George Lucas: Star Wars stood on the shoulders of Star Trek

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies: Kelvin Universe' started by serenitytrek1, Jul 12, 2013.

  1. CorporalClegg

    CorporalClegg Admiral Admiral

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    George Lucas did more for the advancement of motion pictures than anyone since Lumiere brothers.

    Is he a perfect filmmaker? No. He's made plenty of astronomical blunders.

    Would Star Trek be lucky to have someone of his caliber involved with a project? Absolutely.

    Old tropes didn't originate with Star Trek.
     
  2. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

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    Lucas is a great idea man but he's terrible at dialog.

    I've heard stories of Harrison Ford going to Lucas with a script and saying 'Nobody would ever say this crap', then ad-libbing something better.

    Plus Lucas' sense of humor has significantly devolved between the seventies and now, now he's focused on adorable children, cute fuzzy things and wacky slapstick.

    Lucas can come up with good ideas for movies but somebody else should hold the pen. Otherwise, meeza Jar Jar and Jewish stereotype aliens.
     
  3. MacLeod

    MacLeod Admiral Admiral

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    Sure you could possible credit GL for how FX looks today with the creation of ILM. WHich took FX upto a new level.
     
  4. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Define "ever." Star Trek was very successful on film and TV during the '80s and '90s when there was no new Star Wars in sight, and ST had a massively successful tie-in novel line for well over a decade before Lucas decided he wanted to try to duplicate its success for SW.

    And of course, it's safe to say that ST was infinitely more popular prior to May 1977. ;)



    In storytelling, yes, of course. But the point Lucas made in Trek Nation is that ST's success as a profitable science fiction franchise helped him convince the studio that it was worth gambling on his sci-fi movie.

    And of course it borrowed some things from ST, just as virtually everything in mass-media SF in the late '70s and early '80s borrowed things from ST. It cribbed terms like "tractor beam" and "deflector shield" directly, and had some thinly veiled borrowings like "proton torpedoes." Heck, just using bluescreen photography to shoot spaceship scenes was following ST's precedent.



    The screenplay to The Empire Strikes Back was credited to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan; the screenplay to Return of the Jedi was credited to Kasdan and Lucas. Kasdan also wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was always surprised and disappointed that Lucas didn't bring him back to write the prequels. He is involved as a consultant with the upcoming new movies, which I see as cause for optimism.


    As a producer, maybe. But as a director, his only really impressive accomplishment is A New Hope. It's weird that so many people think of him as a director. He's a producer who's occasionally directed.


    There I'm in agreement. Psychic/telekinetic tropes are just a slightly modernized version of magic/supernatural tropes that have been around for millennia. Stage magicians have been levitating objects since before motion pictures were invented. Fraudulent mediums and spiritualists used hidden wires to levitate people and things, and claimed to be able to communicate with the dead or to sense things from vast distances. And the trope of powerful beings hurling lightning from their hands goes as far back as millennia-old myths about storm gods such as Zeus and Thor.

    What Star Trek and Star Wars have in common is that they didn't invent tropes so much as distill and popularize pre-existing tropes. The difference is their source material. ST drew largely on prose SF literature ranging from the pulp era of the '30s to the proto-New Wave of the '60s, as well as borrowing a little Forbidden Planet and the like. SW, as mentioned above, was largely a pastiche of adventure serials like Flash Gordon as well as Westerns, WWII movies, and a liberal helping of sword-and-sorcery fantasy.
     
  5. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

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    Keep Lucas far, far away from Star Trek.
     
  6. Captrek

    Captrek Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Actually Elizabeth Dehner did it first.

    /nit
     
  7. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    And you think Star Trek wasn't?

    Okay, maybe not Samurai films.
     
  8. Captrek

    Captrek Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Lucas and Roddenberry were both hacks stealing from Harlan Ellison.
    Do Sturgeon, Bixby, Spinrad, Matheson and other sci-fi icons who contributed to Trek ever whine about the money Paramount made off their stories?
     
  9. Harvey

    Harvey Admiral Admiral

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    Of that group, only Spinrad is still alive.
     
  10. trevanian

    trevanian Rear Admiral

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    I think it'd be more accurate -- MUCH more accurate -- to say he did more to change motion pictures than anybody since the Lumieres.

    Digital wouldn't have evolved as quickly, and certainly wouldn't have caught on at the speed it has, if he hadn't spearheaded various processes in sound, VFX, editorial and cinematography ... but since those changes haven't always necessarily improved matters, but did make it possible to work much faster or at a greater volume of output (note I'm NOT grouping digital compositing in with this, because that seems to have been a win-win through and through), and since it has been in service to films that percentagewise seem significantly inferior to their predecessors ...

    And no, GL is not singlehandedly responsible for dumbing down the industry. But it isn't coincidental that after JAWS and then GL's big pic, that the supremely impressive era of filmmaking we saw in the early 70s has never recurred. I mean, for every EARTHQUAKE there was a THE LAST DETAIL, for every Bronson pic there were as many Coppolas (for a little while anyway) ...
     
  11. CorporalClegg

    CorporalClegg Admiral Admiral

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    But see I view the change to digital filmmaking as progress. As such, he advanced the medium like no one else.
     
  12. thumbtack

    thumbtack Commodore Commodore

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    And where would we be without Ewoks?
     
  13. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

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    Lucas and his company's influence on how filmmaking technology has advanced is something to be recognized. But that doesn't necessarily mean movies are better. They might look better. A bad film is still going to be a bad film if it has a lousy script, regardless if it's film or digital.
     
  14. teacake

    teacake Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Fucked.
     
  15. Kinokima

    Kinokima Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    I absolutely love the original SW trilogy but I am one of those people who hate what the blockbuster did to film. I am also not happy about the over reliance on special effects and marketing to the teenage audience. Yes there are still good movies but film in general has been dumbed down in my opinion.

    I am not going to blame Lucas for this (because like I said I do love Star Wars) but nor am I going to say Star Wars is the best thing to happen to film. In my opinion it is definitely not.

    It is nice to see Lucas acknowledge Star Trek though. I always felt the whole Star Wars Vs Star Trek thing was beyond stupid. Both are great in their own way and I love characters from both. Star Trek as a successful TV franchise might have helped pave the way for Star Wars and at the same time Star Wars helped pave the way for the Star Trek movie franchise.

    Needless to say no "sci-fi" visual media franchise has come close to topping these two.

    edit: Also not sure if I want to praise Lucas for the whole "digital film" thing because I am not sure if digital is actually better but that is a whole other can of worms.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2013
  16. Captrek

    Captrek Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Lucas : Digital :: Cameron : 3D

    The recent trend in 3D began with Avatar, which used the 3D to good effect. Now everybody does it, but most films aren't improved by it.

    It will be interesting to see if 48fps catches on. I have yet to see a movie in 48fps, but I hope to do so when the next Hobbit film is in theaters. It will also be interesting to see how (or whether) 48fps makes it to home video.
     
  17. Shaka Zulu

    Shaka Zulu Commodore Commodore

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    THIS.
     
  18. DalekJim

    DalekJim Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Like no-one else? Seriously? More than the Lumiere brothers, Sergei Eisenstein, DW Griffith, or Orson Welles? :lol:

    Lucas had the good fortune to work with a terrific, innovative special effects company. He had the luck of being the director of the movie their special effects sequences were placed in. To view him as not only a cinematic genius, but THE cinematic genius, is ludicrous.

    I'd take ENT S3 and ENT S4 over a huge chunk of Star Trek, so I must disagree. I think it's a damn shame ENT was cancelled, and in no way is this a satisfactory replacement.
     
  19. Belz...

    Belz... Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Maybe Star Wars is simply the improved (commercially) version of science fiction.

    He's excellent for looks and action scenes, making him a good second unit director, but he's terrible with actors.

    It wasn't really that much different before. I've seen movies from the 30s and 40s with similar sensibilities.
     
  20. Belz...

    Belz... Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Star Wars is possibly the most influential movie ever made, so yeah, kinda. Maybe except the Lumières and Edison, and the other pioneers such as Méliès, sure.

    That might have something to do with the fact that "this" are movies, and ENT was a series.