Peregrin's C.J. Motonow's Star Wars!

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Peregrin's C.J. Motonow's Star Wars!

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Peregrin's C.J. Motonow's Star Wars!

Universal Galactopedia > Media > Pop Culture and Entertainment > Movies > C.J. MOTONOW's STAR WARS

In the later 200 years, two remakes of George Lucas' Star Wars series have been made. One was made in the 3210s and followed George Lucas' original six movies closely. Another, however, was quite distant from George Lucas' vision and was, when its first entry hit the theatres in 3247 among the costliest and most visually impressive films ever made.

Filmed back-to-back over 6 years under a veil of secrecy by relative unknowns on the biggest budget a film trilogy ever had, USS-born avantgardist Cesar Jorge Motonow (known also for Twin Fullmoon, The Cupcakes Of Justice and The Vortex Octology) financed the movies with the enormous sums paid by art galleries for the paintings and drawings he produced as a member of an artist collective called The Divine Mirror. Even that was not enough to pay for it, he also received generous donations from the governments of the United Solarian Sovereignty, the Holy Empire of Haruhi Suzumiya and the Toraamal Republic.

The first entry in Motonow's take on Star Wars was met with extremely mixed response. Fans of Lucas' original films hated it for its practically nonexistent resemblance to the source material. Others appreciated it for its skilled scenography, deep philosophical content and a visual style which could best be described as unique.

Motonow explained the difference between Lucas' Star Wars and his own interpretation:
C.J. Motonow wrote:"Star Wars" is a myth of the modern days. George Lucas did not create that myth, he merely was the one who communicated the myth to the general public. Storytellers don't make myths, they tell the myths. Each of us has our own interpretation of a myth. What your ancestors saw on the screen back in 1977 was George Lucas' interpretation of a particular myth. This is my interpretation of the same myth. One should neither forget that George Lucas was an American, while I am half PeZookish; half Españan. Thusly, George Lucas' Star Wars was an American rendition of a myth that belongs to no culture, while I have created a fundamentally Nova Terran version of the same myth.

With most of the sets, costumes and spaceships designed either by Motonow himself or by artists who were influenced by him (some hailing from as afar as Zigonia), it was not as much the style as the substance which shook the "Warsies".

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!

C.J. Motonow's A New Hope

In Motonow's version, Luke Skywalker was aware from the start that he was the exiled heir and presumed last survivor of the Skywalker Noble Family. Owen and Beru Lars were not his relatives in this version, rather, they were the two surviving servants of the Lord Anakin Skywalker.

The Jawas from whom C3PO and R2D2 were bought, were depicted by Motonow as a cyborgized degenerate splinter faction of a machine-worshiping religious cult. The designs for C3PO and R2D2 were radically changed, too. Where it really started deviating from the original were Luke's conflict with the Sandpeople. In Motonow's version, the Sandpeople brought Luke into their cave and presented him before Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom the Sandpeople worshiped as a god. Obi-Wan Kenobi (portrayed by Motonow himself) then taught Luke the ways of the Jedi Order (which the Sandpeople had adopted as their own religion) and revealed that he used to be the mentor of Luke's father. Motonow's changes to the code of the Jedi were also a point of critique; the Jedi experience now included minor cosmetic self-mutilation (obviously a reference to Motonow himself having torn off part of his own left ear when he was young) and the lightsabers were actually corporeal steel swords whose blades glowed white-hot with the wielder's telekinetic fire.

One of the most memorable scenes in Motonow's A New Hope may have been the flashback depicting Darth Vader's origin as told by Obi-Wan. In Motonow's version, Darth Vader was not a cyborg but a golem, who decapitated himself to let his disembodied soul possess a robotic humanoid body.

Half an hour through Motonow's version of A New Hope (the first film to be completed), Obi-Wan and Luke led the Sandpeople in a failed guerrilla war against the Imperial government on Tattooine as a response to the Stormtroopers' slaughter of Owen and Beru. When captured, Luke and Obi-Wan broke free of the Stormtroopers tasked with guarding them and fled offworld with Han Solo and Chewbacca, who in this version were fellow freedom fighters who had not yet been taken prisoner. It did not help the purists that in this version, especially not in retrospect, that Chewbacca was portrayed by young Vossrashak Kalnaxxir, who later would become a staple of action films from Zigon-5.

In the Millennium Falcon (a real spaceship custom-built for the movie), the heroes of the story fled and were captured by the Death Star... which in Motonow's remake was made entirely out of crystal, and armed with a choir of specially trained super-psychics who combined their telekinetics to destroy planets. Another extremely memorable scene here was the views of Alderaan's capital city as the planet was hit by the psionic super-weapon of the Death Star.

The fight aboard the crystallic Death Star was in Motonow's version fought primarily with swords and telekinetics against Storm Troopers who looked more like Roman Legionnaires than the ones in Lucas' version. Here came another scene which burned its way into every viewer: Obi-Wan Kenobi's death was marked by a huge flash of white light which filled the room wherein he was duelling with Darth Vader.

Yet another scene which solidified the Motonow version's status as much more adult than Lucas' was nothing else than a zero-G sex scene between Han Solo and Leia.

Motonow's version of the Battle of Yavin did not differ that much from the one in the Lucas version, other than the spaceship designs being remarkably different and the Death Star's destruction causing a galaxy-wide psionic shockwave due to the death of the Psionic Choir. Still, most fans of Lucas' Star Wars were quite upset due to the aestethical deviations alone (which could not possibly be further from the Lucas version), and the plot changes upset them more. It still found its fans, and every single reviewer had something good to say about Ibrahim Ansar's portrayal of Grand Moff Tarkin. Yet the Motonow version of A New Hope, odd as it was, was only a taste of what was to come.

C.J. Motonow's The Empire Strikes Back

Film critics consider this film where the true weirdness started. It opened in 3248, the film annoyed Star Wars purists even more than the preceding entry in the serious.

Its version of the scenes were perhaps the most surreal depiction of a battle on film yet. The mechanical-looking AT-ATs had been replaced by sleek dragon-like walkers which in form looked more organic than mechanical, with close-ups revealing something obviously inspired by 20th century painter/architect Hans Rudi Giger. It didn't make things better that Motonow depicted the Wampa as a noncorporeal ethereal demon, and that the Snowtrooper costumes were even more outlandish than those of the "ordinary" Stormtroopers shown in Motonow's A New Hope.

The flight to Dagobah by Luke Skywalker was yet another downright bizarre visual which enchanted as many as it baffled: Instead of using hyperdrive, Motonow's Luke Skywalker used his extraordinary telekinetic abilities to move his fighters thousands of lightyears - and in this same bizarre trippy colour-explosion scene, it was revealed that at the end of the Battle of Yavin, Luke absorbed the souls of the Psionic Choir whom died aboard the Death Star.

As for the Dagobah sequences themselves, Motonow managed again to annoy purists. Yoda was now a ghost which possessed Luke to produce a "soul-merging" at the end of Luke's stay on Dagobah. This process, along with the myriad hallucinations it provided Luke with, was nominated by critic Reuben Goldberg as "3248's Top Unforgettable Movie Moment". The Imperial Starfleet's hunt for the Millennium Falcon was perhaps the first sequence which reviewers said that Motonow improved from the original version - aside from the "space slug" now resembling a leech more than anything, Motonow opted to add psychedelic "warp storms" and a spaceborne duel between the Millennium Falcon and bounty hunter ships. Fans of the Lucas trilogy, however, did still not like Motonow's tampering with what they considered holy.

Yet what some considered the most breathtaking parts of Motonow's The Empire Strike Back was the scenes aboard Darth Vader's flagship, which Motonow had renamed the Executioner. (He felt it sounded "better in the mouth" than the original name "Executor") Though the interior of the Executioner looked more like that of a nightmare gothic palace than a spaceship, it left audiences breathless either in admiration of the wicked imagination which had designed it, or in disbelief in whether it made sense. The Emperor Palpatine I, played by ex-Divine Mirror painter Romain Passeron (one of Motonow's best friends), had a vastly increased role in Motonow's version of The Empire Strikes Back where he appeared upon the Executioner's bridge as an actual astral projection rather than a hologram.

If there was one thing about this entry into Motonow's remake of the Star Wars trilogy which did not disappoint anyone, not even the purists, it was the climactic lightsaber duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. In addition to the intense and energetic swordplay, which many considered to be better choreographed than that in Lucas originals', Motonow included psychic duelling which culminated in Darth Vader tearing off Luke Skywalker's hand by such powerful telekinetics that the arm was turned to pulp as it was torn off. The dialogue which revealed Vader's relation to Luke was extended and touched also on the golem nature of Motonow's Darth Vader. Aside from the Emperor, Motonow had added more importance to the character of Boba Fett. Motonow's Fett was another element whom many reviewers considered an improvement on the original.

At barely more than 3 hours in length, C.J. Motonow's The Empire Strikes Back was even more loaded with philosophical content than the previous installment. Motonow himself said: "I do not care what other people say - there are reasons that my version of this myth is different than that of George Lucas."

C.J. Motonow's Return Of The Jedi

By far the strangest of Motonow's Star Wars trilogy, his version of Return Of The Jedi was even further removed from the Lucas version than the preceding ones. It started with Luke Skywalker being contacted by the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi and then assimilating Obi-Wan's soul into his own as he had done with that of Yoda. This did not shock Lucas' fans as much as how much Motonow had changed Jabba and his palace. Instead of an anthropomorphizes slug ruling an abandoned monastery, Motonow's Jabba was a "scorpion-mantis-lizard thing" which ruled from an elaborate subterranean mansion whose vast and surrealistically ornamented interiors were steeped in darkness.

A scene which sparked even more controversy, also among those who did not care the slightest about Lucas' version, was the one where the Great God Rancor (Motonow depicted the Rancor as a Lovecraft-inspired demon-god instead of a mere chained beast) raped the captive Leia. Aside from infuriating womens' rights groups all over the galaxy, it also caused much debate in Art And Philosophy about Motonow's alleged sexual deviancies.

As the Great God Rancor ejaculated, Luke rushed to the altar after a swordfight with many of Jabba's guards; upon finding that he arrived too late, he entered yet another bloody fight to slay the Great God Rancor.

For the slaughter of a God, the entomo-reptilian Motonow version of Jabba sentenced Luke, Leia and the now-thawed out Han to death by sacrifice to the Sarlacc, which again had changed in Motonow's version to a God, exactly like the Rancor. The Great God Sarlacc was a being equal parts snake, centipede and leech, woken from its slumber in the centre of the planet Tattooine by a group of shadowy wizards which Jabba had hired. Here, the Great God Sarlacc even had a reason to devour Boba Fett - it punished him for blasphemy against the Great God Sarlacc. Here, Leia used her latent psionic abilities to sever the chain connecting her to Jabba's dais and threw the monster into the Great God Sarlacc's mouth. The Great God Sarlacc then, in a scene which caused some Lucas fans to walk out of the theaters, thanked Luke and Leia for ridding the world of these blasphemers and heretics.

However, for the purists, many more changes in Motonow's Return of The Jedi were to come. The Second Death Star was built entirely out of a bronze-coloured fictional metal called "Orichalcos", and while it made sense to introduce more characterization of Emperor Palpatine, not many considered it necessary to show a scene of the Emperor defecating, nor did everyone like the purple mohawk hairstyles sported by the Crimson Guard in Motonow's version. Others did not even know what to think about Motonow's decision to portray the Ewoks as winged, bird-like creatures which lived in great sylvan cities built in the tops of mile-high trees. A visually impressive fantasy culture if there ever was one, and far more original than the teddybear-like Ewoks in Lucas' ROTJ, but they had only the name in common. A visually impressive scene of the Battle of Endor was when the avian Ewoks duelled in mid-air with Imperial Stormtroopers mounted on futuristic versions of Da Vinci's ornithopter.

All this still paled in comparison to the spaceborne Battle of Endor, a CG spectacle which Motonow had scripted in collaboration with an Anglian naval officer who happened to be his cousin. Said naval officer, Lt. Commander Wladyslaw Motonow, commented in an interview: "This looks more like a real space battle than most of the anti-pirate skirmishes I've fought in."

The three-way swordfight/psi-duel aboard the Second Death Star between Luke, Darth Vader and the Emperor was even more over-the-top than that in Motonow's rendition of The Empire Strikes Back. In another significant deviation from Lucas' original version, the one to destroy Darth Vader was actually the Emperor, who crushed the mechanical body after Vader defected over to the side of his son. Vader's soul, seperated from a body yet once more, merged with that of his son Luke. (Which by now had absorbed several other souls) This way, Anakin Skywalker avenged his own physical death.

The ending of the movie however, topped all this in sheer otherworldliness and offensiveness to Lucas' fans. Luke, now having become one with his father, voyaged to Coruscant (depicted by Motonow as a "Dyson Sphere" rather than an actual planet) where he was coronated as the new Emperor of the Galaxy in a scene where statues of Palpatine are toppled over, the Crimson Guard swear new oaths of loyalty and a new flag flies over Coruscant. As his future successor, Luke Skywalker nominates the demigod with whom Leia is pregnant due to the rape by the Great God Rancor.

As Leia gives birth to the demi-god, an impossible-to-describe 20-minute scene (making Motonow's Return Of The Jedi almost 4 hours long) happens where the very nature of the space-time continuum is fundamentally altered. After over 15 minutes of pure psychedelics, we see a young girl standing atop a meadow, saying: "This is not the end. This is a new beginning."

The Aftermath

Motonow followed it up with his own take on what a prequel trilogy to Star Wars would look like. Having absolutely nothing in common with George Lucas' prequels, the three-part C.J. Motonow's Star Wars: The Beginning opened in 3255 and drew a somewhat more positive response from the viewing public.

It did spark a dilemma which exists among filmmakers today in 3267 and is still debated hotly - namely that of whether the Motonow version is better than all other versions of Star Wars, including the more faithful remakes and Lucas' originals. This is perhaps the area where C.J. Motonow's Star Wars is a true groundbreaker: It is perhaps the first remake radically different from the original and also considered an improvement by a considerable bulk of the population.

On their own right, Motonow's Star Wars movies are also among some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking epics ever to be seen on screen, and among the most expensive movies ever made. (even though they at first flopped at the box office, Mendelson Films reports that they later have become cult classics in the home theatres)

Not surprisingly, they were also Motonow's only voyage into the world of big-budget movies. It still stands as a testament to the most vivid imaginations of the galaxy, that such a surreal space opera epic got made in the first place.'
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Re: Peregrin's C.J. Motonow's Star Wars!

Post by Ford Prefect »

The finest piece of prose ever framed on the internet.
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
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Re: Peregrin's C.J. Motonow's Star Wars!

Post by Somes J »

I feel like I should offer some sort of commentary on this but I can't really think of much to say.

So it's kinda Star Wars done in the style of Jodorowsky's Dune? Sounds cool.
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