slapolakinkaido wrote:

Cattivo wrote: Wow, that's a weird article. A movie blindly inserting random comments about politics in order to seem profound is not the same as saying anything intelligent about politics or making astute references to politics. If anything, the rise of the empire in the prequels resembles how Hitler took control of Germany. I would not be surprised if the author of the article was paid off by Lucas to try to get people to buy tickets to the 3D release of Phantom Menace. That said, the inferiority of the prequels is pretty hard to dispute. They have weak plots, which are a sideshow to the main focus of the movie: distracting special effects. It speaks volumes that the only good scene in the entirety of PM is the light sabre battle between Maul, Obi Wan, and Liam Neeson. On top of that, the movies contain a romance story so poorly written, it makes any random romantic comedy movie look like Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. And to cap it all off, Ewan McGregor is the only actor in the entire trilogy that does a good job. The child & teenage actors, which typically give problematic performances in all visual media, do an incredibly horrid job. At least Natalia Portman has recently gained some acting skills to go along with her good looks, but she seemed like robotic Mitt Romney in these movies. Even Return of the Jedi, with its Ewok issues and copying of the plot from the original film is leagues ahead of the best prequel movie, RotS. That latter movie is simply ok, by the lower standards that were created for us by the first two prequel films. Star Trek owns the sci-fi genre. I agree with this opinion for the most part.

I'm not sure I can agree with this opinion, but I'd have to say, I dunno, maybe halfway? If you're talking in terms of sheer ubiquitousness, Star Wars has Star Trek dicked a thousand times over, at least in the cultural short-term. The fandom is just much, much broader in terms of Star Wars fans, even just casual ones, as is the merchandising. I agree with Klimb's opinion that it's space opera, and I'd say that Star Trek is more space soap opera. It's (Star Trek's) success in terms of remaining relevant is at least partially contingent on having television series, because that's where it originated, although the series reboot film has definitely returned it to a state of viability. Star Wars, on the other hand, is primarily reliant on movies to keep the fandom going and engaged, and that's why (I feel) Lucas finally 'deigned' to make the prequels, because people just weren't going to take another special version of the second trilogy films; now that he's got those, he's going to keep 'churning the waters' by re-releasing remastered versions of them too. Honestly, I don't think it's going to ever end up being the nonology that it deserves to be, and here's the reason why (which ties back into my first statement up top, about the whole cultural short-term).

George Lucas isn't getting any younger. At some point, he's going to die, and unlike Roddenberry, who to be frank, had relatively little input in the Star Trek mythos outside of the first two seasons of OTS, the first movie and season one of TNG, Lucas has remained relatively ham-fisted in terms of the direction that the series and mythos have gone in. I understand that he's supposedly retiring from handling those sort of things, but time will tell. My contention is, when Lucas does die, I personally believe that there's going to be quite a bit of anarchy in terms of where to take Star Wars unless he leaves specifically delineated instructions. Couple that with the fact that the third trilogy of trilogies is supposed to be set with Han and Leia's children, amongst others, studying under Luke, the age of the original cast really precludes them from taking part in it (Hamill 60, Fischer 55, Ford 69), CGI de-aging notwithstanding, and you can see where some issues'll arise. In order to do the third series, they'll likely have to get entirely new actors and actresses to fill those familiar parts that people love so much, whereas the Star Trek series and films can and do jump generations and integrate completely new crews relatively seamlessly.

Ultimately, here's my thought on the matter: in the short term, Star Wars has Star Trek beat for sci-fi supremacy, but in the long run, I think that Star Trek will win out.