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. Yesterday we got Old Weapons. Today we get a rising shadow!
Genre: Sci-fi Fantasy
Premise: (from writer) After the murder of her master, a young Padawan subverts the Jedi Council’s wishes in order hunt down his enigmatic killer before she can put to use a powerful and ancient Sith artifact.
About: Tom Albanese has had a couple of scripts reviewed on the site before and keeps coming back for more. He’s a great guy and always up for some constructive criticism. One of his scripts actually went on to get optioned. He’s a writer I’ve been watching for awhile.
Writer: Tom Albanese
Details: 114 pages
If you’re like me and you watched the prequels, you were probably one of the many people who said, “I could write something better than that.” And that’s exactly what this week’s writers have set out to do, prove that with a little time, they could write something better than that lazy George Lucas could.
Yesterday proved that it isn’t as easy as it looks. Not only can one quickly get lost in this universe, but amongst all that information one has to set up, you also have to come up with a story. That was the big fault of the prequels. They weren’t telling stories. They were telling history. Which is exactly why the three films felt like really glossy sci-fi fantasy documentaries. Not a whole lot ever happened.
What I’m looking for, this week, is someone who can capture the intensity and the fun of those original films. Find a story with great new characters that contains urgency and stakes. That was the secret sauce of the original Star Wars films.
While Rise of the Shadows is definitely an improvement over yesterday’s entry, it makes some mistakes pretty early on that hurt it. After a nice opening where a Jedi master is killed in front of his apprentice, a feisty young woman named Ralia, we head back to the Jedi Council on Coruscant. And this is where, unfortunately, we spend a good 40 minutes. Coruscant is firmly entrenched in the prequel universe, and I still contend that it leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. It shouldn’t be in any sequels.
But anyway, an evil former Jedi named Gena Kortana is the one who killed Ralia’s master, all for an old piece of technology that can raise the dead. But Gena can’t use the thing until she regains her powers. To do that, she must find the person who took them from her, which just happens to be our old Vapor Farmer Friend, Luke Skywalker, who’s now in his 70s.
So Gena invades the Jedi Palace with a couple of nasty bounty hunters and somehow kills almost all of them. She’s able to kidnap Luke and head off to a dangerous unknown planet in order to get this gizmo to work. The ever-feisty Ralia, still pissed that this bitch killed her master, is able to find out where the planet is and go after her.
But she gets there too late. Gena is able to raise from the dead a really evil Sith Lord named Darth Tauren, who grants her her powers back. Ralia tries her best to get revenge, but only ends up killing Luke, who, to his credit, dies before having to watch the finale to last night’s The Bachelor.
Ralia is able to escape with her toes in tact, but now that Gena and Darth Tauren have this Sith-Raising machine at their disposal, they agree that there’s one guy they really want to see back in business. A certain black-clad mechanically breathing dude who loves telling people his familial relations to them. To be continued!
So like I said, this was better than yesterday’s entry. At least this time around, we got some originality, a new story with mostly new characters engaged in a new plot. I liked that. But I’m starting to notice a trend here. It seems in almost every new Star Wars 7 idea I hear, the new main character is a young woman.
Does this mean every writer thinks alike? That we all follow the same thought patterns and come up with the same ideas? That we’re all really unoriginal? Or is this really the way to go? Because whenever I see the idea, I’m immediately reminded of “The Next Karate Kid,” where they tried to replace Daniel-san with a girl. And oh, how cheesy it felt.
Not that Rise of the Shadows was cheesy. I think it was rather un-cheesy, which is easier said than done when writing a light sci-fi fantasy space opera. But what doomed this script for me was all the stagnation.
40 pages of this script took place inside the Jedi Temple, probably one of the more boring places you can place a story. Especially when you’re talking about Star Wars, where you can literally place your characters anywhere in the universe.
And it wasn’t just the setting. It was that our characters were standing around TALKING in the Jedi Temple all the time. This was one of the huge problems with the prequels – that everyone was always STANDING AROUND TALKING. Look at the original Star Wars. There isn’t a lot of standing around and talking. There’s always doing. There’s moving forward. There’s thrust.
In the one place where there is standing around – Luke’s introduction on Tatooine – there was a sense of resistance and conflict as Luke didn’t want to be there. Even as we were there, we were being pulled somewhere else. Here on Coruscant, everyone seemed really content with their surroundings, save for Ralia, who admittedly wanted to avenge her master’s death, but just couldn’t find the means to do so.
We even have flashbacks to tell the backstories of our characters. No no no and no again! Flashbacks not only stop your script – they literally MAKE YOUR SCRIPT GO BACKWARDS. This is BAD. But the worst part about it was that flashbacks weren’t even needed. I needed one line to know that Ralia’s master picked her over Gena. I don’t need to go back and see it happen. Guys, if you need to convey something about your characters, make sure you’ve exhausted EVERY AVENUE before you consider a flashback. And then, please, still don’t write a flashback.
But the flashback represented more than backwards-ness. Star Wars has always been at its best when it moves. So to choose a flashback, a device that is guaranteed to stop the movement of your script, is a sign that you don’t understand what makes these movies work! In short, we needed less standing around on Coruscant and the Jedi temple, and more flying around the galaxy.
What about the characters? Anything good? Outside of Gena, I don’t think any character popped. In fact, I think great characters were ruined. Luke Skywalker is relegated to being dragged around half-conscious for most of the movie. This is supposed to be the greatest Jedi who’s ever lived and he’s taken down by a non-Jedi with little resistance and dragged around in a half-drugged state? NO! You can’t do that to a historically great character. It would be like putting the Godfather in an Assisted Care Facility and having him drool all over himself for 30 minutes. No way!
But anyway, the reason Gena works is because she’s the most active. She’s the one who’s driving the story. Which is a solid approach, since Darth Vader, our original villain, is the one driving the story in Star Wars and Empire. But there were no PERSONALITIES outside of Gena. Ralia was active and always wanted to do something, but I never saw anything that made her unique, original, and stand out as her own person.
When Obi-Wan does the Jedi Mind trick as they’re trying to enter Mos-Eisley (“You don’t need to see our identification”), we really get a sense of who this guy is. I needed distinctive moments like that from characters in “Rise” to really individualize them. But I never got them. Solely sending your characters out to save people or get upset when their masters are killed isn’t enough. Anybody will act that way. What does your character do (how do they act) that nobody else in the world does? That’s what will make them stand out.
Props to Tom for writing something that captured the heart of Star Wars. But we needed way more action, more adventure, as well as more distinctive characters, to really make this Episode 7 pop. What did you guys think?
Script link: Rise of the Shadows
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You need to pick a defining trait for your character and really hit on it throughout the script. Han is selfish. Obi-Wan is wise. Chewbacca is loyal. These are the personality traits that will define your character to the audience. If you don’t repeatedly hit on them, the characters start to come off as personality-less. Which leads to bland characters. Bland be bad.
