and Exercice 1 sample
I suppose I should just keep my mouth shut about George Lucas since he’s so well-loved and successful,but there are many rules that govern film art in science fiction, and five that George Lucas has violated most egregiously. They are as follows:
1) That your characters, though they may be from a fantastic world from beyond the stars, should
speak in a manner that is clear to the audience. So, even if you have a character who speaks
with inverted syntax, it’s a bit unlikely they’d form a sentence as circuitous as “Around the
survivors, a perimeter create!” if they were truly in some sort of immediate duress.
2) That you not spend so much time on the scenery that you lose track of the story itself. We all
love Star Wars for the world-building and the spectacle, but once you’ve established the desert
terrain of the podrace and the dangers therewith, do you really need to spend nearly ten
minutes on it in the middle of a movie, especially when the entire audience already knows who’s
going to win?
3) That you not use digital effects simply to show off technology. All the die-hard fanboys knew
about the unfinished Jabba the Hutt scene, and we all wondered about what might have been if
you’d only had the technology to create him back in 1977. But adding in a creature that doesn’t
fit the scale of the original actors so that one character has to make some herky-jerky digital
stutter-step over the tail of other only calls attention to how poorly you made your revision.
4) That you include women who aren’t necessarily princesses or relatives of the hero. No one can
deny that Princess Leia has an independent nature that challenges patriarchal notions of
womanhood, but did she have to be a princess in need of rescue? That story seems a bit overused, don’t you think? And in an entire galaxy of characters, the only other woman we see in the
Star Wars universe is Luke’s aunt and foster mother. It seems in the hero’s journey there is only
room for two women, a mother, of sorts, and a love interest. The least George could do would
be to include a sister!
5) That you not forget to explore the diversity here on earth before imagining the cultures of
dozens of alien races. One of the most famous scenes in the entire Star Wars franchise, and
indeed all of movie history, is the cantina scene in Mos Eisley, where blue-eyed, blonde-haired
Luke Skywalker and blue-eyed, grey-haired Ben Ken Kenobi meet Indiana Jones and his furry
companion Chewbacca amidst scores of creatures ranging in size, shape, and color, but not a
single non-white human to be seen there or anywhere else in the film!
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