Five years ago, Keith Martin, a Star Wars fan (whose other characteristics are unknown to me), thought very hard about the implications of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy and how it integrates with and changes the plot of the original movies. Specifically, Martin tried to reconcile the events of the final ten minutes of Revenge of the Sith with the situation at the beginning of A New Hope. Obviously, this is fairly well-trod territory, but what he came up with is worth a look and maybe some H'thon discussion (with the understanding that life really doesn't get much geekier than this):
A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope
4 comments:
Putting aside for the moment that his whole thing allows the prequels justification to exist, I will say that it's a formidable, well-thought-out essay. I think I had heard rumblings of this sort of thing before, i.e. the Chewie-and-R2-as-agents thing.
The one glaring flaw in his argument, as far as I see, is the idea that leaving Yavin "in cold light, is for the good of the Rebellion." Clearly, this was All In for the Rebels, and if Chewie really was aware of the entire history, why would he leave the son & daughter of Anakin to their almost certain doom?
With that in mind, it HAD to be Chewie's idea to turn around, go back and help out.
I LOVE the bit about Luke "leaking Force all over the place."
Thanks for the link, Jordan, this is great! I need to read it again before commenting. It never occurred to me that Leia was not putting the plans into R2 at the beginning of A New Hope.
See, on the one hand, you have to look at sequences from some of the greatest movies of childhood, film history etc. and somehow accept that what we're seeing --what's clearly meant and intended -- is actually something else; that we're misunderstanding or misinterpreting it.
On the other hand, as I've argued many times before, I believe that Lucas was already retconning himself in 1980, when he added all that new stuff. I'm a firm believer that Star Wars (1977) (not "A New Hope," but Star Wars as originally conceived) is a story in which Luke's father (Ben's "pupil") is somebody completely different from Darth Vader, and that Vader didn't become Luke's dad until Lucas started working on the Empire Strikes Back story and retconned it in there. They had to fudge the retcon in Jedi with that "a certain point of view" discussion. (I'm basing this on my typical insane familiarity with Star Wars, but also on a Wikipedia article which I'll find later.) Remember, too, that the "Biggs" scene from the Yavin sequence (which was restored for the Special Edition) had to be cut, because in the original version the dude tells Luke, "If you're anything like your father, you'll do all right." (The first six words are removed from the scene in the Special Edition, and the gap is covered by a superimposed passing pilot in the foreground.)
My point is, people are always retconning (John LeCarre and Tolkien and Arthur Conan Doyle do it shamelessly) and it always means you have to re-interpret what you saw against the obvious creators' intentions. The question is, what do you do when you don't like the changes? I'm not talking about "canon" or "non-canon"; I'm saying (for example) that you can consider yourself free to ignore the Matrix sequels because you don't like how they undermine the premises of the first movie. You can ignore the prequels (as HandsomeStan is recommending) or you can try to integrate them with what we already know, which is what this dude is trying to do. I don't know what the "rules" are...in fact, I don't think there are any "rules" about this.
Point being, Lucas clearly WANTS us concerned with continuity; that's why he goes to so much trouble with matching the sets and costumes and logos and music between the movies. So all this speculation is in tune with his intentions.
It's not like (for example) Star Trek, where they just completely re-designed the Klingon Bird of Prey between III and IV and nobody noticed or cared. Lucas would never do that!
Lucas wants us to fit it all together in our heads.
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