doesn't go anywhere.

In a way, the song is quite good for what it is supposed to be. It's supposed to be a minor hit from the early 1960s, pre-British Invasion. As that, it actually fits some standards of the time. Short. Emotional. Uncomplicated.

But even there, the shortest songs of the era had a feeling of going somewhere. "Stay (Just A Little Bit Longer)" by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs is about a minute and a half, but even though it's static in a storytelling sense (it ends with the same plea that opens it), it has real emotional movement to it. "On the Dark Side" tries to do this with the (wonderful, if brief) sax solo.

This is why the song is a nostalgia piece, not something that new generations discover and embrace as their own, in spite of the cult status of the movie for which it was created.

This is a good thing to remember when writing a story (of any length), too. Yes, you need a great hook, something to grab the reader and make him think "Whoa, that's cool!" And if you can do three great hooks, that's even better. but you need more than just hooks. The story has to be about something, and has to have some kind of movement to it, even if you wind up right back at the beginning.

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