Star Wars and Eragon: a different comparison

[drkstormyknight]

I was pondering in my lair (read 'at my computer') when an interesting thought popped into my head: Star Wars is the greatest rip-off that cinema has ever seen. It basically took the good bits from everything and got away with it, making a shed-load of money in the process. To name a few: the opening text crawl from old adventure films like Flash

Comments

[kellicat]

Because if Star Wars is a ripoff, than Eragon's a ripoff of a ripoff and not a very good one at that. It's so transparent that it doesn't take much thinking to see the parallels. It can't be excused by calling it the Hero's Journey: I've read The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetypes it discusses are not an exact template for the plot points in Star Wars. Star Wars uses the archetypes discussed in the book, but the ideas Campbell are far too vague and universal to attach to a single story. None of the stories he discusses are an exact fit for Star Wars whereas Eragon rips off major plot points directly from A New Hope.

Also, what works in movies will not necessarily work well in books. Movies are a visual medium while books are a literary medium and what makes a good movie often does not make for a good book. For all that Paolini talks about reading Story by Robert McKee, he seems to have missed the chapter discussing book-to-movie adaptations and the differences between novels and movies.

[coldplay42]

Seconded. I've heard many of the fans defending Eragon by using the Hero-With-A-Thousand-Faces-argument, but the fact that Eragon is a poor farmboy that finds a MagGuffin that the Empire wants . . . etc. etc. shows the unmistakable similarities between the two series'.

Star Wars brought a fresh perspective to the HWaTF, while Eragon was a simple cut-and-pasting of its plot points.

[drkstormyknight]

The Hidden Fortress. Again. Star Wars so obviously takes stuff from it that it doesn't need a scholar. It just so happens that Star Wars is more famous, so more people notice it. Plagiarism is normally wrong no matter who sees it. I'll agree with you that Star Wars combined loads of things seamlessly, and that they were, on the whole, minor things- but by no stretch of the imagination is it new on the story front.

[darth_gojira]

There's using it as a model, then there's doing a copy-paste with the scripts.

[drkstormyknight]

Again, this is not a post about if Eragon rips off Star Wars. We all know it does. The post is about why Star Wars is allowed to borrow from various sources to great praise, but when Eragon does it the reaction is completely different. But if you do want to do a comparison, then there's a shot-for-shot recreation of a chariot chase in Ben Hurr in The Phantom Menace. And I think we all know which is the superior work and which one was the depressingly awful prequel. If you want more comparisons, how about when Anakain and Padme enter the arena in Episode 2? Gladiator. Or when Yoda dies? Lost Horizon. Screen wipes? Kurosawa. But still Star Wars is praised for this aspect even though it deliberately recreates scenes with no variation in the shots.

[kevias]

There's a difference between lifting ideas and copying. More to the point, there's a difference between melding several notions and plot elements into a coherent whole and simply tossing them together. The Force, though never explained or explored in detail (in the movies), is far easier to understand the the jumbled mess of Alagaesia's magic system.

And then there's another component too: going above and beyond. Let's say I have a dragon that turns into a human. I do this for no better reason than I can't think of a good way to get the beast to an interior scene. If that's all I do, I've ripped of Raymond Feist. If I explore some of the ideas that dragons might live among us or how this feature might help/hinder the heroes or dragons or how draconic metabolism and magic interesect, then I'm doing something more

[fulcon]

At this day and age, there is nothing original anymore. It has all been done. If you think of something, someone else has thought of it first.

I think I heard the best explanation for Star Wars a while back: "Originality is the art of hiding your sources."

Star Wars hides its sources extremely well, so it's lauded as 'original'. Eragon does not.