kai2: Star Wars is about the duality...
The Light Side of The Force vs The Dark Side of the Force
And i'd add to that it quite clearly set's up that the 'Light' side is the good and the 'Dark' side is the bad, and in the biblical sense of Good vs Evil, not 'bad' as in 'bad-cool' etc (and Disney in particular is bad at depicting this).
The Empire is an evil oppressive force in the galaxy and people have a just war in fighting it and standing up to it's oppression. There is a reason the Empire looks and sounds like it does, as it draws on our own earth's historic examples, and in that Star Wars is a cautionary tale about that (multi?) universal struggle against evil, and how it is every good persons duty to fight and resist the tide of evil.
dtgreene: Does *every* story have to make sense from a logical standpoint? To me, it feels like making that requirement puts a restriction on one's creativity, and one could create interesting works by completely disregarding this rule, and writing a story that's intentionally inconsistent.
kai2: No, stories are certainly allowed to be illogical...
... but...
... once you have set up that your story (or series) is based on a logical plot progression, you are "trapped" by audience expectations within that logical framework.
Also the trouble is when you let the illogical run amok in your story-telling, you just create a world that seems it could have been taken from a crazy-persons rantings. Nothing really makes sense anymore, so nothing really matters anymore.
babark: Genuine curiousity, What do you mean by this? His skill at creating an outline for the whole saga to follow? An outline for each individual movie? The plot of his scripts? Or something else? Because none of those seem to hold up (except maybe the second if you exclude the first), especially counting his later Star Wars movies.
kai2: No worries.
The story is the basic plot points... very close to the outline.
Actually writing scenes, dialogue, etc. is scripting or screenwriting.
For instance, I'd say the prequel trilogy is horribly written but the basic story (and most of the plot points) is great.
Lucas has never been a strong screenwriter;
he's always used co-writers and dialogue "sweeteners" Personally, I think all of the OT are well-scripted and the story is well-told. The prequels are pretty poorly scripted but the general story is well-told (and IMO taking a rather simple space fantasy and molding it into an almost Shakespearean tragedy is amazing).
Lucas was infamous for his 'bad dialogue'. Ever since the start Marcia was helping him out on that (in THX 1138 she really didn't like the early draft of the script Lucas had done as it made it impossible to connect to the characters, and she probably was the difference when you compare the dialogue of the Original Trilogy with the Prequels).
And i'm totally going to have to pull you up on the Shakespearean remark! As a classics trained British person, and knowing just how 'trashy' for his time Shakespeare liked to be, nothing Lucas has done even comes close to being able to call it 'Shakespearean' imho. Sure he crafted a good outline for a great tragedy story, but that is about as far as we can realistically go here. Please leave Shakespeare out of the Star Wars discussion ;)
Just go back and look at the Prequel behind the scenes where Lucas is trying to convince everyone that Jar Jar Binks is the key character to the story and how the film hinges around him (he really said this).
If those are not the words of a guy that has clearly 'lost his way' in his art i could eat my hat ;)