| A very serious ‘Star Wars’ question |
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| Written by Matt Adams-Wenger - Argonaut | ||||||
| Monday, 08 February 2010 | ||||||
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This is something that's been on my mind for a while now, ever since the reboot and the retcon came into fashion. For the uninitiated (or the non-geeks), retcon means retroactive continuity. It's when the writers of a franchise decide to change something about a past storyline. It'd be like if we all agreed the South won the Civil War or something like that. That would affect everything in the present. Another geekier example is when "Batman Begins" came out and fans started over with the Batman franchise. They also changed his origin story a little bit. No biggie, but now it's a little different from when I learned about Batman from Michael Keaton and Tim Burton. Same with "Casino Royale" - more than 20 James Bond films worth of character development restarted in a single movie. I love what they did, but it raises a serious question: What do I show my kids first? This question pertains specifically to "Star Wars" more than anything else. I know you're all losing whatever respect you had for me quickly right now, but beyond the geeky ramifications, there are serious literary considerations at stake. Up until recently, we all saw the "Star Wars" movies the same way: it started with "A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi," and then the prequels. And to us, the prequels were interesting in that it was only a question of how George Lucas was going to explain the few events we knew were going to happen. We knew Anakin would become Darth Vader, but we didn't know how until the prequels. That's a strangely temporal trick for Lucas to play: start us halfway through a space epic and then go back and give us all the exposition 20 years later. But in the future when I have kids, they don't have to do it the way I did. They have a choice of seeing it from the beginning and not having to wait until "Empire" to find out Vader is Luke's father. And now I'm wondering which way would be better, or is there a better way at all? I think there's an argument for doing it either way, but I don't want to let the old way win out just because it's what we're used to. The strongest argument in favor of seeing the prequels last is that there is a lot left unknown, and it makes what little story Lucas didn't mangle in the prequels so much more interesting. Plus, it can't be ignored that it would be weird to watch the prequels, then jump back in time - in terms of special effects - to watch the sequels. But - and this is a big but - would it be necessarily better to know what we know going into the prequels? If you saw the prequels first, then a majority of the sequels would become more character-driven. They're just cowboy movies in space until "Jedi," when everything makes sense and everyone knows who they are. If we already know what will happen and are just waiting for the characters to figure it out, then we're more invested in Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan and Vader's relationship. It's only a matter of time before people forget there was "Star Trek" before the new Abrams version. I think it will be interesting to see how our perspectives of legacy fiction like this change over time. OK, back to pretending I'm not a massive geek.  Add as favorites (10) | Views: 229
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