OK, let's see what I can get done here. It was twelve hours ago I was thinking about this silliness and I'm rapidly losing any memory of where I was going with things.
I believe I'd decided it was about time to get back to Han Solo. He's dramatically an important character in this because he's one of our "ordinary person" POV characters. I don't really remember the plot of "The Hidden Fortress" so I don't know how slavishly "Star Wars" copies it, but I really do think the pacing of the first Star Wars film is pretty good - a mix of the cosmic and the personal. There's a lot of American Graffiti in the portrayal of Luke, a farm boy out in the boonies, and the later films don't really have that view from the ground.
My thought here is to wrap up the first act of the film by having Han meet up with Lando. I really haven't seen Solo so I don't know what the hell happens in it but it seems like a good story to tell at least. There's some dialogue that establishes some stuff about the world and the characters - Han isn't impressed by his first look at the Falcon, which Lando is defensive about, and claims that the Falcon is really maneuverable for a cargo ship and can hold its own in a firefight with customs agents. Viewers who have seen the first couple films will know this is true, but crucially I'm _not_ assuming that viewers know everything that happens in the first trilogy, because that's not how you make a quality film. In response to Han's questions he says that the unorthodox design isn't super aerodynamic, but helps it evade scanners. Han asks why Lando needs a human navigator instead of a droid. Lando - "And alert every customs agent between here and Tattooine? Every one of those things has a back door directly to Coruscant." It's not a major plot point and I don't have any idea how to reconcile this notion with the ubiquity of droids in Lucas' trilogy, but I do want to introduce the idea that droids are viewed by some as surveillance devices under the control of a corrupt and untrustworthy government.
Lando's assertion that the Falcon can handle herself in a firefight is tested in the next scene, when they're spotted by a couple customs agents. Han is assigned to gunnery duties while Lando is in charge of evasion. Han being young and new has a hard time hitting the agents, particularly while Lando is conducting advanced flight maneuvers, but does eventually destroy both ships and they jump to warp before reinforcements arrive.
The problem here is that this maybe mirrors a little bit too closely the Falcon's escape from Tattooine in episode IV. I don't think it would be enough to just do the same thing again with souped up special effects - there needs to be some twist to differentiate this from this, particularly since it occurs at the same place in the movie - this is the end of the first act. I'll have to revisit this scene later.
We start out with in the second act with a couple of intercut montages, montages of battles between the Orthodox and Reform Jedi in pursuit of "Sith Lords" and montages of smuggling operations conducted by Lando and Han on the Falcon. This does a couple of things. It allows time to pass and it allows Han and Lando to get to know each other and become friends. It also allows the relationship between Vader and Elana to develop.
Elana is going to be a challenging character to write for. The issue here is that she's the token woman in the film and therefore has a big weight to carry. There are also a lot of crappy storytelling techniques that are used with the token woman, particularly since the audience expectation is going to be that she's played by a young, attractive white woman. Unfortunately there's only so much subversion I can do within the confines of this universe, because the Star Wars universe treats women like shit. If I did a film that passed the Bechdel Test I don't really feel like I'd be telling an authentic Star Wars story here. I'm also particularly constrained by knowing that certain characters _have_ to survive the films. We know what happens to all of the characters who reappear, the interest is just in figuring out _how_ it happens. So I know, for instance, that Elana dies towards the end of the film in a vicious and messy attack by the Jedi that kills tens of thousands of innocent civilians. What I don't want to do is say "Oh Darth Vader turned evil because his girlfriend got killed", that's a bullshit story.
Elana isn't a good or virtuous character. If she lived she'd possibly be worse than Darth Vader. She's got this tremendous and terrifying capacity for cruelty and brutality. Hell, there might even be an argument that the Jedi are doing the right thing by killing her when and where they do, despite all of the innocents dead. So I have to be careful about how I portray the development of her relationship with Vader. They're not going to go on any dates to fancy restaurants or any shit like that. Nobody wants to see Darth Vader suck face with some chick. Also, he literally is more than 30 years older than her, and that's fucking creepy. She needs to be tough and cruel and, really, dominant, because that's what's called for in this setting. None of this peril monkey shit. She's in a misogynist galaxy surrounded by people who hate her and look on her as lesser, but under no circumstances is there ever to be a threat of rape, implicit or explicit, against her. That's not the kind of character she is.
So anyway, this montage sequence is going to show a bunch of battles that take place in nominally fantastic and exciting settings, but we don't care about the outcomes, we're not invested in any of them. These are boring, routine, meaningless battles. We don't see how any of them start, how any of them end. The purpose is to show how the relationship between Vader and Elana develops, and it'll mostly be by implication. They're still fighting each other, but it's for show. In one of the battles a Reform Jedi, hell, let's make it the one who was giving Elana shit earlier, is in a position to kill Vader, and Elana frags him. "Whoops," she says, in a monotone.
The growing relationship isn't, incidentally, doing anything to stop Vader from fucking everything that moves. Just like his relationship with Elana, this is implied - shots of people leaving or entering his apartment between battles. In fact, let's make part of the montage an endless succession of women leaving his apartment. As the montage goes on, Elana appears more and more in the rotation. At the end, she's about to leave, and then she turns around and goes back in. Yeah, I like that.
All of this is, again, intercut with Lando and Han flying the Falcon, getting into space battles. All that comes out of this is that the next time we see them they are good friends; nothing else really important on this end of things, other than, again, gradually showing the "glamorous" smuggler's life as dull and boring. Maybe there's some shots of them being bored, playing that goofy chess game with each other, sleeping, gradually becoming more predominant over exciting space battles.
The second act proper kicks off with Vader and Elana leaving the Jedi order... I said a little about this in an earlier post. Obi-Wan has begun noticing ligatures and whip marks on Anakin (let's just say that he alone still refers to Vader as "Anakin"). These are not typical Jedi battle scars. The nature of his relationship with Elana is, again, mostly alluded to, circumlocuted.
This isn't to say they immediately become "Sith Lords". Today I'm thinking that the Sith's relationship to the Jedi is sort of the relationship of Satanism to Christianity, shot through with this sort of Blavatskyan bunkum. Sheev is really into all this Sith shit (as Elana thinks of it), and all the Jedi, despite their differences, are pretty unanimous in believing that Vader and Elana have embraced the "dark side", but Elana doesn't remotely think of it that way. Vader is iffy on the whole "dark side" thing, torn between Elana and Sheev's views on it. Mostly they're pissed off about all the Jedi bullshit.
Elana is a violent revolutionary, a Charlotte Corday type. She's the one who really kicks things into high gear towards the end of the second act when she assassinates Senator Miramar in a sequence that, yeah, let's just make it an overt tribute to David's "Death of Marat" because we're pretentious like that. She didn't like Miramar before, but she finds out something terrible he's done - I don't know, take your pick, he's done shitloads of detestable things. Maybe she's just really naive and doesn't know about _any_ of them and Vader just happens to mention it. Anyway, at this point they are definitely plotting the violent overthrow of the Jedi, but not quite yet. Ichi has started training his troops.
He's gotten quite a few of them from Han Solo. I've decided that he does, in fact, find out that he's been smuggling Wookiee slaves at least some of the time, at the behest of high-ranking Jedi like Senator Miramar. Let's say there's a technical fault with the Falcon and he has to go into the cargo area to help Lando, who knows full well what their cargo is but hasn't been fully forthcoming, repair it.
Solo is not at all down with this and demands they liberate their cargo. Lando, unsurprisingly, is not enthusiastic about this. He agrees to a coin toss, though. If Solo wins, he gets the Falcon with its cargo to do with as he pleases; if Lando wins, the same. If this seems like an unusually generous wager, perhaps Lando isn't actually that happy about being a slaver either and is looking for an excuse to get out of the business without immediately becoming the target of every bounty hunter in the galaxy.
Han wins, of course. He attempts to deliver the Wookiee through some underground railroad connections he has, which is how they get to Ichi. However, the Wookiee select one of their number to serve Han in acknowledgement of the life debt they owe him. Han is not really enthusiastic about this - he didn't put his neck on the line liberating slaves so he could become a slave owner himself - but this is a cultural expectation of the Wookiee. He'd be insulting them if he didn't. Well, fine, but he insists on treating Chewbacca as an equal and not a servant.
Maybe this last bit we put off to the third act, though. This kind of wraps up Han's arc and he doesn't have a whole lot to do in the third act. So say he just liberates the Wookiee and then the Falcon is peripherally involved in the wider rebellion against the Jedi after they slaughter tens of thousands of innocents in order to kill Elana. Maybe Han doesn't know shit about Elana or Vader or any of that and he's just outraged and caught up in the wider battles, maybe it's one of these battles where he saves Chewbacca's life and that's where the "life debt" thing comes from. That way he doesn't just disappear in the second act. Maybe upon delivering the Wookiee to Ichi he devotes himself full-time to ending Wookiee slavery and that's what he does in the third act and the way it turns out is, we can infer, what causes him to be cynical, disillusioned, and apolitical in "A New Hope". I definitely don't want him to pop out of the narrative and make a "surprise" reappearance because again that would be way too much like "A New Hope". He stays in the picture all the way through.
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