It Could Be Said #63 Did George Lucas Ruin The Star Wars Sequels?

The first part in a series of posts about where Disney went wrong with Star Wars

For years I’ve been threatening to write a big article on where I think the Star Wars sequels went wrong, and was finally spurred to do it at the beginning of the month. Alas the resulting wall of text is enough of a beast that I’ve split it up into a series of posts, the first of which below, looks at how what came before the Disney takeover gave everyone involved a much more difficult task than commonly appreciated.

Timing Is Everything

There is a well-known rhythm to nostalgia where revivals and relaunches work best around twenty years after the thing their returning to. The easiest way to explain this is to think about a ten year old who went to see Star Wars in 1977; they would be 32 when The Phantom Menace comes out in 1999 and 48 in 2015 when The Force Awakens is released. Very plausible they would first take their kids to the prequels and then their kids and grandkids to the sequel trilogy. Animated movies have long since perfected the art of including jokes for adults in the knowledge that children don’t actually get to rock up to the cinema by themselves nowadays, but legacy franchises have the in-built advantage of adults volunteering to share something from their childhood with the kids they know. That advantage extends to the purchasing of toys, clothes and other merchandise.

The problem for the sequels is that if Lucasfilm was wedded to roughly one trilogy every two decades, George Lucas’s decision to go with the prequels first, meant they had been pushed back to the late 2010s at the very earliest. But that of course created practical problems for the series given Harrison Ford’s age and Carrie Fisher’s health. The production of The Force Awakens would be interrupted by an injury to Ford, whilst Fisher would die before she could play the pivotal role planned for her in the final film of the trilogy. Throughout their appearances in the sequels both actors just looked worn out and ill at ease in a way that wasn’t true of Mark Hamill who could easily slip into the elderly wizard archetype that had been present in Star Wars from the creation. But having Luke pass from rising hope to elder statesman without depicting the intervening period in between, robbed the franchise of what could have been the hook for a second sequel trilogy. Above all, it meant that when the Disney sale went through, everyone was aware that there were very practical reasons to rush the films into production. And even in their haste they couldn’t quite get them done in time.

A late-90s sequel trilogy would have allowed the series to pick things up with its three legacy leads still capable of being leading actors in an action film, allowing for the characters of Han Solo and Princess Leia to be gracefully written out, and for Luke Skywalker to gradually develop into being an Obi-Won Kenobi-esque mentor for the new leads. That Lucas instead decided to first go with a set of prequels can partially be explained how The Return of the Jedi acted as such a hard ending to the series.

Thank God, That’s Over!

As extensively told in The Secret History of Star Wars the ideas behind the series had been swirling around in George Lucas’s head for some time without ever quite fully coalescing. But sometime between the first and second films the idea of them being two thirds of a middle trilogy of trilogies takes shape hence the re-release of the first film as Episode IV: A New Hope the year after its sequel raised the stakes in the most profound way possible. Empire Strikes Back not only places Luke at the heart of the machinations about the future of the galaxy but in a key exchange between Yoda and Kenobi hints at his ultimate failure by suggesting that there is someone else who could rescue the galaxy from The Dark Side.

The identity of that “other” hope was not originally meant to be revealed in the third film. Even at a late stage the original films were meant to end on a far more ambivalent note with Luke walking off into the distance, estranged from a galaxy that he and his father had just freed from The Empreror’s rule. But George Lucas was sick of the whole franchise and wanted to bring everything to a firmer ending, so not only did a smiling Luke play a full role in galaxy-wide celebrations over the total defeat of The Empire, but Leia was revealed to be his sister and “the other” Yoda spoke of. This even though she had never demonstrated any connection to the force, it contradicted her pre-exisiting backstory as a member of Alderaan’s royal family and rendered verboten the previous subplot of Luke being Han’s rival for Leia’s affections.

That The Return of the Jedi meant that any sequel trilogy would have to gingerly unpick a beloved happy ending to the series was only made worse by the poor reception to the prequels. In theory the sequels would need to explore The New Republic on Coruscant, and the interaction between Republican politicians and whatever military and Jedi forces now protected them. But not only had that story already been told, it had been told so poorly that Disney had clearly decided they couldn’t go anywhere near such concepts lest they annoy older fans. But if you can’t show the future that the The Rebel Alliance’s great victory secured for the galaxy, how can you credibly explain why it’s now under danger?

Likewise an underappreciated quirk of the first six Star Wars films is that Lucas’s vision narrows as the story becomes ever more tightly wound around Anakin Skywalker. That the original trilogy ends with him killing The Emperor sometimes obscures just how elevated his role becomes in the prequels, culminating with his final embrace of The Dark Side leading to the fall of The Jedi Order. Not only does the reimagining of the franchise as “The Fall and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker” undermine the trilogy of trilogies format, it also begs the question that if Star Wars has become more and more about the elder Skywalker, then surely you can’t have a new set of films without him? George Lucas certainly thought not, with his rumoured ideas for the sequel trilogy involving Anakin’s resurrection.

From A Standing Start

The next post in this series will look at the mistakes made by The Force Awakens in terms of characterisation and The Last Jedi in terms of plotting, which speaks to both films being underwritten as Lucasfilm lacked the proper structures to supervise the development of a coherent trilogy. And this comes back the simple fact that Disney rushed the sequels into production. Work on The Force Awakens began within weeks of their purchase of Lucasfilm with J.J. Abrams announced as the film’s director in January 2013. The need to get the film into production meant the original script writer left in October that year when he said he needed another year to finish it. Abrams and Lawerence Kasdan would instead write a new script in a couple of months. That it was it only finalised at the start of January gave only a few months for the film to be cast before filming started in April/May. The bulk of filming would be completed by November 2014, almost exactly two years after Lucasfilm had been reborn as a division of Disney.

But you can only appreciate how crazy a schedule this was when you remember Lucas had basically wound down his company after its early noughties burst of renewed activity. Lucasfilm didn’t really exist as a film company in any meaningful sense of the word back in 2012; indeed it was George Lucas’s realisation about how much it would cost to independently produce the sequels that made him willing to sell his life’s work. Led by Kathleen Kennedy, the new company would have to spring into life from a standing start to rapidly produce not just the new trilogy but several planned spin-off films. That it would all go wrong should not obscure the fact that to get the new Lucasfilm up and running but deliver one the biggest blockbusters of all time in just over three years is a staggering achievement.

And as we will see next time, they oh so nearly got it right, before snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So no, George Lucas didn’t ruin the Star Wars sequels, but he didn’t make it easy for successors.