Restoring Balance to the Force: Episode II - Simplicity Strikes Back

Restoring Balance to the Force

Episode II

SIMPLICITY STRIKES BACK

This week I found this amazing collection of Star Wars and Indiana Jones drawings by the very talented Andrew DeGraff. They depict the paths of each of the main characters in each movie. And yes, I want a framed copy of each one. It has been a month and a half since I introduced my series on how to fix the Star Wars prequels and my first entry focused on how a simple plot restructuring could make Episodes I-III into enjoyable films. This entry will discuss how over-complexity helped wreck the prequels and how a streamlined plot could save them.

The two greatest Star Wars movies are, without question, The Empire Strikes Back and A New Hope, and while I am a big fan of Return of the Jedi, the problems that would plague the prequels first became evident in that film. So, let's take a look at the best of the best.

While that drawing up there might seem very intricate, it really illustrates how straightforward of a movie A New Hope is. After most of the main characters are introduced to each other on Tatooine, they spend almost the entire remainder of the movie together. Really, the scenes on Tatooine really only serve to introduce the characters and give us an idea of their backgrounds: Luke is a restless teenager/orphan; Obi-wan is an old hermit/exiled Jedi; Han is a money-obsessed smuggler. There are no side-plots to distract from the overarching storyline: the evil Empire has constructed a superweapon and will hunt down anyone who opposes it.

Sorry Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru.

After that point the plot is extremely linear: Save the princess, escape the Death Star, destroy the Death Star, receive medals. You can count the number of important characters in the movie on two hands: Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca, R2D2, C3PO, Darth Vader, and Tarkin. And Wedge. You always have to count Wedge.

In fact, I should write an entire blog piece about how having Wedge in a Star Wars movie is the only way to ensure it will be good.

In Empire Strikes Back, the plot is even simpler. After the main characters escape Hoth, all of them except Luke, spend the rest of the movie just being chased until they arrive at Cloud City. Luke simply goes to Dagobah, discovers Yoda, and starts his training. They are all reunited for the most part on Cloud City where, once again, they are chased. And unlike any other Star Wars movie (or really even most action/superhero/sci-fi movies today), the "victory" of our protagonists is simply that they survived. They did not blow up a Death Star, they did not kill a Sith Lord, and they did not win a single major battle. They are just alive! Luke has one hand less than he began with and Han is frozen in carbonite, but the happy ending is just that they were not murdered. Empire Strikes Back is likely the most critically acclaimed movie of the Star Wars series and it definitely carries the most emotional power to it, and it did not depend on some contrived, over the top battle to do it.

By the way, while Luke was busy getting his gunner killed and crashing his speeder, Wedge was all like, "What, trip this indestructible giant robot camel using tow cables? Piece of cake, m*****f****r."

As I said earlier, I am a big Return of the Jedi fan. If you haven't caught on, it has a lot to do with the fact that Wedge blows up the fracking Death Star.

(Lando helped)

But RotJ is where plot complexity starts to get out of hand. The rescue from Jabba's palace becomes improbably complex (What if Jabba had accepted the two droids as trade for Han? No more R2D2/C3PO then. What if R2 hadn't managed to get in position to get Luke his lightsaber? No more Han, Luke or Chewie then. And, what good was Lando doing undercover?). Our climax is not one, not two, but three big battle scenes! One on Endor, one in space (which is awesome, because Wedge), and one on the Death Star. I do think this huge climax works for the most part because it involves all of our main cast (which had slowly grown since A New Hope) and since it concludes the final installment of an epic trilogy.

The problem is, each of the prequels would have a similar climax.

The other problem was the ewoks. Damn them.

Pictured above: not Wedge.

I am asking you, dear reader, to try and summarize the plots of any of the three Star Wars prequels in a simple manner. You can't, can you? Here is my attempt:

Concerns over the taxation of trade routes has led to the blockade of Naboo by the Trade Federation who are revealed to be manipulated by a Sith Lord. Obi-wan and Qui-gon Jin are dispatched to negotiate with them, but escape an assassination attempt and end up on Naboo's surface where they run into Jar Jar Binks who leads them to the underwater city of the Gungans where they acquire transport through the planet core to the capitol city of Naboo. There they meet Princess Amidala and help her escape the planet, but they are sidetracked to Tatooine where they coincidentally meet a young slave boy who is powerful in the force. A wager is made over a podrace where the boy is freed to join the Jedi, who now travel to Coruscant to argue for Republic assistance. When that fails, the whole group returns to Naboo where FOUR climatic battles break out: one between the Gungans and droid army, one at the Naboo capitol, one in space, and one between the Jedi and Darth Maul.

I might have been able to word that more simply, but my main point is this: the plot is littered with unnecessary sidetracks and features a bloated climax that features more final battles than Return of the Jedi! The movie would have sucked even without the terrible acting and dialogue; it lacked a straightforward narrative to carry us along with the protagonists.

Some movies thrive off of a complex plot with dozens of characters. A closely related film series, The Lord of the Rings, is one of those. But Star Wars plays out more like a fable or a medieval quest (that is one reason why it features knights and sorcery).

The way to fix this is by taking the model from A New Hope or Empire Strikes back. The bulk of our main characters need to stick together and when they do separate, they need to be involved in very similar tasks (i.e. when Obi-wan, Luke, Han, and the droids split up on the Death Star). The plot can still take them to Naboo, Tatooine, and Coruscant, but it should be careful to not get bogged down in unnecessary scenes that detract from the forward march of the movie: less dinner chats and junkyard visits on Tatooine, less cultural discussions about Naboo/Gungan relations, and, for heavens sake, less monotonous senate arguments.

I will only focus on Episode I today, but the same holds true of the next two prequels. Try and do a count of how many large battles there are, how many lightsaber fights, how many major characters you are supposed to keep track of. Are any of them Wedge? (No.) How many branches does the plot split into?

I realize that this blog-piece is lighter on solutions than my previous one. My advice mainly applies to whomever is rewriting the plot. The most important concern is a compelling plot, but for it to evoke the feel of the original trilogy, it will have to be more simplistic than the prequels, or the majority of action movies today, for that matter.

I hope you're listening!

My next and final entry will focus on the last element that is crucial to remaking the Star Wars prequels: The Return of the Philosophy! I hope you'll stick around to read it!