Things The Star Wars Saga SHOULD Have Taught Us

About Life:

1) Light and Dark are not bad things. The Dark Side is not the Evil Side. But it's easier to use for evil means because it's more powerful offensively. The Light Side is only seen as good because much of it's power tends towards defensive abilities, mastered through meditation. But the saga is there for a reason larger than "Yay! Lasers and princesses in the same story! Let's blow things up in space!". The saga as a whole (Yes, I am recognizing episodes 1-3 as part of the saga officially, dispite my initial displeasure at how they were writen) is a lesson on the need for balance. Their conflicts arrise from the belief that one side is right, and the other wrong. Point of view draws them into combat with each other. The Jedi believe Anakin will bring "balance" to the Force by helping eliminate the Sith, when in fact, the only way to balance a council of several hundred Jedi against a few Sith is to kill a lot of Jedi. As it was, the Force was stacked in favor of the Light Side-favoring wannabe-Vulcans. And as good as it is to have them around, people are not meant to live lives of logic. Nor are they meant to spend their years cultivating hatred. The true "balance" in the Force ends up being Luke, who embraces qualities of both schools of thought to confront Vader and the Emperor. We must all find this balance.

2) It doesn't matter who shoots first. It matters if you can walk away from it.



About Film Making:

3) It's okay to change an audience, but not too much. A New Hope was so good because it was a grown-up's fairy tale. It was a quest to save a princess from a black knight. But with lasers and a wookie. The Empire Strikes Back was a great follow-up, and takes our heroes into darker territory, setting us up for a final showdown in the next film. Return (Revenge) of the Jedi is the darkest of all, and yet, for some reason, this film is infested with Ewoky cuteness. As if C3PO wasn't annoying us enough on his own, we now have to listen to the incessant screaching and purring of Ewoks as they show us all the reasons they should have never been able to flourish as their own society. But yes, many of them die (some heroicly), making the Empire an obviously horrible enemy, but by this point, we know how terrible they can be and we don't need the very obvious visual of stormtroopers killing teddy bears.

In these terms of an evolving tone through the movies, episodes 1-3 actually mature better, in a manner which I'm going to call the Jar-Jar Effect. The less he is featured in a film, the darker it is, and the closer to the original Trilogy you are. Jar-Jar Binks is inversely proportional to the quality of the movie.

4) We really don't need to see how everyone was as a child. Boba Fett, though in need of more focus as a character (since we assume he's a badass until he's beaten by a blinded Han Solo), was an entirely unneccessary addition to Episode 2 as a little boy. In the books, I know Boba Fett is supposed to survive, managing to escape the Sarlaac's stomach before he is digested, but unless the fact that the clone troopers were cloned from his father (like him) plays a major part in the next episodes (Lucas wrote 9, remember?), his history is something that would have been best left a mystery.

5) Human dialog is the key to a movie. I don't care how many ships you can show in combat at once, or how amazing the action is, if your main characters sound less human than R2D2, the whole piece of art will suffer and it will flop. I sincerely wish I could get a few people and redo the scenes that went wrong in the 'new trilogy' - say, all of the scenes involving Anakin or Padme.