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• Screenwriting
  

Movie recommendations

Movies recommended by Tarantino

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My thoughts while watching / summarizing this

• The most basic underlying concept for the prequels is itself seems like a kind of fan service: Darth Vader is a cool character and the audience wants to know more about him, so give it to 'em, regardless of whether it actually makes a good "hero's journey" adventure movie.  It seems like it would make a better Godfather-type movie, which would cater more to adults than kids.
• I'm reminded of the Jurassic Park sequel-analysis video I saw: the appeal of the original film is largely the awe of seeing something you've never seen before. So once the first movie has done and the audience has seen the new thing, it's very difficult to recapture that magic in a sequel. In Star Wars' case the sequels benefited a lot from the bond the audience had formed with the characters in the first movie.
• It seems that Lucas started out with certain constraints which made it more difficult to create a good story.
  
  • He wanted to include R2, C-3PO, young Anakin, young Obi-Wan, Luke / Leia's mother, and Palpatine.
  • Having young Anakin and young Obi-Wan significantly restricted Lucas' options for casting two of the main characters of the story, as the characters had to look a certain way.
• He then didn't have a process to verify that the script was great before expensive production work began.
• Mike doesn't mention this, but the entire film is very fully-lit.  You don't have the same kind of shadows and darkness that you see in the original trilogy.  It would be interesting to have some kind of graph of the luminosity of the screen throughout the film for both the original trilogy and the prequels.
• It would be interesting to apply the same level of scrutiny to the original trilogy that Mike does here.  I'm aware of at least some things in the original trilogy that people find as questionable as some of the things Mike pointed out here: Ewoks, the discrepancy in Luke's abilities between the end of ESB and RotJ.

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