Last year, in anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars films, I invited anyone who wanted to send in their own Star Wars script to do so. I would review the Top 5, and if one was really awesome, who knows, Disney might see it and get the writer involved in a future installment of the series. I received 20 Star Wars scripts in total. This week, I will review the best of those. Monday we got Old Weapons. Tuesday we had rising shadows. Yesterday we had the most badass lobster in the galaxy. And today, we’ve got twins, baby. Twins!
Genre: Sci-fi Fantasy
Premise: (from writer) With the fate of the galaxy in the balance, two-young Jedi and children to the heroes of the New Republic, must come to terms with their destinies as they set out to save the lives of millions from a dark force with deep ties to their family’s past.
About: Star Wars Week continues! Team Jedi wins! I was especially moved by Tom Albanese’s comment about how thoughtful Nicholas has been in the comments all this week. Yes, Nicholas’s script was 150 pages, but after I heard that, I felt like he deserved a shot. Let’s find out if he delivered!
Writer: Nicholas Saraceno
Details: 149 pages
As we continue to get closer to the greatest day in the history of the universe, December 21, 2015, the day Star Wars VII comes out, I must admit that I grow more and more worried about the script. Here’s what I know so far, based on three-quarter-truths that most news outlets agree are probably accurate.
Michael Arndt came in before the Disney-Lucasfilm deal was finished to create an outline for Episode 7. He was working off a treatment from George Lucas himself. Now as we know, Lucas only really understood Episodes 4-6. Everything outside of those films he only knew bits and pieces of. So this outline for Episode 7 was likely based on a few really flimsy ideas.
One of the strangest parts of this whole odyssey is that Arndt started writing the Episode 7 script before a director was chosen. As most everyone who’s worked in Hollywood knows, writing a script within the studio system without a director guiding it is pointless, because once a director comes on, he’s going to change everything anyway. But I guess they wanted to get a head start, which I suppose makes sense.
Needless to say, JJ was then chosen as director and started guiding Arndt to a script closer to his own vision. Somewhere during this process, something broke down. Maybe it was that Lucas’ flimsy idea for the film never worked in the first place. Maybe JJ and Arndt weren’t getting along. I don’t know. But soon, Arndt was fired and JJ (who started as a screenwriter and had a very successful career doing so) pretty much took over writing duties himself. He then rewrote the entire script within three months.
Now I think JJ is talented as shit. I’m so behind him helming this film. But this is Star Wars we’re talking about. You can’t write a good Star Wars film in three months (while prepping the biggest movie ever, while running a company, while shepherding 15 different TV shows, while putting the kids to bed every night). There’s too much imagination involved. Sure, you can slap something together. But if you want it to stand out, you need time. And since JJ had to start building sets and doing pre-viz, time is the one thing he didn’t have. So for better or worse, whatever he came up with in those three months is what we’re getting. And that scares me to shit, only because I believe Star Wars deserves more, and the franchise now has a history of bad films due to shoddy writing. I don’t want that trend to continue.
Nicholas Saraceno to the rescue? Maybe that’s asking to much. I will say, though, out of the four Star Wars scripts I’ve reviewed this week, Saraceno’s is the most faithful and exciting. It was the first time I saw the potential for what the new Star Wars films could be. It’s not without its faults though. It’s extremely ambitious and there’s a lot going on, but let’s see if Nicholas was able to wrangle it all in.
It’s 20 years after all that Ewok dancing. But despite yet another “Nyug Nyug” video going viral, not all is well in the universe. There’s still a lot of poverty, a lot of crime, and an upstart terrorist group known as the “Children of the Sun” which is using all this unrest to push its agenda.
Meanwhile, across the galaxy in the Spice mines of Kessel, a young man named Jacen Solo is following in his father’s footsteps, buying and smuggling spice between planets. On this particular run, one of the mine’s slaves sneaks on his ship, the Falcon, because she’s sick of working for nothing. Her name is Kayla. And although Jacen would never say it out loud, he thinks she’s darn cute.
Kayla seems like a nice girl alright, all the way until they get to Tatooine to sell their spice to Babbee the Hutt. That’s when Kayla reveals that the whole slave thing? FAKE! She played Jacen to get here. Before Jacen can figure out what just happened, the Hutt palace is attacked by the Republic, and everybody must run for their lives.
Somewhere in this mix, both Luke Skywalker and Jaina Solo (Jacen’s twin sister) show up, and everyone’s trying to get to safety. After they get away, it’s revealed that the attack was some kind of front to trick the Hutts into aligning with the Children of the Sun in a growing war, led by a nasty Sith-in-Training named Dragil.
If you’ve lost track yet, don’t worry, it gets more confusing. Luke meets up with his old friends-with-benefits Jedi pal, Mara Jade. Turns out, Luke’s 5 years late on Republic Credits child support. Because he be a baby daddy! Do I smell a “Jedi and Pregnant” reality show coming to TLC?
Not that that matters, because we learn that some other children, the Children of the Sun, are planning on blowing up Coruscant with a rare super-weapon made of red spice and a powerful Jedi infant, that infant being the son of the Emperor’s brother, who’s been hiding out on his estate on Naboo all this time! Jar-Jar? How could you let this one slip by!
Over the course of the story, Jaina is trying to get Jacen to be a Jedi. Jacen is trying not to fall in love with Kayla, who keeps changing sides. Luke is trying to train Jaina, who keeps doing non-Jedi things like making out with hot soldiers, and Han is trying to figure out why his family is so damn dysfunctional. This will all end in a Hutt battle on Naboo and a race to stop a super-bomb from destroying Coruscant.
Naturally, you can guess what my biggest problem with Children of the Jedi was. There were 8 billion things going on! You have to admire Nicholas for trying to go big, but in the end, he bit off more than he could chew. Actually, he bit off more than anyone could chew. Too many characters, too many storylines, too many twists and turns. I kind of felt like I’d been dropped into an Industrial-sized trash compactor along with every single Star Wars character ever created.
Part of the problem was that Children of the Jedi tried to invent a universe instead of just telling a story. That was the problem with the Prequels. They were trying to invent a universe. What I mean by that is that they had to set up a million things before they got to a single storyline that mattered.
I keep telling everyone that about Star Wars. Its genius is in that it wasn’t trying to be an epic. It jumped into a story that was already moving, that had already been set up many years ago. We were coming in when the good stuff started, after the Death Star plans had already been stolen. That’s what gave the story such urgency.
If Star Wars had, instead, tried to invent a universe, it would’ve started by introducing everybody on their home planets. It would have had the rebels come pick Leia up and say, “Hey, we want to go steal these Death Star plans. You in?” We would’ve met Han Solo smoking cigars with old friends on Planet Takator before saying, “Yo, I gotta go visit Tatooine.” Instead, Star Wars fast-forwarded over all that stuff and put us in the thick of the moment.
In fact, that’s the whole point of the Star Wars crawl. To get all that exposition taken care of in 60 seconds so that you COULD start in the middle of the action.
I’m not going to say that Children of the Jedi didn’t have any action. It had plenty. And there were instances where characters were introduced in the heat of the moment. But by biting off an unheard of character count, and having to then set all those characters up, Nicholas gave himself no choice but to repeatedly stop the story to let us know who these new people were.
I must remind everyone of The Power of Simple. When in doubt, simplify. This script should’ve been Jacen Solo’s story through and through. He was the most interesting character. He had the most going on. We needed to strip away all those cumbersome non-essential plotlines and focus on his deal. That’s how I would’ve approached it, at least.
Overplotting is kind of like throwing a grenade. There’s the explosion that kills anyone within the explosion radius. But those aren’t the only deaths. Frags also shoot out, hit people, and kill them slowly. One of frags of an over-plotted story is confusion. I just wasn’t always sure what was going on.
For instance, when Jacen originally arrives at the Hutts to trade spice, Luke Skywalker is hiding out in the crowd. What he was doing there I still don’t know. I know that Nicholas knew. But by forcing the reader to sift through and remember so many things, even the simplest things can be hard to understand. All I could think was, “How long has Luke been here? Does he always just pretend to be a bad guy and hide out at the Hutts for no reason? Has he been here for days? Months? Years?” Maybe he has early onset dementia and is trying to save Han, who’s frozen in carbonate?
I think identifying the solution here is easy. This script needs a clear main character on a cleaner, easier-to-understand journey. I understand why Nicholas ran into this problem. He loves the original characters so much and wanted to find a way to get them in there. But if characters are only in a story because a writer wants them to be, they never feel quite right. Characters only feel right when they’re organically grown along with the story. This is a problem that not only Nicholas had to deal with, but JJ will as well. I wish him luck!
Script link: Children of the Jedi
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The more complicated the plot, the less double-crosses work. Double-crosses (characters being on one side then switching over to another) can be fun – a great surprise to shock the audience. But the more complicated a plot is, the less effective they are, because we’re trying to figure out what’s going on period, much less figure out who’s on who’s side. When Slave Kayla kept changing sides, I got confused and stopped keeping count. I didn’t know if she was good or bad. In a simple plot, I would’ve figured it out, but because I had to keep track of so many other things, multiple double-crosses were information overload.
