This Has All Happened Before, And It Will All Happen Again: The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
by Michael Giammarino
2. A Tale of Midi-chlorians, Microbiotic Universes, and Disney
Star Wars became a phenomenon the moment it hit screens in 1977. While it was embraced by multitudes, critics and public alike, it still had its detractors. In my previous chapter (“The Generation Gap”), in a ramp up to an analytical reading of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, I highlighted how a smattering of poor reviews for the original Star Wars trilogy became commonplace reactions to the prequel trilogy, which snowballed into virulent social media toxicity with the sequel trilogy and everything that followed. What's interesting is the critiques have, for the most part, stuck to the same issues. But they've also ballooned and gotten more venomous and ugly. To borrow a quote from JM Barrie and the Battlestar Galactica revival, this has all happened before, and it will all happen again… and again. And again.
Before an earnest reading of the Star Wars sequels can begin, I guess the first question which needs answering is this one:
Do I miss George's input?
That's a tough question to answer.
Yes and no.
I miss his input, obviously, because he created this whole damn thing. It's his. But let's face it, it got to a point where it stopped making him happy. Say what you want about Disney's involvement, but George's work was always criticized, often harshly, and he received his own share of toxic fandom, first with the special editions, and then with the prequels. And then, when he decided he'd actually go ahead with sequels, to cement his legacy before retirement, he made a deal to sell his company to Disney. Disney didn't like his approach, and they went in a different direction.
It was those damn midi-chlorians, and the damn microbiotic universe. That's what frightened Disney. We remember how much of the fan base reacted poorly to midi-chlorians, don't we? I do. They saw it as a betrayal to everything we learned about the Force. It isn't a betrayal, not at all, but that was the consensus back then. And now, it looked like George wanted to double down on all that, with a microbiotic universe.
In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn describes the midi-chlorians to Anakin as “microscopic life forms that reside within all living cells .... and we are symbionts with them ... life forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you."
Does this mean the Force isn't mystical, as we were led to believe, but biological; scientific? People were genuinely confused and annoyed. The midi-chlorians were always a part of George’s concept for the Force; the explanation for what the Force is was heavily streamlined in A New Hope, and we've always learned new things about the Force as the movies have gone along. The Phantom Menace gave Lucas a way to introduce midi-chlorians into the films by using them as a means of establishing young Anakin's exceptional skills.
The inclusion of midi-chlorians really burst people's bubbles, though. A typical retort to the establishing of midi-chlorians into Star Wars canon was, “May the midi-chlorians in your blood be with you,” instead of the standard, “May the Force be with you.”
The truth is, the midi-chlorians never really conflicted with what was already established about the Force.
The Force, as Obi-Wan Kenobi describes it to Luke in A New Hope, “is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
A being who is strongly attuned to the Force is said to be Force sensitive.
Midi-chlorians are a measurement of Force sensitivity. They don't cause Force sensitivity.
Dave Filoni, currently Lucasfilm's chief creative officer, described the midi-chlorians most succinctly to Comicbook.com staff at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016 as “a physical manifestation of a meta-physical concept”:
“To me, when you talk about the Force, the Force is in everything that's alive; that's what Obi-Wan says originally. That's true, even in the days of midi-chlorians, which everybody is afraid to talk about, but I'm not. What that tells you is – when I was a kid, I believed that everybody probably had the Force, and they just didn't believe – midi-chlorians actually prove that theory out. We all have them, just to differing degrees.
"For a long time I've used someone like Bruce Lee as an example. He has, if you like, a lot of talent for martial arts – or a very high midi-chlorian count. If I train in martial arts, can I learn martial arts? Yes, I can improve my midi-chlorian count in that discipline. Will I be as good as Bruce Lee? No, that's not my talent. We were always able to find real-world equivalencies to Star Wars to make comparisons that make it feel like it's a real thing. When I talk about Force sensing, I talk about when you are standing somewhere and you don't know but you feel someone standing behind you. It's all extensions of those things on a much broader level. The Jedi and Sith have one way of interpreting that.”
If someone had explained midi-chlorians to the fan base this way, in 1999, would it have made much difference?
Who knows.
I think it's important to consider the climate in which this was all going on. George's Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace,Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith were divisive, to say the least. And the sequel trilogy he was proposing to make was bound to be just as divisive, if not more so, if what he described to James Cameron on Cameron's 2018 AMC limited series, The History of Science Fiction, is to be taken seriously:
"[The next three ‘Star Wars’ films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.
"Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in… We're vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force."
And it wasn't lost on him that he'd be headed into dangerous territory with the Star Wars fan base:
“Everybody hated it in Phantom Menace [when] we started to talk about midi-chlorians. There's a whole aspect to that movie that is about symbiotic relationships.To make you look and see that we aren't the boss. That there's an ecosystem here.
"If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”
And in the book Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, George discussed this even further with interviewer Paul Duncan:
George Lucas: This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart.
The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that I couldn’t resist it.
Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants — I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells. I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it. That’s why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force.
If we have enough Midi-chlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practice of being able to walk on hot coals.
Here's more from him about the Whills:
George Lucas: The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100,000 times more Whills than there are Midi-chlorians, and there are about 10,000 times more Midi-chlorians than there are human cells.
The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midi-chlorians and the Midi-chlorians effectively work for the Whills.
It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body, and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to whom?
I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, “We want it to be mysterious and magical”, and “You’re just doing science.” Well, this isn’t science.
This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it’s a fiction.
It’s saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they’ve been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships — those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They’ve been living on those things for thousands of years, they’ve been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything.
The one-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over.
Everybody got that? Yeah, I know – it's a lot to process. Now, while the midi-chlorians were a total mystery to me in 1999, I've known of the Whills for much longer. I knew the name, anyway. When I read the novelization of Star Wars for the first time around 1979 or 1980 (I would've been four or five), it began with some background from the Journal of the Whills. But it was never specified what the Whills were. What George was laying out here, it was some elaborate, ambitious stuff.
There's no way, after the backlash the prequels received upon release, and the divisiveness that followed a few years afterwards, that you wouldn't have some trepidation after hearing George describe his full concept for his sequels, at least in the ways it involved the midi-chlorians and the Whills. I don't blame Bob Iger for balking when he read George's treatment for those films. I'd balk too! And I'm sure I don't even know the half of it! I never had any issue with midi-chlorians, but you have to think about all those who did. No studio executive would want the kind of fallout that The Phantom Menace and the other prequels caused back then. All George was interested in was telling the story he wanted to tell, and there's nothing wrong with that. But Iger was trying to protect a brand, and in the long term, that's more important. It wouldn't hurt George if he received flack for the sequels he was proposing, because he expected his sequels to end the franchise, forever and ever, amen, for real this time, I really, really mean it. But if you had a franchise you meant to keep going, and you produced the sequels that doubled down on what upset fans the last time, you'd be courting disaster. You don't want to gamble with what might wind up being a franchise killer.
George was tying up his Star Wars story in a bow with those sequel films he was proposing. Never mind that he said it was all over with Return of the Jedi in 1983, and in 2005 after Revenge of the Sith ("There is no Episode VII," George told Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes two months prior to Revenge of the Sith's release), but it seemed like he really meant it this time. But by this point, now that Star Wars was at Disney, Bob Iger wasn't planning on wrapping it all up. He wanted to take Star Wars even further. As far as it could go. Let's be real, midi-chlorians weren't exactly universally accepted at this time.
George went through hell with the fans, the critics, and the press on the prequels, and the midi-chlorians had a lot to do with that. As the new custodian of Star Wars, would Bob Iger want to deal with that backlash, especially when it could be avoided? The answer, clearly, is no.
Disney did everything they could to make Star Wars feel familiar again. They threw out the midi-chlorians; at least, mentioning them by name was out. The movies were shot on film again; the digital cinematography of the prequels was gone, with the exception of Rogue One and 10-50% of The Last Jedi, depending on who you ask. George's predisposition for green screen stages, digital backgrounds and digital creatures was minimalized. But this is Star Wars, and fans are fickle.
I do believe it was kismet, however, that Star Wars, and by extension, Lucasfilm, would become property of Disney.
It seems George's entire life has been leading him to Disney. At the D23 Expo in 2015, George said:
“I've been really associated with Disney for 60 years now. I started the second day the parks opened. I was here, and I've been here every year since. And then in Florida. And then in Paris. And then in Tokyo. I look forward to Shanghai. And Disney has always given me a great, great deal of inspiration. A lot of what I do came out of the joy, the awe, the experience I had, in the movies on television, and in the parks, And that's what I was trying to pass on with my work, was to inspire, and make people have funny thoughts, and think that they can do anything… I mean, I can't even begin to tell you how much of an influence Disney has been on me.”
A page on Lucasfilm.com expands on what George said:
George Lucas had grown up in the 1940s and ‘50s as part of a generation of children deeply influenced by Walt Disney. The animated smash-hit Cinderella was released the year Lucas turned six, and just four years later, Disney premiered one of its earliest live action adventures, the special effects epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Soon other mediums were bringing Disney stories to audiences in new ways.
Lucas has stated repeatedly the importance of television to his generation. Among the most recognizable faces on the small screen was Walt Disney’s, who, beginning in 1954, hosted his weekly anthology series that included the documentary True-Life Adventures, animated classics, and live action historical tales like Davy Crockett. These stories soon coalesced into a physical space that introduced a new concept in entertainment: Disneyland.
As a native Californian, George Lucas visited Disneyland the month it opened in 1955. He had just turned 11-years-old. There he discovered, along with thousands of other guests, a world of adventure, history, fantasy, and the future. Disneyland was like a film that you could step into and assume the role of a character. Amongst its many delights were the forward-looking, science-inspired attractions of Tomorrowland, reflecting the country’s increasing attention on space travel.
As Lucas grew up and considered his future, art and illustration became a possible career path. As a 17-year-old in 1961, he toured the Disney Studios lot (thanks to a connection through an old family friend). It was his first time glimpsing a movie studio, and it was during the era when Walt Disney was at the peak of his creative powers. Later, as the direction of his life changed, Lucas entered the cinema program at the University of Southern California. Walt Disney died in 1966, the year Lucas finished his bachelor’s degree.
As the Disneys struggled repeatedly in their early business dealings with motion picture distributors, Lucas endured similarly grueling experiences with his first two features, THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). In both cases, the respective studios seized the films and recut them. A resentful Lucas then had to search yet again for support on his next project, a space fantasy that seemed right out of Tomorrowland called Star Wars. As more than one studio rejected his visionary concept, he reflected, “I think Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt Disney were still alive. Walt Disney not only had vision, but he was also an extremely adventurous person. He wasn’t afraid.”
Neither was Lucas. His odyssey in the creation of Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) rivaled Disney’s making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had been released 40 years earlier. Both films were all-out gambles that many doubted but were led by the dogged perseverance and commitment to quality of their makers. For both Lucas and Disney, the facilitation of creative talent was an essential component. As Snow White defined the intrepid culture of the Disney Studios, Star Wars built up Lucasfilm, which beforehand had only been a very small company. Both films met their moments, sparking cultural phenomenons that are difficult to imagine for those of us who were not there to experience them. These were movies made for people, of all ages and backgrounds.
And the Top Disney blog expands on this even further:
George Lucas is a Californian through and through. That’s why it should come as no surprise that the Modesto native was at Disneyland in Anaheim during opening week in July, 1955.
As an eleven-year-old boy, Disneyland made a big impression on Lucas. He already loved the Disney films, but seeing this new type of theme park, which was like stepping on to a movie set, captured his imagination. From that point on, George Lucas knew that he wanted to be like his idol Walt: a dreamer, innovator, movie maker, and visionary.
After graduating from USC as a film student in 1967, Lucas put those plans into action. He’d closely studied some of the special effects tricks developed at Disney and other studios by legends like Ub Iwerks, Peter Ellenshaw, John Hench and Harper Goff. His first professional film was 1971’s sci-fi adventure THX-1138, which used some of those same effects.
Two years later Lucas had a big hit with American Graffiti. During that time he kept working on a story, called The Journal of The Whills, inspired by watching the Saturday morning cliffhanger serials in cinemas, Disney live action adventures, Disney TV shows and sci-fi literature. It was about a young man named Luke Starkiller and his journeys through the universe. That story evolved into the Star Wars saga.
Lucas believed that Star Wars was exactly the type of film that was in Disney’s wheelhouse. He even planned to open the first movie with a storybook cover of The Journal of the Whills, like all of the great Disney fairy tale movie title sequences.
Unfortunately, Walt died in 1966, so George never got the chance to meet him in person, or to pitch this fantastic story to him. The people in charge of Disney at the time took a pass on making Star Wars at their studio.
Had Walt still been around, Lucas was sure that he would have seen the value in Star Wars, but it was not to be. Instead, Lucas had to pitch it to other studios around Hollywood. 20th Century Fox took the chance, though even they thought it would wind up as a small B-movie summer release. Taking a page from the lesson Walt learned with Mickey Mouse, Lucas insisted on keeping the rights to the stories and characters, especially the merchandising. This one shrewd business move helped to make Lucasfilm a powerhouse player in Hollywood.
Casting for the original Star Wars was done in 1976. A young Jodie Foster was one of the people considered for the role of Princess Leia, but she was still under contract to Disney (Freaky Friday and Candleshoe were two of her films made around then) so she had to pass.
After Star Wars became the biggest movie of all time, the other studios, including Disney, tried to catch up. Disney’s sci-fi answer was 1979’s The Black Hole and – to a lesser extent – 1982’s Tron. Neither film lit up the box office. Tron was, however, a pioneer in the use of computers in film. Lucasfilm had branched off into those areas, too, with their special effects house, Industrial Light, and Magic. Another company that they funded was a small Silicon Valley firm that became Pixar.
Disney did have a small part in the initial merchandising success of Star Wars. Their Disneyland Record label signed a deal with Lucasfilm to license the stories for their brand of “read along” records. Several of them were produced from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
After Michael Eisner became the CEO of Disney, he used his connections with George Lucas, made during Eisner’s time at paramount – where the Indiana Jones series was developed – to persuade Lucasfilm to collaborate on an E-Ticket attraction for the Disney Parks.
In 1987, Star Tours opened at Disneyland and has been a staple at Disney properties around the world ever since. That was the first opportunity for Disney and Star Wars characters to co-exist in the same universe and together at the parks.
George also admitted (i.e., alleged) at the D23 Expo in 2015 that Jar Jar Binks, often accused of being a racist caricature, had ties to a Disney animated mainstay:
“I can't even begin to tell you how much of an influence Disney has had on me… I will say one secret that nobody knows; not many people realize that Goofy was the inspiration for Jar Jar Binks… I know that you will look at him differently now. It's pretty obvious, actually, but… I love Goofy and I love Jar Jar.”
And there's no way you can read what George tells American Film in their April 1977 issue without a tremendous sense of irony all these years later; even the writer from American Film comes off sounding particularly prophetic:
If Star Wars sounds like the stuff of Marvel Comics sword and sorcery plots, well, it is just that. (Marvel will even release the story in six installments this spring.) There is a lot to charm the preadolescent mind – rebellion, interplanetary wars, doomsday machines, space pirates, black knights, magic and sorcery, death stars, mystical happenings, sophisticated torture devices, medieval weaponry, and a savage air battle above the gray surface of a killer satellite. George Lucas does nothing to disguise the fact that Star Wars is for the schoolboy in us all.
"I decided I wanted to make a children's movie, to go the Disney route," Lucas explains in his distinctively nervous manner. "Fox hates for me to say this, but Star Wars has always been intended as a young people's movie. While I set the audience for [American] Graffiti at sixteen to eighteen, I set this one at fourteen and maybe even younger than that."
Thirty-five years later, not only does Star Wars literally go "the Disney route," it becomes associated with Marvel all over again, to the point of being accused by some fans of ripping Marvel off.
That's not to say George didn't feel cheated or betrayed when Disney chose not to follow his sequel treatment outlines to the letter. We all know George took it badly. He aired all those grievances publicly, and apologized for some of those comments later. I can empathize with him, but empathy only goes so far. You can’t tell me this wasn't all negotiated during the Lucasfilm sale. Agreements had to be made, giving Disney the right to refuse any concept they didn't feel comfortable pursuing. But I do empathize with him; because it's difficult to be sidelined and watch someone else bring up your baby, especially when they're raising that baby differently than the way you would raise the baby.
However, contrary to what was said in the press and in the social media space by critics, pundits and fans (including what Lucas himself has said), not everything in George's initial sequel trilogy outline was scrapped. Luke was still under self-imposed exile on an island. The focus of the story was always on a young girl who sought Luke out on that island.
Darth Maul and Darth Talon were meant to be the antagonists of George’s sequel trilogy.
Darth Maul, Darth Sidious’s Zabrak apprentice in The Phantom Menace, was bisected by Obi-Wan Kenobi in a lightsaber duel on Naboo but survived his injury (as anyone who falls down a chasm in Star Wars seems to do these days) and became a recurring character in the Star Wars animated series The Clone Wars and Rebels. His arc led him – after it was decided he wouldn't be appearing in the sequel trilogy – to a fatal confrontation with an elderly Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine sands, giving both characters closure. And if you want my opinion, a more fitting end for Maul.
Darth Talon was a Sith Twi'lek, featured in the Star Wars expanded universe Legacy comics. Her EU backstory would've been (perhaps in whole, perhaps in part) discarded by George, making her Darth Maul's apprentice.
Frankly, I'm glad they didn't make it into the sequel trilogy we got. Darth Maul had a more fitting end in the animated series, and I still hope to see Darth Talon enter canon somewhere, somehow. There was simply no substantial place to put her in the sequels. I'm also glad Snoke didn't make it past The Last Jedi. I was always anticipating Emperor Palpatine's return. Because you don't defeat the ultimate evil in the galaxy (ultimate evil with unlimited power!!!) by simply tossing him down a shaft. If he's the ultimate evil, you don't vanquish ultimate evil in chapter six of your nine-chapter saga, especially when you've built him up for six past chapters, only to replace him with his underlings or a pretender to the throne to wrap up the whole story. It isn't satisfying. If all you have to do to permanently destroy the ultimate evil is throw him down a shaft and watch him vaporize when he collides with power conduits, and that's it and that's all, then he isn't ultimate evil.
What George wanted to give us is not what I wanted to see, because I don't think it would've worked from a pure storytelling perspective. You don't kill off your main antagonist in the middle of your story, only to confront his henchmen to wrap it all up. It's an unfulfilling way to tell a story. If George had been able to make the movies he wanted to make, the way he wanted to make them, I would've respected that, but I probably wouldn't have found them very satisfying. And I probably would've disregarded them, as certain fans disregard the sequel trilogy we have now, or even the prequels George made. Minus the vicious public attacks, of course.
But George knew we weren't going to like his sequels. He knew I wasn't going to like his sequels. That's why he retired.
I wanted to see the whole story come full circle. With these mentions of a microbiotic universe, Darth Maul and Darth Talon, it doesn't sound to me like anything was going to truly come full circle.
With The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, I feel the Skywalker Saga has come full circle. In the chapters that follow, I'll tell you why I think so.
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