There is a device in comics called the 'retcon,' which means "retroactive continuity." Basically, it changes things that already happened in order fit a contemporary writerly goal.
I've identified two distinct kinds of retcon, so far. The most common kind involve introducing new elements to a story that the reader hadn't previously seen in order to radically reinterpret certain events. The obvious version of this is the "it was all a dream" retcon. This isn't logically impossible, within the story. Readers are merely informed that what they thought were real events (within the fictional world of the narrative) weren't real at all. This happens in comics all the time.
The Clone Saga is one of the biggest, most horrendous fuck-ups in Marvel Comics' history. In it, a clone of Spider-man, complete with Peter Parker's memories and thought to have been killed in a late 70s, throw-away adventure, turns out to have lived. He comes back, and it turns out that he is the real Peter Parker, and the character readers had followed since the 70s was the fake. The story was awful, dismal dreck, but it was not logically impossible. We simply didn't know that the Peter who seemed to have survived the original story in the 70s was the clone, not the original. Woops.
The second kind of retcon is something I've already mentioned. It's what Julia Round, a fellow comics scholar, refers to as 'superscription,' literally 'writing over' a previous narrative element. In this version of retcon, something for which readers have demonstrable evidence is contradicted in a subsequent story either by radical rupture in the narrative, or writerly fiat.
To continue the previous example, readers' reactions to the Clone Saga were so overwhelmingly negative (and with good reason), that the powers that be at Marvel Comics decided to just plain chuck it all and start fresh. They basically rebooted Spider-man continuity, returning him to a point at which there were no clones, where his Aunt May was still alive (she died mid-way through the Clone Saga), and Peter Parker was back to being the smart-ass superhero readers knew and loved.
On a case-by-case basis, superscription usually happens by fiat. Which is to say, they just happen, and readers have to just live with them. When they occur on a massive scale, though, they're sometimes facilitated by events of cosmic proportion that attempt to either justify or explain how continuity suddenly, radically changed.
DC Comics (in)famously rebooted its entire universe of characters in 1985 in an event called Crisis on Infinite Earths. The multiple individual universes that previously existed in DC Comics, which facilitated the occasional cross-over of characters from one to the other, were suddenly squished together into one big, seemingly consistent, timeline. This took a year's worth of comics to depict, and was followed by decades of "so, how did this now happen in the past?" discussions, most of which defied the verb tenses of the English language.
Despite their technical differences, however, retcon and superscription function to solve almost exactly the same problem of storytelling. In order to tell a story now, a writer must violate an established element of a story that happened then.
In the case of superscription, this is often just a convenience, a narrative element swept under the rug, like the fact that Leia claims to remember her mother in Return of the Jedi, but her mother dies in childbirth in Revenge of the Sith. Lucas et al. wanted to alter a story element for the sake of drama and pacing, so they did. No harm done, really, but a continuity problem none the less. In the case of retcon, this is often a way to either create a new story, as is the case in the Clone Saga.
Both, however, are routinely used to correct what are percieved as bad stories, or stories we'd like to have never happened. Crisis on Infinite Earths was supposed to clean up DC's continuity, to simplify the universe of characters. Instead, it confused the ever-living crap out of several generations of readers. A recent story called Green Lantern: Rebirth was a grand retcon, not a superscription, meant to undo a story in which a beloved hero, Hal Jordan/Green Lantern II, turned into a cosmic villain called Parallax.
The question I'm left with is this: why do audiences in comics and sci-fi need these interventions? Why are we incapable of simply ignoring or dismissing stories that we don't like? Why do we take it personally when George Lucas or Rick Berman or Geoff Johns write a bad story about characters or settings that we love? Why can't we let go?
Okay, everybody's weighing in on this one, so here I am. Yes, it was better than I or II, but that ain't saying much.
What they did right:
The pacing and editing are waaaay better. This movie clips along as a thoroughly engrossing speed. Most of the dialogue-heavy scenes blip by as quickly as possible, and make way for the next action sequence. The movie starts with a big space fight, ends with a big lightsabre duel, and has lots of action in between. In fact, my guess is that someone in the production realised that the 'dramatic' parts of the I and II just didn't work, so he/she/they decided that III would be better as a straight sci-fi/action movie. All the rest of it became secondary.
Chancellor Palpatine/Darth Sidious' dialogue, rumoured to have been tweaked by none other than Tom Stoppard, is much improved, and you can actually pursuade yourself to think that his attempt to 'turn' Anikin is more than half believable. On paper, anyway, it makes perfect sense; it's just in the excecution that we lose something. I have to give kudos to Ian McDiarmid for just chewing the scenery as much as possible. He goes 'big' with his acting, and it pays off. What the prequels have forgotten is that, despite high budgets and mythological underpinnings, Star Wars is, at heart, a great big space opera. If more of its production staff had realised this, and respected the material for what it is, the movies would probably be a lot better.
What they do wrong:
The 'romantic' dialogue is so bad that you'll be wishing that Anikin would go back to talking about how "sand is hard." Reportedly, Christianson and Portman can actually act, but you'll see little to none of that in this movie. Portman is barely in it at all, and basically just runs around in an incredibly fake-looking pregnancy insert, and though Anikin is far less annoying and childish in this movie, Christianson still doesn't have the talent to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The only actor who manages to elevate that awful dialogue to being somewhat emotionally important is Ewan McGregor, who's "You were my brother..." speach is actually kinda, you know, moving. A little. It's ironic that Obi-Wan and Anikin's relationship has more feeling in it than Anikin's to Padme, but there you go.
This movie does give us the money shot we've been waiting a good six years for: Anikin is fitted with extensive cybernetic gear and transformed into Darth Vader, as we know and fear him. However, it's really not the great big, emotional 'capper' to the Star Wars story that it could have been, and indeed should have been. All in all, this is a decent enough little F/X action flick, but that's about it.
I know I've touched on this subject before, but I still have some things to say.
First, I know that these movies have some flaws. The pacing, the dialogue, the acting, Fishbourne's mystery gut in Reloaded and Revolutions (where did it come from? when will it reappear!?), but they're not nearly as bad as everyone continues to claim. If you expend a little bit of energy and analyse the films as they are, almost all of the plot elements fall cleanly into place. On paper, they're brilliant. On screen, they're still pretty good, but a lot gets lost in the translation.
Here's the funny part. I've talked to a lot of people who didn't like the sequels purely for the reasons I've outlined, but I've also talked to a whole lot more people who hate, HATE them, and the explanation is usually that the Wachowskis didn't make the movies that were in those fan's heads. "I thought in Revolutions they should have been in a matrix inside a matrix." Congratulations. They weren't. Deal with it. "I thought Morpheus should have been The One." Not a bad idea, but they didn't do that. People who object these kinds of reasons are talking about the movies that the Wachowskis 'failed' to make, not the ones they actually did make, and that's just unreasonable.
Farscape did everything the exact opposite of what I usually like, and they did it beautifully. The animatronics were a wonderful antidote to the over-use of CG. The Creature Shop should do more big productions. Their stuff starts off looking just a little silly, but the style sinks in very quickly and you see the genius of it. I was always really miffed that the puppet characters weren't in the credits. I want to know who works Pilot and Rygel! They're actors too! Anyway, the visuals of the show looked like they were trying to replicate the aesthetics of low-budget TV sci-fi (TOS, old-style Dr. Who), but with a real budget and with great technology.
There are a couple of things I really loved about the writing, too. Almost all of the 'alien of the week' episodes re-enact a very old SF cliché, but then there will be a twist about 1/3 of the way through, and then maybe another near end. Sometimes. The result is that you really never know where an episode is going, when it's going to go with the cliché, and where it's going to deliberately mess with the cliché.
The other thing was how much they pushed the fact that these aliens, regardless of being bipeds with basically human bodies, were aliens. They had totally different value systems, unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world. Crichton was truly a stranger in a strange land. Part of the point of thing was to make you also realise that Crichton is the real alien. He's the one who doesn't understand this place, the one from somewhere else, the one spouting off wierd references to things no one understands (which is partly why everything thinks he's crazy). Instead of the aliens being stand-ins for certain nations or cultures on Earth, a very useful device in things like TNG or B5, on Farscape the aliens are just plain alien, and the human doesn't know his ass from his elbow.
This show has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. It's so ridiculous sometimes that you just have to laugh. As far as I can tell, most of the 'science' they employ is vaguely reasonable, if we assume that what takes them seconds and that they do every day, takes actual forensic scientists hours if not days and that they can only afford to do on seriously big, important cases. Also, they don't carry guns and interview witnesses. Ever. They are lab techs. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.
However, this episode has well and truly jumped the shark for me. They actually triy to make the audience believe that they recover spoken sound waves that happened to be in the room while someone was turning a vase on a wheel. There is a brush of some kind that the sculpter uses to mark the wet clay, as far as I can tell, it's hand-held. They use a lazer to sample the grooves in the clay (dried, but not fired) and actually hear dialogue that allows them to solve the case.
Seriously, do the they think we're totally fucking brain-dead, or what? I'm not one to complain about pseudo-science in the context of sci-fi stories and shows. I'll accept a lot of nutso crap in the premise if it allows me to engage with the meat of the story. Do I complain that there's sound in space and gravity on the new Battlestar Galactica? No. I'm just fascinated by the pitting of military and political ideology against each other, and the commentary on American foreign policy. That's what I'm there for. But a show that claims some measure of realism, that is populated with characters who constantly call themselves 'scientists,' should have some relationship with reality when it comes to, oh, I don't know, the science they portray.
From now on, I will laugh at CSI only, and never with it, because if I'm watching it like it's science fiction (accept the fantasy, enjoy for the commentary), then there's no point to that awful, banal little show.
What this movie does, it does well for the most part, but what it leaves out is frustrating.
The philosophy of the adaptation seems to be "movies need to be plot-driven and linear, and the trade-mark witty dialogue and description of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does not serve that end." This is why, as far as I can tell, Arthur and Mr. Prosser's dialogue is cut, as well as the Vogon Jeltz' actual response to Arthur's attempt to comment on his poetry, and Ford's subsequent attempt to convince one young Vogon to change career paths. Suffice it to say, all the funniest bits are cut, and I can only hope that they will be in a DVD release.
All that said, what's left is really, genuinely clever. Sam Rockwell's rendition of Zaphod Beeblebrox as a narcissistic pseudo-Texan is totally unexpected and brilliant. The set decoration, costumes, and visual design are consistent and delightful. They didn't necessarily stick with exactly the descriptions from the books, the Vogon Constructor fleet is brown not yello, the Heart of Gold looks nothing like a sport shoe, but what they created has its own feel, its own life. The Vogons looks particularly arresting in all their giant-headed, skinny-limbed Vogonity. Marvin doesn't quite look right, to me (too cute), but Alan Rickman's delivery of Marvin's dialogue was perfect, so I'm willing to forgive, and to see that Marvin's design is meant to be both ironic (cute bot, depressing voice), but also consistent with the Syrius Cybernetics corporation's over-all design of the Heart of Gold.
There are, unfortunately, so bad casting choices. Arthur is a good choice. Martin Freeman, famous for Tim on The Office, would have been the perfect actor for the job, had they given him, you know, lines to say. As it is, he's not particularly active in the plot. Yes, he does some very important things, but most of the character is his undying love for Trillian, which is a very weird rewrite. And on the subject of Trillian... the actress has the right kind of 'girl next door' cuteness (though making her American seems really odd), but she delivers her lines in a way that makes them distinctly unfunny. Her voice borders or the whiny. She's a huge improvement over the Trillian in the BBC TV series, but nowhere near engaging enough for me to buy that Arthur was all that in love with her. Mos Def as Ford is another puzzler. Again, why an American? Black, I have no problem with, but without an actual Guildford accent he lines just aren't funny. Plus, Mos Def mumbles. His dialogue has no emotion and no character.
All in all, I give it a solid 'B.' It entertained me. I laughed (the dolphin water-ballet at the opening is wonderful; from what I know of the man, Douglas Adams would have loved it). It was missing most of the things I really love about The Guide, though, and I hope those things are on some wonderful, magical DVD that will be released just in time for Christmas of next year.
Ron Moore's blog entry on the death of Enterprise got me thinking. Partly as an echo of and partly as a response to his thoughts on the matter, I found myself musing, and my musing expressed itself, thusly...
As Moore says, this will be the first time since 1977 that there has been no Star Trek project either in production or actively on the air.
I have to say, I'm of two minds. On the one hand, season four of Enterprise has actually been quite fun. The whole thing is one long shout-out to the fans, and they even admit that on the commentary track for "In a Mirror, Darkly." Season four has been their extremely well-funded and officially-sanctioned fan film. So, I'm really sorry to see Enterprise go because I feel like they've finally found their voice again since the first half of season one, which I loved. Season two was unremarkable. Season three filled me with political rage (long story).
On the other hand, I feel like Paramount et al. have been resting on their Trek laurels for a long time. They seem to think that they can churn out any old crap, underfund it, generally not take too much care in what they give us, and good old, reliable Trekkies will lap it up.
This is not to insult the hard work of those people who made DS9, Voyager, or Enterprise. Those series all had real moments of greatness, but none have hit the high notes that Next Gen or the original series did, and part of that is the fact that there was just too much Trek on TV for too long. There was a time when I could flip channels for ten minutes and inevitably find one of, count 'em, four Trek shows. It just wasn't special, anymore. It went from a cult love affair, to just another franchise.
I think it's time to let it sit for a bit. No movies. No shows. Wait until a truly innovative, interesting, enthusiastic project comes up. If JMS ever comes back to his Trek project, I'll be there. If some other brilliant artist with a Rodenberrian gleam in his or her eye comes crawling out of the woodwork, then Paramount should go for it. But there shouldn't be Trek on TV just for the sake of having Trek on TV.
That means that if there are no good ideas for it, then nothing gets made. If we have to move on past that world that we all love so much in order to have good TV and good movies, then we do that. That doesn't disrespect the memory. That doesn't mean we let Trek 'die' (art doesn't die unless people don't experience it, and there's no shortage of ways to experience Rodenberry's world). It means doing what everyone who's ever worked on the show has tried to do: make good fiction.