So, Cumberbatch as a casting possibility:
http://screenrant.com/star-wars-7-9-trilogy-benedict-cumberbatch-sith-villain/
So, Cumberbatch as a casting possibility:
http://screenrant.com/star-wars-7-9-trilogy-benedict-cumberbatch-sith-villain/
Originally posted by DARTH POWER
So, Cumberbatch as a casting possibility:http://screenrant.com/star-wars-7-9-trilogy-benedict-cumberbatch-sith-villain/
Story says he would be in all 3 movies. He might not just be a "bad guy" right from the start. In the length of 3 movies, he could start good and become bad or vice versa. Or even have a role that's more gray where he acts based on what's good for the Force or for the Republic, sometimes good/sometimes not so good. An excellent actor like him shouldn't be wasted on just being The Bad Guy.
I think we only hear about there only being 2 Sith at any one time in TPM because GL thought it would explain why there are only 2 force sensitive bad guys in the original trilogy. I do hope they go into Jedi/Sith history for the new movies personally, but I am aware that a lot of the EU centers around this so it would be hard to achieve this with any degree of originality without annoying hardcore fans of the EU.
Ushgarak and I were talking about this, earlier, in the thread. Was a good read:
Star Wars was almost perfectly constructed for success in many different ways, and this is actually a good historical question because the reasons behind this have a rich history.Let's start with scifi as a genre. Beginning in the late 19th century with authors such as Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and others science fiction came into being as a substantial and widely popular literary genre. Through the early to mid 20th century a huge number of new and talented authors brought the genre to substantial heights of legitimacy and sophistication by presenting an ever growing and highly varied selection of imaginative worlds, characters, and circumstances. A backbone of the science fiction literature world were the many magazines and anthology publications that regularly printed collections of short stories by many different authors. These magazines (such as Galaxy, Analog, and others) gave many budding scifi authors their start and helped cultivate a readership that sought out inventive and thought provoking stories in speculative often futuristic settings.
By the 1970s there was quite a collection of scifi authors whose work could be compared favorably with that of nearly any literary fiction author. Authors such as Ursula K Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Phillip K Dick, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and many more. These were authors who wrote stories on epic scales and often addressed important and even politically sensitive topics. Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness", for example, addresses issues of gender, sexual orientation, totalitarian governance, and tribalism both directly and competently within the framework of a gripping and interesting plot that involves technologies and developments that are far removed from 20th century norms. That book was published in 1969, decades before such themes would be widely accepted by society at large in the western world and yet it was a very popular book at the time and it won the two most prestigious awards the science fiction literary community gives out (the Hugo and the Nebula).
All of that is to say that science fiction as a literary genre was quite well established and enormously sophisticated by the mid 20th century, which will put into sharp contrast the genre in the medium of television and movies.
Science fiction within the movie industry developed along entirely different lines. One of the ongoing problems of the film industry, and to a lesser extent the television industry, is that productions are expensive. Consider a stereotypical "western", for example, which were very popular movies for several decades through the mid 20th century. You'll likely need to shoot outside for some scenes, you'll need horses, you may need cows and wagons, you'll need period costumes and props, and so on. These things compound the expense of making a movie. Now consider a movie with a scifi setting. You can shoot the whole thing indoors if you like, on a soundstage where the set is a "space ship" interior or what-have-you. You don't have to worry about accuracy of props or costumes, anything you invent can be shoehorned into the science fictional setting. Instead of costly outdoor action scenes you can use special effects shots using props to show planets, spaceships, space battles, and so forth. And if you ever did need an outdoor scene you could get away with a barren landscape and you certainly didn't need horses or wagons.
In short, scifi movies and tv shows became popular to a substantial degree because they were cheap and easy to make. You have a similar phenomenon with many other movies of noticeably similar complexion, such as old monster movies. And because of this the quality of scifi movies and television shows was just not very good, with only a handful of exceptions. Consider the twilight zone and the outer limits, for example. These shows certainly fall into the category of "cheap scifi" which is why it was so easy to justify their production, though with the aid of talented writers and producers with good taste they were often able to overcome their low production values and present compelling science fiction. Compare that to the sheer mountain of material that has graced the screens under the science fiction banner but which at best might be a guilty pleasure. A copious bounty of material for commentary shows like MST 3K to lampoon without ever having to worry about running out.
But even though the quality was often laughable some of it was rather entertaining and quite popular. Which brings us to the next topic: serials. Prior to the television era films were the only form of broadcast audio visual entertainment. From the 1920s through the 1940s a unique form of film, the serial, came to popularity. These were stories that were broken up into episodes or chapters, each of which might only be 10-20 minutes long, typically they would be shown paired with a feature length film. The individual chapters were shown for a period of a week before moving on to the next, and often chapters would end with a cliff-hanger. Serials encompased many varied genres but science fiction did well there. The low cost of production and the ability to create settings and characters out of whole cloth was a near perfect fit. Many of the most famous science fiction stories in film from the first half of the 20th century are serials, such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Undersea Kingdom, Captain Video, Commander Cody, etc.
With the invention of television the serials largely died out. Meanwhile, cinema from the 1950s through the 1970s went through several fundamental changes. Take a look at the scifi films that managed to make it into the top 20 grossing films in a year for the early 1970s. You have The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, and several Planet of the Apes sequels. All of these were very dystopian views of the future. Each of them were post-apocalyptic or nearly so, and all of them could be characterized mostly as action dramas.I'm sure I could have done a better job explaining one or another subject above but this is already getting pretty long and I don't want to spend too much time just in preparation.
So, given all of this backdrop you insert the movie Star Wars. Star Wars is an utterly different sort of science fiction film in a great many ways. And here I'm going to go through piece by piece to simplify the comparisons before coming back for a summary.
Instead of being set in a dystopian future Earth the backdrop of Star Wars is an entire galaxy filled with many planets teeming with technologically advanced civilizations and many alien species. In the first 90 seconds of the film you learn a great deal just from the opening crawl backed by John Williams' impressive orchestral score. You learn that all of this is set in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. You learn that the galaxy is ruled by an evil empire which has acquired a new weapon of terrifying power, the Death Star, but which is fought by a rebel alliance capable of standing up to the empire in battle and achieving some measure of victory. You learn other things as well, such as that this is the middle of a longer story (Episode IV) and that there are princesses in this story and one of them is an important leader of the rebellion and in possession of information which could save the entire galaxy from tyranny.
And just as this information is settling in the crawl fades into the distance and the opening scene hits viewers with an enormous clue by four of exactly what sort of movie they are in for. First a small distant spherical object is seen, perhaps a planet. Expectations built up from past films would indicate that this is about the most you could hope for in a brief establishing shot of "outer space" in this genre. But the camera continues to pan and before you have time to cogitate about a much more impressively rendered and much larger planetary body that comes into view you're hit with the stunning vista of the limb of a planet that fills the entire bottom part of the screen. And then only a moment after that a space ship comes on screen, flying away from the camera and firing lasers backwards. Now it becomes clear that you've been thrust into the midst of a space battle near some planet. And again, before you have time to let any of this settle the movie ups the stakes again, with the appearance of the pursuing spaceship. And here we have the iconic scene of the enormous triangle of an imperial star destroyer pushing its way into the field of view. The instant the star destroyer comes into view you realize it must be larger than the other ship, but the ship just keeps getting bigger and bigger, while the orchestral score crescendos in the background, until you are left with an understanding that the star destroyer must be a ship of unimaginable size.
From just this you learn that Star Wars is not a drama nor even an action drama, it is an epic. Something that has been absent from cinema, in any genre, for many years in 1977, something that is almost anathema to the culture of hollywood at the time, but something that still tugs at the emotions of the movie going public. Oh, and there is also a nod to the film serials of the past, which might give some folks a hint that adventure, exploration, and derring do on a grand scale are in store.
Already many of the core pillars of the movie have been revealed to the viewers. The core plot elements, the setting, the scale of the story and the stakes, and the quality of the special effects. Within those first 3 minutes of the film the viewers are transported to an expansive futuristic world where enormous spaceships do battle in the skies with the lives of untold numbers of people in the balance.
(continued...)
cont'd:
As I mentioned above scifi in films, with rare exception, tended to be significantly "dumbed down". Even though Star Wars was not as sophisticated as the best literary scifi it still touched on many important topics. Consider, for example, the droids, which are actually the very first characters in the film that are seen. Viewers quickly bond with these droids, but even in the first film we see that they are second class citizens in this universe. They are slaves, they are subject to segregation, and their lives are valued very little by people. This despite their obvious signs of sentience, emotion, intelligence, and self-awareness. This is a remarkably deep subject matter which forms the backdrop of the first few minutes of the film. And yet it is not merely a throwaway part of the story, as R2D2's escape from his new slave masters is a key plot point and the pointed words of the bartender in Mos Eisley toward the droids that he doesn't serve "their kind" is meant to draw attention to the subject without making it the overriding subject of the film. Very quickly you understand that this universe is filled with a great deal of immorality and just as much moral ambiguity.Then there is the appearance and structure of the imperial forces. There are a shocking number of comparison points between the Empire and the 3rd Reich of the Nazis. The assumption of power through questionable means, the maintenance of power over conquered peoples through threat of force, the "stormtroopers" which share the same name with Nazi paramilitary forces, the rigid military order and strict discipline, etc. But you also see a deeper element. The powerful figures in the empire (such as Tarkin and Vader) are not mere dime store villains such as Ming the Merciless, they are complex characters. They are administrators and leaders. They have differing opinions and sometimes they have deep insights into the minds of their enemies. But even so you are presented with abundant evidence of their evil. They torture political prisoners, they blow up planets, they force choke subordinates to death, and so on. It's certainly not the deft portrayal of the banality of evil that one might see in a film like Schindler's List but it is a far cry from the typical ham handed villains of the genre.
Even today gender issues are an ongoing struggle in hollywood, yet Star Wars had no less than a princess who could stand on her own. In a typical chauvinistic adventure story the hero might fight through adversities to rescue the princess (who might as well be an object in the story). In Star Wars there is a princess, and a rescue, but it's in the middle of the story and happens by accident. Moreover, rescuing her doesn't "save" her, it allows her to return to the rebellion to help lead it. Leia proves herself to be more than just a mere object, she is a hero in her own right, a fighter, and a powerful political figure.
But the meat of the story is Luke's coming of age and his hero's journey. This is an archetypal story that is thousands of years old, it resonates deeply with our culture and sentiment and has since the bronze age. Homer's Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Frodo's journey with the one ring, these story arcs have always been popular and Star Wars executes its version well.
Taken together, all of these elements add up to something a bit more than the sum of its parts. You have a movie which hits a lot of popular high notes that have been out of fashion for a while (mythology/hero's journey, adventure epic, serials, futuristic scifi) and hits each of those notes squarely and strongly. Stunning visuals across the board from planets to epic and realistic looking space battles on an unprecedented level of scale and complexity. An equally stunning orchestral score that submerges the viewer into the mood and atmosphere of the universe and the story. An enthralling story arc with many iconic character types. Complex and thought provoking issues (not just oppression by "bad guys" but totalitarian rule by political forces, segregation and slavery, racism, gender equality, etc.) And you even get a happy ending where the good guys win despite the odds, which was even more out of character for the time. All of those things contribute to the immense and immediate popularity of Star Wars as well as to a long-lasting fascination with the universe and characters.
Based on that, I honestly do not think the new Star Wars Trilogy will have the same cultural impact and result. The cinematic vacuum and describes is just not present, currently. The best we can get are films that have great writing, acting, VFX, and an nicely executed story. But I don't think we can have something like A New Hope, again. It just will not have the same impact.
I doubt the ST will have the impact the original film(s) did. It came out in a time when sexy adventure space fantasies didn't really exist (the 70s), and its use of special effects was wondrous for the age. We're not wowed by that shit anymore. We're inundated with sexy adventure space fantasies (and every other kind of fantasy) and special effects are coming out of every movie's orifice. Star Wars appeared out of nowhere and blew everyone away. Star Wars VII will not. That we all know about it years beforehand, and that it's Star Wars VII, will create a much shallower impact crater. It's nice to imagine that a new generation of the same franchise that we all know as the "F*ck Yeah" of sci-fi awesomeness will have the same effect on kids an adults as the progenitor did, but it's wishful thinking and rose-tinted goggles, unfortunately.