Posted 04 October 2004 - 10:59 AM
Yeah, more of what movie goer just said:
TPM and AOTC (I presume) have weaknesses that the viewer HOPES will be resolved with the final segment, plot holes that we (that is, other people, not me so much) PRAY will be fixed up later. So the onus is on the later film to make the current one good.
EMPIRE is great and incomplete, and it gave its sequel a lot to answer for and to live up to. EMPIRE is not as good post-1983 as it was pre-1983, simply because JEDI failed to complete the story and to live up to the promise. In fact, in the light of the story elements made available in JEDI, EMPIRE just sucks ass.
But it's not EMPIRE's fault; it's due to the fact, not known to us at the time, that Lucas had no idea what he was going to do with all that stuff he was throwing at us in 1980. Unlike the PT, where Lucas has produced mediocre films he need to make better with a decent conclusion, with EMPIRE Lucas had produced a great flick and he needed to live up to it. When actually put to the wall, he waffled. And too bad, because in my opinion he had something there for a year or two.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).