‘KOTOR’ Conversations: In Summation
PART FIVE: IN SUMMATION
AS: So, let me try to tie a couple of these things together real quick. You know, we talked about the danger of trying to set too much, put too many eggs in this basket before the audience has a chance to accept the first movie. And if they reject that, it’s all for naught.
JB: Well…you’re right. But I think the problem with Star Wars is that they can reject it for any reason. It doesn’t have to be because it’s bad. Last Jedi was in many ways rejected because it was good. So it’s a prickly, weird fanbase that has almost outgrown the thing itself so much, that it’s sort of primed to reject anything outside the original scripture. For one reason or another.
AS: Yes, but I think you’re freed from…like as much as people want the new Star Wars to be their thing entirely, if you’re doing a KOTOR movie, there is not a Luke Skywalker or a Han Solo to quote-unquote “ruin” with it.
JB: Mm-hmm.
AS: I mean, everyone can say “not my Revan!”, I guess. But everyone had their own, that’s the nature of the beast and it’s not going to be anyone’s particular Revan. But everyone knows there is not one clear canonical one, that’s sort of baked into the concept. As personalized as Revan can be for everyone, for the most devoted, fanatical fans they probably already had multiple Revans already, that they made themselves.
JB: Yes, and I was thinking, I guess you could say that the Fantastic Beasts films have kind of screwed the pooch with this. They didn’t betray anything about the original series, I guess maybe a little, but mostly that it just wasn’t good. Nobody gravitated toward…whatever the fuck the Eddie Redmayne character was called, no one gave a shit about those guys. And that was just in execution, I think. But on paper, you know, that could work, there was nothing inherently flawed in what they were trying to do. So I guess it’s just a matter of doing it well, which is you know, easier said than done.
AS: Sure, but…I don’t think there’s any idea so good it becomes immune from being fucked up in execution.
JB: No, no.
AS: And I haven’t seen those Fantastic Beasts movies, so I can’t really speak to it.
JB: They’re kind of interesting in how they fail.
AS: But it does seem like they are kind of going for something similar to what I am talking about.
JB: Yes.
AS: A prequel that’s really an alternate continuity thing….but they’re not back far enough, that there isn’t still some overlap-
JB: No, there’s definitely still some characters and things, there’s Dumbledore and shit like that. Younger versions of things from the originals. And it makes it worse, but probably more profitable, so…
AS: Yeah, they don’t have the, like the freedom to have Grindelwald actually conquer the Muggle world.
JB: They’re more hemmed in.
AS: By history. Real and fictional, of that world. So they’re not far enough removed to function fully as that, but I think they are trying to do it. To have an alternate version of that fictional world.
JB: They are.
AS: But, uh, I was saying…I think to kind of return to the idea of selling someone on this project, your cautious Disney executive, I think the way the story is structured is kind of nice. Is friendly to a safer opening, it lends itself to making the first movie the most of a throwback to the original Star Wars. Very straight forward, kind of adventure serial vibe, and just trying to make likeable characters do exciting stuff. Some derring-do, with a bunch of aliens and stuff. And then the second movie you get the twist, and that is also evocative enough of the original trilogy to be a familiar thing, but different enough that I don’t feel like…I wouldn’t be rolling my eyes like I was at “I am your grandfather.” I think the series takes on a different character, with that. It takes on the identity of its own.
JB: Mm-hmm. Okay.
AS: And from there you, uh, as you get into a third movie where you are dealing with the twist and the amnesia stuff, which again I don’t usually like that as a conceit. But I think it’s somewhat justified by, it can do a lot of the same stuff that the sequel trilogy did with Rey, but sort of correct for them not doing enough with it. Because the Revan twist is much darker, takes things into darker territory. And again, I think they had the instincts, the idea that tying Rey’s power to Palpatine was going to make things darker and more interesting. But it’s at such a remove that I don’t think it really accomplishes that. But Revan being the actual bad guy, is legitimately dark in way that I think it becomes harder to chicken out from facing that in some form. And it gives that series more of an identity of its own.
JB: Well, it would be amazing, just amazing if you went with the dark ending. If you did the evil ending of KOTOR, which is the better ending. That would be fantastic, but they’d never do it. It’d be so contrary to their goals, for something like this. (cackles) But you’d get my interest. You’d get me on board.
AS: You could do that, but it sort of crosses the line for me. Like I started out saying I don’t expect Disney to become Annapurna, but I also don’t expect them to become Blumhouse, and like, be pumping out Star Wars horror movies.
JB: No, they would never. It’d be so wrong for them. They’d never.
AS: But it does, even with the light side ending, it makes for a more difficult, a more complicated story than maybe you expect from Star Wars. And that makes for a segue, a tonal bridge to KOTOR 2, which I think is a much better story overall. The cast of characters in that one is legitimately great. And it’s deconstructionist in a way I think is just as bold as Last Jedi. But quite a bit darker. It got obscured in the release of that game, because it got rushed out by corporate mandate, without a lot of the ending material even implemented. Which a lot of it has since be remastered and put back in by fan projects in the subsequent years, and you can get a fairly complete version of it now. It gets quite complicated thematically, and…there’s a lot more long discussions of philosophy in there than you’d expect from a hastily-produced sequel to a Star Wars game.
JB: Hmm.
AS: And this whole conversation was sort of prompted by some discussions on the message boards about Star Wars and KOTOR and somebody mentioning “oh yeah, it’s a video game story and its pretty simple and not really about anything.” But I think this does, the big twist, does make it about something. Something that I actually maybe find more relevant now than I did 15 years ago when I was trying to teach myself about writing movies by way of plagiarizing a game.
JB: That’s not…that’s a really good way to learn, actually. You have a structure, and you…I’ve tried shit like that.
AS: No, I think it actually is. Adaption is a really good learning process, I think. It forces you to ask what is important and why it is important, about a story. In a way that you can sort of forget to when you’re being all wildly innovative and creating out of whole cloth.
JB: For sure. The first thing I ever wrote was an adaptation of a vampire book. It was a learning process, you know-
AS: Was it Anne Rice slashfic? Did you have a really vampy goth phase???
JB: (chuckles) No, not really, it was Christopher Moore. It was a vampire thing, and I turned it into a screenplay, just to get the experience of doing it. And it taught me more than just about anything I’ve done, really.
AS: Yeah, it’s that whole thing about learning to…it teaches you the rules, so that you can know how to break them.
JB: Yeah, but back to Star Wars.
AS: Right, okay. So I was saying that once you get past the twist, when I was writing it out, it was like well, this is the most interesting material. All of the crew, and his friends dealing with the fallout of finding out that “oh, you’re actually space Hitler?”
JB: The commanding Zaalbar to kill Mission stuff? PUT IT IN THE MOVIE DISNEY.
AS: (laughs) I do remember just laughing at that part, in shock, when I tried the dark side path. That is…
JB: It’s outrageous.
AS: It’s outlandish in the sadism. Even for the Dark Side way.
JB: What we did in this last game, was we went hardcore dark. The darkest, most evil, because I had never done that originally, and it gets real…some of it is pretty wild. (laughs) The darkest Bioware ever went in some cases, I think. And in this franchise that is more decidedly kid-friendly than their others, Mass Effect and whatnot.
AS: Yeah…I always start off on the Light Side, because I’m boring I guess, but there’s also part of it where I think I just prefer to play on the hardest difficulty level. And money and whatnot is harder to come by when you’re being good, it’s more of a challenge. You don’t get to rob as many people.
JB: But you get the lightning! And the choking!
AS: There is that. But anyway, the material once everyone finds out about Revan is, it feels like it has a lot of resonance to me now that it didn’t 15 years ago. Because it’s kind of like, okay, we made this guy our last best hope to overthrow the evil Sith empire, and now we find out he has this horrible past. And that’s sort of, it’s based in a lot of amnesia and magical bullshit that doesn’t have a lot of bearing on everyday life. But it’s also not that far off what happens when, like, we put all our chips on Joe Biden to be the one who is going to beat Trump and then it comes out, he may have sexually harassed people 30 years ago.
JB: Uh-huh.
AS: But we still have this Sith empire to fight.
JB: Hehe, yeah. But it also, it kind of has a mirror in the Anakin storyline. Which is something that kind of Star Wars always does. It’s about the stories kind of repeating themselves, which I know we’re trying to kind of move away from with this. At the same time, it’s kind of inevitable with this stuff.
AS: I think there’s ways you can repeat yourself…
JB: In a good way.
AS: Without just doing a cover song, they way a lot of the Sequel Trilogy did.
JB: Well, yeah, it would be different from how the Anakin story plays out in some ways, but it would also have a lot of that similar, you know, “WE TRUSTED YOU!!” stuff.
AS: Yeah, yeah, you get melodrama out of it. But also you get something that a lot of people…this is one of those things where at least older Star Wars fans on the internet like to say that they want it. Who knows if general audiences could be bothered. But what people complain about, between Vader and Kylo Ren, and a lot of the type of villains Vader inspired, is you get these evil characters that have their turn back to the light side and sacrifice themselves at the same time. And that’s sort of the easy way out, and wouldn’t it be more interesting to see them actually have to live with it? Trying to be good again, but live with all the bad stuff?
JB: Yeah…maybe.
AS: And this gets you, even if you still had Revan do a heroic sacrifice, blaze of glory sort of ending, it gets an actual movie of that. Leading up to it.
JB: Yeah, the third film, basically. Well fuck it, I’m sold. I’m in on this.
AS: Hehe, well I feel like you were a softer audience for this than I anticipated. I didn’t know you were playing it literally when I reached out about suggesting this.
JB: Ha, well sorry about that.
AS: No, I mean that’s not a complaint. It’s just a strange coincidence that we had both circled back to this 17 year-old game in the same week.
JB: Yeah. From different directions.
AS: Well, if you guys are getting into KOTOR 2, I don’t know if you’re doing it on a console, but you should definitely try to do it on a computer where you can download the restored content versions that have a complete ending.
JB: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll do that one. It’s a commitment.
AS: Yeah, it’s not like sitting down to watch a movie, by any means. One of these games is like multiple trilogies in terms of the timesink. But if you get through it, I can give you a whole, another quasi-political schpiel about how Atris is a Berniebro. And the hero is actually Hilary Clinton. (chuckles)
JB: (laughs) Oh, you’re really selling it, there. That was all grey jedis, right? That’s what that one is doing? With the light and the dark kind of combined, and that’s a little of what they were half-assing in the new movies?
AS: Sort of.
JB: But that’s the thing, isn’t it? They already have kind of taken some of the best scenes, the better content from KOTOR, and kind of stepped on it.
AS: Somewhat. I think that they did so little with those elements, that you could go through them and it won’t feel as obvious.
JB: Well, yeah. You’d be repeating things less directly than the recent ones, at least. You’d have to be.
AS: I mean, hell, just slapping a new coat of paint on it would be more. Some new ships designs, and uniforms. And a new cast, without the familiar faces. It would go a long way, I think.
JB: I mean, here’s the thing I would say. Is that it is, in the end, a KOTOR adaptation. And I get that, because it is, pretty much without debate, the best Star Wars story that anyone has come up with since the OT. That’s a pretty common belief amongst those who are familiar with it. In spite of the whole, oh it is a video game, I mean that’s part of it-
AS: Well, for my money, part 2 is better, has a way better storyline.
JB: Okay, fair enough. I remember that one a lot less.
AS: But it is darker, it’s more philosophical. More in the vein of Last Jedi, what it’s doing with interrogating the nature of the Force and jedi/sith divide and what have you. Whereas the first is the more classical version. It’s, we’re doing Star Wars, the adventure serial stuff, in a somewhat revamped context.
JB: But my point is, it’s the natural thing to adapt because it’s the thing that worked. It’s the story that all the people in the know are like, yeah, that’s it, they nailed the stuff I like about it. That’s pure Star Wars, there. And my interests, so to speak, sort of run toward, well why can’t we just do that again? You know, why can’t we come up with the actual new thing. Create the new, iconic story, the thing that pulls off the new moves?
AS: I think…that this might be stretching that as far as we can, under the Star Wars umbrella.
JB: Yeah…
AS: At a certain point, you start to ask, why can’t we have a new Star Wars, instead of just more Star Wars? And I guess we have Harry Potter, and the MCU, and Pirates of the Caribbean to some extent.
JB: They all pull from Star Wars to some extent, I guess.
AS: I think what that question gets back to, is what makes it a Star Wars movie? What is the essence, that makes it a Star War and not an imitator, or a descendant? If we just keep wookies and lightsabers involved, is that all it is? That’s what I was trying to get at in the whole first half of this conversation, that really, you don’t need to be slavish to the plot of the game. If you have an actually new idea, something that is actually less derivative of the original Star Wars than the game was, you can still do that in this context.
JB: Right. But we’re skeptical of that ever coming out of Disney.
AS: Yes. I think they kind of need to be forced into leaving the originals behind. But you get a lot of benefits, just by sort of forcing that distance, while maintaining the brand. It creates almost a guardrail against repetition that is too direct, against total laziness, it forces a branching out of some sort, to…even if it is the same sandbox, at least to a different corner of it.
JB: What I like, is just the idea of taking an old samurai movie or whatever and Star Wars-ing it up. That works for me. Like The Mandalorian is just basically Lone Wolf and Cub. So if they could just keep doing shit like that, I’m into it. You remember when they were talking about the Zach Snyder Star Wars movie for a little while there?
AS: No, I don’t.
JB: It was pitched as The Magnificent Seven with jedi. And I was like fuck, yeah, that’ll work. Do that. I mean, they kind of did a version of it in The Mandalorian. But that’s sort of how to do it, I think. You take some classic samurai or western story, and you plant it in the Star Wars world.
AS: That is what A Star Wars Story, I think that’s what that was supposed to be. Or at least what I wanted it to be. But they sort of handicapped it, I think, by tying them a bit too closely to the original movies.
JB: Yep. “Now here’s a Han Solo movie!”
AS: Yeah, they went right to that well.
JB: And the next one will have Boba Fett! And then Obi-Wan Kenobi or whatever.
AS: So, um actually, one of the very first things I ever, when I started the blog way back on the old CHUD…I’m just pulling it up, yeah November 2012, it was 8 years ago. But this is before, they had just announced that Disney bought it but there weren’t any movies announced yet. And I was basically pitching the idea of A Star Wars Story. Like, you can do anything in this milieu.
JB: Sure. A courtroom drama, why not?
AS: I rattled off like a dozen one sentence, kind of jokey pitches. Number one, a mob war between space slugs and yetis. Great, that still works. There “A Magnificent Seven riff on a frontier world”. So that was the second one. An Aliens riff on an abandoned space station. You can still do that. Die Hard on a star destroyer, a heist film a la Ocean’s Eleven, that is sort of what-
JB: Ah, Die Hard on a star destroyer is a good one. But yeah, do one of those!
AS: Solo was sort of trying to be the heist one, I think.
JB: Yeah, it just wasn’t that good at it.
AS: You can do a “Terminator where Jon Connor has a squid head, The Great Escape on an unstable asteroid prison, Jaws with a giant sandworm, Mutiny on the Executor…”(chuckles)
JB: (chuckles) A mutiny on an imperial ship, that could be fucking cool. I could get into that. Do you remember the Del Toro Jabba the Hutt film?
AS: Uh…I think I remember reading a headline about that and just thinking “No. That’s never going to happen. Stop lyin’.” (laughs)
JB: No, of course it’s never going to happen, but the pitch is that it’s like a Goodfellas style crime movie about the Hutt crime syndicate. And I was like “oh, that’s fucking awesome.”
AS: I mean, he’s clearly fucking around there. (both laugh) Like, a Star Wars gangster movie could be a blast. I’m going all in here on there being endless potential to do whatever, but I think there are some limits, with like a Jabba or when they were talking about a Yoda movie. Like, you’re not really going to do an entire movie where the protagonist is a little green muppet, or a giant slug. Where it’s…frickin’ Slurms McKenzie, is your main character.
JB: No, well he’s the Don Corleone figure, or whatever. And then there’s someone rising through the ranks of the Hutt crime syndicate. That’s a movie.
AS: Well, you can do that. I think the biggest failing of the Disney stuff this far has been they’ve tied themselves so closely to what came before that they’re ignoring that you’ve got this great opportunity…you know, this logo you can slap on any type of adventure movie and give it a boost in profile. Like I mentioned Jaws just now, you can totally do Jaws in Star Wars.
JB: I mean, they expect to make a billion dollars with every one of these movies, is the problem. You know? If they let go of that, and Marvel I felt was trying a little to do that, they were saying we can make smaller movies, and we can make a Doctor Strange movie, and it won’t be as big as Avengers. But it’s okay if that makes 200 million. But then it’s sort of like, oops, it made a billion anyway. (laughs) They’re almost too successful at it, because they blew past that point. And now they all have to make a billion, even Ant-man.
AS: Yeah, I’m not sure if they HAVE to. Like I don’t think they were banking on Guardians of the Galaxy being what it was when they greenlit that movie. I think they’d have been fine if it did half of what it ended up making.
JB: Well, I hope that’s still the case. Because I want them to do stuff that’s niche. You know, I’d like it, that’s what I want. Stuff that feels different, has a different tone. And I guess the TV shows are kind of a version of that. We’ll see what happens there. But that’s the key to longevity, I think.
AS: Well, sort of my counterpoint to that is I think that Marvel has been pretty successful…obviously, you can’t refute that they’ve been hugely successful. But even creatively, I think they’ve been pretty successful at doing different scales of movie, and focuses, within that framework. And they definitely all feel like part of the same thing. And that’s a big negative for some people, and it’s also kind of the cornerstone of the entire appeal, of the whole thing. But you know, the Ant-man series feeling different from the Captain America series, and Black Panther feeling pretty different than Thor.
JB: Right.
AS: But I don’t think the Marvel universe is quite as malleable as Star Wars. It’s a smaller universe, in some way.
JB: Yeah, I think that’s right. Inherently, they’ve got more limitations, they all kind of have to be superhero stories. Star Wars can be about jedis, or it can be about gangsters, it can kind of be anything. You know, I guess it would hard for them to do like an adult relationship drama. But most stuff is on the table.
AS: I mean, if you have a really talented writer you can sprinkle some of that in. It’s not going to be A Marriage Story.
JB: (laughing) You can’t do Terms of Endearment, with Admiral Ackbar.
AS: (laughs) But you can do a bit. A bit more adult relationship stuff than Empire.
JB: Or the courtroom drama. You can do A Few Good Men.
AS: (laughs) With Lobot as Colonel Jessup?
JB: (laughs) I think Lobot is more of a Pollak. The Kevin Pollak role.
AS: But Star Wars started out as such a mash up, as opposed to Marvel, which has influences of course but is very much a superhero thing. And Star Wars was such a mash up that its palette is broader, that it can draw from. So any western, any samurai, gangsters, a pirate story could be a Star Wars thing.
JB: Space pirates. I’d watch it.
AS: Yeah. You can fit a lot of different shaped pegs into that hole, I think.
JB: Mm-hmm. That’s what I’d like to see them do. My number one thing, just try a bunch of these weird things because why not? And if some of the work, make sequels to them. But if not, that’s cool. But don’t create Solo looking to make three Solo movies, just make the one good one. You can always figure out another if you need to.
AS: Lobot will always be there, if you need him.