Clone Wars "Victory and Death" Spoiler Discussion and May the 4th Thread

Can we just have Dave Filoni over Lucasfilm creative? You know he probably calls up George to see what he thinks too. Last couple of episodes were amazing. Great send off. Thank you (Lucas) Filoni & Co. for a great series.

 

Filoni is George Lucas if he was a good director. He told the story of the prequels better than Lucas was capable of.

 

He is truly the apprentice to Lucas.

I'm glad him & Jon Fav are the ones behind The Mandalorian, but I really hope we get another Star Wars animated series post ROTJ with a youngish Luke Skywalker. I want Filoni doing that! Maybe even live action could be awesome.

 

How about doing animated movies, like the DC animated ones?

 

Been saying that forever too. Honestly theres quite a bit they could do. Love to see some Legends material adapted into animated films.

 

While I'm not overly defending Lucas's directing abilities on the prequels since they're very flawed films, this is an unfair statement to make. Lucas only had six hours to tell a story with the prequels whereas Filoni had hours of content to work with. Also let's not forget that Clone Wars as a whole isn't perfect either. The movie that kickstarted the whole thing is pretty bad and never should have had a theatrical release. If you had told me back then after seeing that movie that one day I'd end up liking the character of Ahsoka I'd have called you crazy. Thankfully it got a lot better after that.

 

It is also an important fact that Lucas needed someone like Filoni to help make Clone Wars what it was. So many of his ideas could have gone completely wrong without some help.

 

That's all true, but I do think that when Filoni is at his best he exemplifies a level of filmmaking that just doesn't exist in the PT. Granted they are different mediums and Lucas had a lot less time, but there are some fundamental things that Filoni got right that Lucas didn't. Lead characters like Anakin and Padme are three-dimensional and actually likable. The overall worldbuilding with the galactic politics and the Jedi's role in it is better realized. These are things that do not require dozens of hours to portray. Lucas had plenty of story real-estate to work with and he fumbled with it.

 

No, 1970s George Lucas is George Lucas if he was a good director. Lucas WAS a very good director once upon a time. However, the craft was a love-hate relationship for him and, in the 20 years between the OT and PT, he let that muscle atrophy and he also lost the supports that pushed him to be a better filmmaker, such as Marcia and Gary Kurtz.

 

I still think they should do a live action Clone Wars Jedi film with Obi and Anakin and Yoda in the film. It's a galactic war that lasted 3 years. There is soooooo much uncharted narrative territory in multiple genres.

As for the Legends, I'm hoping as more time passes Disney and Marvel will use the Legends brand as a sort of "Elseworlds" label and begin publishing new Legends material. But I think right now they just want to give the real canon time to establish itself fully and be around for a while before they start doing anything new with Legends.

 

You know, I’m glad Lucas decided to go back and do TCW. It gave us Dave Filoni, it gave us the characters of Ahsoka and Rex, it completely redid Maul so much better. Yet, something I really appreciated was the Clones. I rewatched Clones and Sith the other day and sandwiched some TCW episodes between them, and man, Order 66 is just so much better. I liked it before, but without TCW the turn feels like a surprise but only as they were droids, so it’s surprising Sidious could instantly turn the army. TCW made every Clone into a person, that became friends with their Jedi Generals. It’s now a surprise that these were beings developing relationships, forging strong bonds, and yet that chip Sidious had implanted could override all of it in one second, making for a much bigger shock. Not to mentions the tons of better Anakin stuff in TCW, but then I could just keep going on and on. TCW has some bad episodes, a couple really bad ones, it’s not perfect, but it’s honestly one of the high points of the franchise.

 

TCW made me resent the OT. Dont get me wrong I still love ANH and ESB as films. But I resent the fact that Lucas made the OT first and wrote the story into a corner. The Republic and the Jedi Order and that whole universe was a ****ing massive and awesome scifi and fantasy world. I want to see that universe continue. I want to see Jedi Master Anakin and Obiwan and Ahsoka and Rex continuing to fight bad guys and go on adventures and grow old and die as warriors and heroes. But because Lucas made 3 films decades ago all this wonderful stuff has to end. It has to be wrecked. It's just so damn frustrating. And frankly I'd be entirely fine with Disney doing an Elseworld canon in which Sidious's plan failed, the Republic won the war, and Anakin never fell to the dark side.

And to be even more frank, I just dont think the OT and the ST era has turned out to be even half as interesting as the Republic era. The OT and ST just feels so small scale and underdeveloped. It's all stories happening on backwater unimportant worlds. Theres no Jedi Order. No deep exploration of the government or civilization. And the Rebellion and the Resistance just pale in comparison to the Grand Army of the Republic and its war against the Separatists.

 

There's a part of me that agrees with the sentiment. The irony here is that, the reason the Republic era has been able to grow and evolve so much is because it was born from a series of movies that weren't that well received to begin with. The creators knew they were working with material people didn't like, so they a) put more effort into making it the best version of itself they could and more importantly b) they weren't afraid to take risks. "We'll change it a little" was the mindset, because at worst they would fail with characters people didn't care too much about in the first place. With the OT's expanded stories, especially the Marvel Star Wars main series (though even Rebels, which I love, is kind of guilty of this), there's always this feeling of restrain, they constantly gravitate to the familiar themes, characters and approach of ANH and Empire, probably because those characters are much more iconic and the writers feel a risky story could tarnish iconic movies via recontextualization, something they want to avoid at all costs. But this lack of creatitivy has, over time, made the OT era feel more stale, while the Republic era feels like a more vivid place, a place with more characters where everything can happen, in comparision.

 

You hit the nail on the head.

 

Very interesting that you say this, and I'm glad I stumbled upon it.

One thing that really struck a chord with me a few weeks ago when the movies were all running on cable over a weekend, was a realization of how 'small' and simple of a story and the universe of the OT really is in the grand scheme of things. It really is a very intimate set of stories in what feels like a fairly sparsely populated universe, with maybe the ROTJ battle pushing outside that box a bit. I mean heck, ESB is actually a very very small story, I remember at some points over the past 40 years not really liking it and thinking (outside the battle of hoth) that it was kinda boring. As a kid when I saw it I loved it, but I remember in my teen years not having the best view of it.

And yes.. there were "Legends"/EU stuff out there, that grew the universe quite avbit, but I wasn't a big consumer of it.

Once the PT came about there was such an expansion in scope of... everything, vastly bigger universe than we'd seen, all the political machinations, all the Jedi Order stuff, the Chosen One stuff. It actually makes the OT seem even smaller.

I'm almost to the point where I don't know if I have a favorite movie, because I so much enjoy the overall arch of what's happened. Or well.. I did up to the ST. That was just such a huge letdown to me, because, in it's effort to rekindle the 'magic' of the OT, it went "small" again and totally forgot about everything that had been opened up with PT.

But yeah individual movies, to me, are almost like just chapters in a book...and you typically don't have a favorite chapter in a book. It's just that I see them as part of this larger story. And as it turns out the wheels fell off at the end of that larger story, where I'd had such high hopes that we'd get closure on the themes and have gained an understanding of how The Force works within this Galaxy far Far Away.... thus just setting up context for any other stories they'd want to explore in the universe's past or future.

And yes I know there's a group of fandom that wouldn't have liked that... they prefer the mysteriousness of the force. I get that.

I also think there are so many different facets of the fandom now, that it's impossible to make everyone happy. Some people are into the Force aspects, some are into the OT characters only, some are into the space battles, others like the lightsaber stuff... others into the bounty hunters/smuggling side of things.... we've got folks that grew up on the OT, the PT, TCW, and now the ST.. everyone is going to have a different perspectie.