Need to do a little more basic scenario establishment before I go on. I'm feeling like round about here I want to introduce the character of Han Solo. He's gonna be tricky to incorporate into this, though. The idea behind his character is that he's not into all this Jedi shit, that he doesn't know who Obi-Wan Kenobi is. Since I'm mostly interested in the interactions between characters writing a treatment in which Solo doesn't so much as know who Obi-Wan is... that's a bit challenging. I definitely don't want to go the hacky route Lucas went with his prequels where C3PO is a major character who happens to get a convenient mind-wipe at the end of the trilogy.
My thought here is that the Jedi and the Republic are so disconnected from the ordinary people that gutter punks like Solo don't even know or care who they are. Even on Coruscant most everyday folks don't know or care about the machinations of the Republic. People know what Anakin Skywalker looks like, because they're always seeing him around in the popular media, but this doesn't necessariy extend as far as knowing his name. Hell, maybe he doesn't use the name in public; maybe he just goes by "Vader" as a Jedi. He's Vader Skywalker, in the same way that Ben Kenobi goes by Obi-Wan. Obviously this isn't super fleshed out, but it's a thought. I might run with it.
One of the things Lucas does that I like is that he leaves the timeline deliberately nebulous. My thought is that Han Solo is maybe about 16 years old, which is 10 or 15 years before the events of "A New Hope". Kenobi is portrayed as an "old man" in that film, so I don't want to make him _too_ young... maybe he's in his 30s, a little older than McGregor plays him. This still allows him to be a "young turk" in contrast to the aged Jedi hierarchy.
The implication of the story is that Vader has lots of kids. Presumably two of them are Luke and Leia. We don't see them because this isn't fucking Star Wars Babies. Nobody in their right minds gives a shit about seeing Luke and Leia as toddlers. Seeing Han Solo as a young, tough smuggler is something different.
Solo has all the bravado we know from Ford's portrayal, but beneath it there's a sense that it is a front, that he is not just young and cocky but also vulnerable and unsure of himself. He overcompensates by acting tough, particularly around important people like Senator Miraman. This is who he's meeting with in his introduction scene. I'm not really sure where this meeting takes place right now. The gist of it is that he wants off the planet. He's done something to gain the attention of a bounty hunter and needs to get out on a ship, a fast one.
Why Senator Miraman is interested in helping this good-looking young kid, why Solo is on a first-name basis with "Jeff", is not stated. There could be a number of reasons. Miraman, as a corrupt senator, could be expected to have ties with the criminal underworld. Or their past relationship could be more... personal.
Miraman asks which bounty hunter is after him. IG-88, Solo says. (One thing I've learned from fandom is to never introduce a new character when you can just namecheck an old one, particularly as none of these characters have fucking personalities of their own anyway.) Miraman can't do anything to get IG-88 off his back. If it was Boba Fett, he'd be able to help, but he doesn't have any pull with droids.
Miraman offers Solo passage on a ship. He has a friend who needs some help. Solo starts backing away - oh, no no no no no no no - to which Miraman clarifies it's just some basic smuggling. What's the cargo? None of Solo's business. (It is, in fact, slaves, but this is never explicitly stated.) The ship is the Millenium Falcon. She has just unexpectedly lost her co-pilot. Solo hasn't heard of her. Is she fast? Fast enough for him. She's done the Kessel Run in (slightly more parsecs than Solo states in "A New Hope"). "Is that good?" Solo asks. It's a fair question because there is no fucking "Kessel Run", and "parsecs" is a measure of distance, not time. Maybe I can have Lando make fun of Solo for this when they meet.
OK, at this point I think it's time for a good old-fashioned TRAINING MONTAGE. Why? Because training montages are awesome, because if I'm going to write a hatefic I'm going to write one that I'm going to enjoy. Which is also why the soundtrack to this one is "One Of These Days, I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces" by Pink Floyd. If this seems like a violation of the unwritten norms of the Star Wars universe, fuck you, this is hatefic, and anyway it's either this or "Iron Eagle (Never Say Die)" by King Kobra. This is one of those inter-cut training sequences wherein we see both Elana and Vader ("Anakin" has too many fucking syllables, and I'm _not_ going to start calling him "Annie") doing cool shit. I'm not going to get into too much detail because the cool shit they do has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.
So for the fight. Look you're probably going to want to get some sort of choreographer or stunt coordinator or something to lay out this scene, because I don't really know a damn thing about how to write fight scenes that look cool on screen. I'll give you some basic setup, though. Vader is wearing Jedi robes instead of his riot gear getup. The basic progression of the fight is that they start out with lightsabers. Very quickly, though, the fighting becomes extremely close-quarters and intimate. Lightsabers aren't actually practical here. Oh, you know what? Hell with it, we're gonna introduce something new into the mythos - lightdaggers. These don't _actually_ look like dongs, but they're close enough that people with dirty minds will be able to pick up the clear sexual undertones of this battle. Anyway, since we're introducing something new into the mythos, at some point one of the lightdaggers actually breaks, causing an impressive-looking but harmless explosion. Maybe it causes the whole arena where they're fighting to be bathed in a weird neon glow. IDK how practical this is though because my other idea is that this whole sequence is gonna be shot as a tribute to Adrian Maben's work on "Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii". Shots of the four of them (Elana and Vader with, of course, Yoda and Kenobi as their seconds) walking over hardened lava flow to the ruined amphitheater. Hell, you know what? Maybe make the area still actively volcanic. Volcanos erupting in the background and pyroclastic flow everywhere and shit. I've seen the prequel trilogies, Lucas loves him the hell out of some fuckin' lava. This also can help us out with the weird and uncanny lighting. Oh, you know what? Let's throw in a lava monster. A dragon, like the sea serpent Floyd had at the Crystal Palace Garden Party. I'm thinking it should look a little like a lava version of the huge dragons in Breath of the Wild - not there to pose a threat, just there to look enormous and majestic. IDK if we can reconcile all this with Maben's swooping crane shots and his whole pre-DePalma wide camera circles, but we can give it a shot. What I'm kind of thinking is that we start with epic panoramic CGI porn shots and as the fight goes on the shots gradually start getting tighter and tighter (though not in a linear progression) until at the end we're literally just looking at reaction shots of Vader and Elana's faces. Oh, also, more Floyd shit? To start the fight an extra (Roger Waters, in a cameo appearance) strikes an immense gong in the empty amphitheatre, which brilliantly bursts into flames. If all this seems a little over the top for a "friendly practice", that's kind of the point.
So anyway while they're fighting with lightdaggers Vader has the upper hand, like he did before, but once his lightdagger blows up and they switch to fighting directly via the force Elana is clearly getting the better of him. I'm thinking of some weird implicitly erotic twist on wrestling except the two of them aren't actually touching each other, a combination of emotional intimacy and physical distance. Again you want a choreographer to convey this. Where it ends up is that Elana does a remote force choke on Vader (who has not, up to this point in the film, attempted a force choke). She is trash talking him, feeling angry, feeling _powerful_, wants to know how it feels to be at her mercy. Vader is choking so he can't answer but it very clearly feels good. He's into breathplay, into being at her mercy, as much as Elena is into being in control. We haven't seen Kenobi or Yoda in a while, the focus has been entirely on the two of them. Yoda interrupts - we hear him, and we see Elana's face, the look of shame. She immediately releases the force choke and drops to her knees to beg forgiveness of her master.
Look the whole thing doesn't go that hard on the BDSM but it's part of the story. Also yes I'm a little uncomfortable about having the two "evil" characters in a BDSM relationship but one, they're not "evil" but morally ambiguous, two, the BDSM isn't what _makes_ them evil. If that squicks you out, I'm sorry. BDSM is implicit in the story Lucas told (ahem, Slave Leia) and I'm not interested in making that go away. If it helps I'm doing my best to get rid of all the goddamn incest.
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