My brain has been taken over by midichlorians

[mishaday]

Today was consumed by Star Wars. Oh, sure, I meandered through the University Street Fair and took a nap, but pretty much Star Wars.

There was a film crew there who asked if I would be in their little documentary (The Audience Strikes Back) and I gave them a few thoughts directly after the movie.

After a few hours of brain percolation, some of the answers have changed.

Sure, as a few hours of entertainment, I enjoyed the movie. The action was the best so far, and I truly geeked over the tech - the shapes the starships were taking were familiar, and I could see the evolution of tech from shiny to war-scarred and the direction it would take made sense. Story-wise...

Well, like any tragedy, I end up supremely annoyed with the characters.

And annoyed with Lucas. I never needed the prequels - part of the magic of Star Wars was the shape of the silence: "Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars." The details didn't matter, just a sense of galactic scope. And Lucas ruined that a bit, taking green and purple and orange crayons and coloring in the white space of a Mondrian. Sure, he stayed in the lines, mostly, but it was completely unnecessary. Midichlorians were just the bright puce polka-dots, really.

My bright spot is that this month in crack_van there have been a lot of wonderful Star Wars fics recs and I've wandered my way out to the other side and got sucked into the rebuilding of the Jedi order and... err... may have been sucked in by some Luke/Mara fics.

Comments

[wolfling]

The original trilogy definitely stood on its own, but I can never wish away the prequels -- not only do they give more depth to Obi-Wan and Anakin/Vader, but if we never had the prequels, we'd never have had Qui-Gon and I love that character far too much to wish away the story he was in. (And I can't say enough how much I love that Lucas gave him back to Obi-Wan at the end of RotS; it's actually giving me the itch to write SW fic again and I haven't really done any of that since before Attack of the Clones was released.)

I'm currently this weekend doing a marathon of all 6 movies because I wanted to watch it all together, see how the original trilogy reads now that we have this background completed. I do know that events that were great when I watched them as a kid resonate with even more emotion and meaning now that we see the beginnings. I appreciate that kind of added emotional depth.