I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
"The whole point of this movie is to bridge Episode II and IV. Everyone knows what has to happen; the fun is to see how it’s going to happen."
ReplyDeleteAnd the answer turned out to be: In the most mechanical way possible.
:-)
Mechanical yes - but effective. I think Lucas gave what his audience expected - all tied up in a neat little bundle. But in retrospect - aside from the big shocker - that Vader was Luke's father, which we all learned way back when - have there have any huge surprises in the the Star Wars films? That's not Lucas's MO. His dialogue is crisp and forthright; he doesn't allude, at least in terms of his storyline. His strength is in his technical abilities and his ability to translate imagination into something visual.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that - did anybody notice a difference between The Empire Strkes Back (not directed by Lucas, but written by him) and the other Lucas directed episodes? (I have seen all of them, but my long term memory is pretty much shot at this point... )