No joke, the Lego TFA game was one of my favorites; it brought more life to the worlds and settings than the movie ever did. It was paced better too; TFA could have been improved enormously by an editor who understood that drama needs to be allowed to breath and break up the action.
That’s the real tragedy of the Disney Trilogy: there were a lot of concepts and design elements that really had potential if they had just given it to someone who actually understood real people.
The TFA teaser was a stroke of genius and if I could have the version of that film that existed in my mind from that minute and a half of content, I’d be more than happy.
The concepts were there, and immediately compelling:
1) An awakening in the Force, shown in a Stormtrooper, drenched in sweat, wresting with a sudden connection to the life-force of the universe that he never even believed existed.
2) The slow approach of the new X-Wings, a republic desperately clinging to the heroic iconography of the Rebellion, the pilot’s face wearing an the exhaustion of years of attrition against a foe that should have dissappeared with the Death Star.
3) An impoverished loner, living in true destitution, struggling to get by in an uncaring, inhospitable Galaxy, deserted by a Republic government more obsessed with eradicating the remains of the Empire than allowing its citizens to prosper.
4) A new threat from the dark side, crude and unrefined, but crackling with raw power, seeking its own way in the balance of the Galaxy unshackled by the burden of the Sith’s past failures.
And before you dismiss this as edgy bullshit that doesn’t fit in the swashbuckling adventure mold of Star Wars, remember that the prequels tried many of these themes and mainly failed due to poor execution as opposed to the weakness of the concepts.
You can set a fun, Star Wars adventure in a world that’s grounded and well-thought out while letting the dark implications fester in the background while they add to the urgency and drama. A New Hope finishes it’s first act with a fucking genocide for God’s sake.
The Sequel trilogy lacked coherent world building. It lacked the interesting stories going on in the background that made the galaxy feel real and lived-in. The camera is glued to protagonists, and even then their story is lazy, haphazard and awful. Hell, it doesn’t need even make sense in the wider context.
Lucas had way more answers for how the Galaxy functioned and what was going on in other parts of it than anyone on the Disney story team, even if a lot of those stories were stupid.
