francis george (afab viddy narcy)

Revolutionary Girl Utena, as an anime, has a reputation for being a complex, symbolic series that is difficult for even a multiple-time viewer to understand. Director Kunihiko Ikuhara, screenwriter Youji Enokido, and animator Shin’ya Hasegawa, as well as manga author Chiho Saitou’s collaborative work is a multi-layered series, using Japanese post-rock opera music with ambiguous lyrics referring to the characters during duels, complex and often time and money saving animation techniques that many of Ikuhara’s fellow director juniors would use in anime they directed and animated to come, and characters that are seemingly simple and archetypal in shoujo manga that become more and more complex and multi-layered as the anime reaches its climax at the Apocalypse arc. However, with the reputation for the complexity of the anime series, the reputation for its movie reboot-remake-sequel Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse is an even bigger ordeal to decipher. Characters those who have watched the anime are familiar to have turned themselves on their heads, with not only personality changes, but obvious design changes made to Utena and Anthy, as well as subtle design changes made to characters like Touga, Jury, Miki, and especially Shiori. Personalities and motivations aren’t always clear, and the brimming sexuality in the anime series prior had finally made its implications implicit, if not explicit in certain moments. And, of course, casual viewers of the movie and fans of the series alike wouldn’t be remiss to mention the scene in the climax of the anime, where Utena promises to take Anthy to the outside world, only for a giant car wash to appear out of nowhere and turn Utena into a car. Elements like these are what makes Adolescence Apocalypse memetic in anime movie spaces, both casual and hardcore fans alike, and admittedly, wtih the amped-up strangeness of the movie, as well as the more intensified symbolism, I could see why that, at first blush, Adolescence Apocalypse is seen as the final stage in Kunihiko Ikuhara’s deepest indulgences as a director. In some ways, you’d be right; many of Kunihiko Ikuhara’s hallmarks as a director, from the ways he plays with color to the ways he emphasizes the surreality and unreality of the films and anime alike that he directs, sort of give off the feel that he’s sort of a combination of American directors David Lynch and John Waters in campiness, surreality, and overt sexuality, with a bit of Andy Warhol thrown in for good measure. However, as I’ve said before, the filmic elements of a movie don’t only come from a director, but a competent screenwriter and in an animated film such as this, many, many animators, including animation directors; Be-Papas isn’t just Kunihiko Ikuhara, after all, and there are many more collaborators to Adolescence Apocalypse that make up the strangeness and surprising groundedness (in my opinion) of the movie, including screenwriter Youji Enokido, chief animation director Keiko Kawashima and art director Shin’ya Hasegawa, and musicians J.A. Seazer and Shinkichi Mitsumune, to name a few. These players, no matter how small, make up many of the filmic elements that make the symbolism of the film, while slipshod and unclear to others, bright and crystal clear as the Sword of Dios in the first anime series to me, and I would like to explain why. Using the elements of music and music lyrics through nondiagetic sound, elements of animation, and (the personally most important part, to me) the art of screenwriting, I will finally explain the seeming confusion around Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse and take you to a world with no roads, where we all can create our own meaning together.


An important element of Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse is, like the original show, the element of nondiagetic sound to symbolize, build, and introspect on characters. This not only includes the original insert song of “Toki ni Ai Wa” by Masami Okui, but includes instrumental music, as well as the lyrical songs of musician J.A. Seazer. Take the song “Duelist - Revive! Infinite History of the Middle Ages”, Kyouichi Saionji’s duelist theme, as an example. For reference, the main duelists that face Utena in this film, Saionji and Jury, get very scant characterization, though Jury’s I’ll come to in the screenwriting section. However, there is one place where the duelists gain much of their characterization, and that’s through the allegorical songs of J.A. Seazer. Although some may say “Middle Ages”, and much of the dueling songs after it, refer to Anthy and her point of view during the duels (and that is a fairly compelling thought that I partially do agree with), I also personally believe the dueling songs give vital characterization that is heavily informed by the original anime that many people who go into the movies only are missing. For instance, take these lines from “Middle Ages” as an example of Saionji’s worldview prior to escaping the school: “The eternal miracle I believe in./The eternal deity I tested./Ah, infinite history of the “Middle Ages.”/Be reborn in me!/Temperamental history” (Spadaro et al., 2002). This symbolizes not only Saionji’s belief in possessing the Rose Bride/Anthy as his ticket to anything and everything he desires, but he views the Rose Bride/Anthy as his ticket to a new, better life. Obviously, this mindset enables the dueling system as a whole and enables the abuse of Anthy, but he isn’t aware of it; he simply believes her abuse at the hands of the dueling system and the abuse from her brother beyond the grave necessitates what he needs for freedom. Another example of how this symbolism regarding nondiagetic sound comes into play is another dueling theme in the movie: Jury’s theme, “Rose Naked Body - Shura - Flesh Constellation in the αψζ Nebula”. This song is more sparse on lyrical content, but the lyrical content that is there is worth digging into. The beginning lyrics, going “Shura: now, burn bright/In the throb of your fingertips/Shura: now, burn hot/Ignorant of your demise” (Spadaro et al., 2002), symbolize the bright, shining facade of Jury, and how it’s all crashing down due to her unrequited, toxic love for Shiori, who is now more openly manipulating her in between lesbophobically tarnishing her for her unrequited love. Shiori knows Jury loves her, but she chooses to stay and become involved with Touga anyway, believing Jury’s feelings for her are “disgusting” for, likely, being targeted at a girl in the first place. Later lyrics suggest Jury’s feelings for Shiori leading to a self-imposed solitude, and/or perhaps her solitude being caused by her high position within the school itself: “Shura is in solitude/And solitude is just then nothingness/Shura: like a firefly, pale and transparent/It stands at the verge of its dying hour” (Spadaro et al., 2002). In fact, these lyrics can be interpreted as Jury’s catalyst for leaving Ohtori Academy and traveling to the outside world with Anthy, Utena, Miki, and Saionji at the climax of the film: the firefly, pale and transparent that the lyrics in this song represents may represent the fascination and pull the academy, and its symbolism of trauma, has on Jury, and the “dying hour” can refer to the dying hour of the academy itself, with Jury abandoning the patriarchal, cisheteronormative society the academy is only able to mimic and provide in the movie by driving off in a makeshift car with the rest of the student council members in tow. However, to miss the most well known song of this movie is to be missing out on a lot of the main themes of the movie as a whole, so an analysis of “Toki ni Ai Wa” by Masami Okui is in order. The first lyrics, “This rose is our destiny, ripping us apart./Our hands have been torn apart” (Spadaro et al., 2002) emphasize the contrast between the first anime, where the revolution Utena caused quite literally ripped her hands apart from Anthy in the end, causing the time loop in which Anthy looks over and over to find Utena and bring her back to the outside world. The lyrics “Even when I sleep,/as I embrace my thoughts and dreams for you,/they reach to the ends of the world!” (Spadaro et al., 2002) symbolize both Utena’s and Anthy’s feelings for each other before they meet in the current loop, with the “end of the world” line being of particular note that implies the past incarnation of Utena made it to the End of the World (the outside world), but Anthy didn’t. The line in the beginning of the second verse, “This rose is our destiny,/leading us/to now meet once again” (Spadaro et al., 2002) has a double meaning as well, referring to (what is likely) the first loop and the beginning of the show: Utena received the Mark of the Rose from The Prince/Akio in the beginning, thinking it was her desire to be with him that lead her to Ohtori Academy. However, the Mark of the Rose  in the original series was given to her by The Prince/Akio for another purpose: Utena wanted the power of the Rose Seal to save Anthy, who she saw as a child much like her, from the Punishment of Eternal Swords, a curse put on her for being a “witch”. In a sense, this lyric calls back to the first loop, bringing Utena not only the connection of finding the Mark of the Rose in a flower that Anthy grew deliberately for her, but a connection to the original reason why Utena got the Mark of the Rose in the first place: to save Anthy from pain and suffering due to the sheer empathy she felt for her. This lyric calls back not only to the theme of cycles present in the movie, but the theme of cycles present throughout the whole movie: like karma, everything ends up happening circular for a reason.

Another important filmic element to Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse is the element of animation. Animation is a quite underrated element to filmmaking that many people both studying film and making film tend to ignore; not only are the filmic elements present in an animated movie different from the filmic elements present in a live action movie, the idea of adding unique filmic elements to an animated film is often not utilized by those setting out to make an animated film in the first place. Consider the recent controversy around Disney’s Wish, and how the filmic elements to the animated movie made the movie seem muddled, slow, and even lazy at times: this is often what happens when animators, and animation directors, are either rushed or are paying little attention to the filmic elements of animation. Thankfully, Adolescence Apocalypse’s animation is not rushed, lazy, muddled, or slow, and if there are elements of cheap cuts or reused animation, it was used in a way that I wouldn’t have noticed. Many of these filmic elements are characteristic of Shin’ya Hasegawa’s later works where he is an art director: examples of these elements include the unique, brutalist architectural style in Ohtori Academy, brilliantly shown in the opening scene of the movie where Anthy is standing from the tower and suddenly, a thousand different buildings unveil themselves before finally zooming towards Akio standing over Anthy in the rose garden observatory tower, symbolizing his dominance over her, patriarchy’s dominance over women, and adulthood’s power over children. Another animated sequence, likely animated by Akemi Hayashi, shows a single white rose blooming out of a garden of red roses before bursting forth the Mark of the Rose. This sequence is not only beautifully animated, but also shows symbolic meanings that go beyond “white means purity”. Of course, the white rose could just be symbolizing Utena’s purity over the rest of the duelists, whether it be her pure intentions or her lack of sexual intent towards Anthy (at least in the beginning), but in my opinion, it symbolizes something that’s directly connected to the prior anime, and that is Utena being chosen by Anthy, and Anthy being chosen by Utena, after Anthy reveals her past in the prior anime as the bearer of the Punishment of Eternal Swords. In my mind, Anthy could’ve chosen anyone to bear the white rose, and the Mark of the Rose, to duel for her and bring her into the outside world. She could’ve chosen Wakaba, one of the few girls in the anime to not get a car in the travel to the outside world sequence, or Shiori, one of the few who transforms into a car on her own to travel to the outside world by herself. However, Anthy remembered the time loop surrounding Ohtori Academy, and remembered the previous cycles of failure to escape into the outside world, and remembered that she had to choose Utena, once and for all, to help her gain the agency she needed to travel to the outside world she and Utena were born in. Thus, this rose, white in a sea of red, is symbolic of the choice Anthy made in picking Utena; this isn’t just Anthy passively manipulating the world around her to finally give her reprieve from comfort, after all, this is Anthy’s active choice to save herself and Utena from being trapped in a world that gives both of them pain. There are other notable filmic elements that make use of animation that help establish the theme of cycles and escaping from trauma within Adolescence Apocalypse: you could pick from many scenes among them, such as the “Toki ni Ai Wa” dance, the scene where Utena finally moves on from the dead Touga, the nude modeling scene, or the Locust Cars Finale. However, the scene that I establish personally in my filmographic canon as the animated sequence that hammers in the themes of the movie are these two sequences: the sequence when Utena transforms into a car, and the sequence where Utena and Anthy are in the outside world, torn by apocalypse without roads, riding nude towards an unknown tomorrow. The first scene is animated with stark, bright colors and contrasts; suddenly, when Utena says, “Let’s go to the outside world,” it’s as if a trigger opens in Ohtori and suddenly a car wash erupts from the rose garden. Anthy grips Utena’s hand, but Utena is torn apart from her; she is stripped of her clothes and transforms into a pink race car, sleek and fast and powerful. This scene is juxtaposed by Anthy’s fear, saying how she doesn’t want to go into the real world yet, and how she’s afraid. But then, eventually, Anthy knows: she has to do it. The latter sequence, after Anthy and Utena escape the Locust Cars, is another example of filmic techniques reinforcing the themes of the film: Utena and Anthy are, as I’ve stated before, riding together in the remains of the car, nude and intertwined together. The outside world is a cold, borderline apocalyptic place; there are no roads, and the ground is a dark asphalt riddled with failed car parts and broken chassises. However, Utena and Anthy have found freedom in this lack of a road, as the script section will show you, and they embrace and kiss while on an endless lack-of-road towards a new beginning of a world that will accept them.


The final important filmic element I would like to give you is the script. Now, I am very familiar with Youji Enokido and his style of writing, and, in my personal opinion, the reason a majority of post-Utena projects by Kunihiko Ikuhara have, in my opinion, fallen victim to poor writing and problematic tropes that are all-too-common in the anime industry, ableit with the quirky twists that Ikuhara gives to a lot of the scripts and premises of his works. Youji Enokido is a writer, first and foremost, who knows how to deal with trauma and the aftermath of it. One notable instance of his delicate touch with traumatic subjects is the famous scene where Utena is almost undeniably implied to have been raped by Akio in a car; while the rape isn’t shown, Utena is seen babbling about a sandwich, desperately trying to distract her brain from what’s happening, while the only thing on the screen is a close up of her face as the whole thing is going on. More exploitative writers such as Alan Moore or Warren Spector would’ve made the rape scene the front focus of the scene, with details paid attention to every licentious aspect. Youji Enokido, instead, chooses to focus on the protagonist, who, need I remind you, is a fourteen year old girl’s, face and her seemingly irrelevant monologue; many viewers don’t tend to remember that Utena’s monologue during that scene is due to anxiety, fear, and not realizing that Akio, who earlier in the episode took her on a trip to an amusement park and gave her very expensive gifts, such as earrings and a dress (which were also meant to feminize her and dissuade her from her implied genderqueer butch lesbian methods of moving through the world) and was basically since the beginning of the Black Rose arc was grooming her. This subtlety in which Enokido portrays the topics of trauma, sexual violence, and lesbophobia is explored further in Adolescence Apocalypse. For instance, a scene where Shiori is discussing Jury’s “secret”, that she is a lesbian and attracted to her, she very pointedly says Jury is “gross” in the subtitles for “putting her face in a locket and obsessing over her”. Although this is one of the rare instances of lesbophobia and general queerphobia in the film (the other one, coincidentally, also being caused by Shiori), it shows that Youji Enokido knows very well how middle schoolers treat other middle schoolers for being queer, no matter how perfect (Jury) or unusual (Utena) they present. Another example of Enokido’s clever script writing would be the nude drawing scene with Utena and Anthy; while Anthy is drawing Utena nude, Utena states she is uncomfortable being seen in the nude but tells Anthy, “it’s okay, because as roommates and friends, we should understand each other and bare it all”. This then prompts Anthy to disrobe, asking her, “do you understand why the Duelists want me? Do you understand why they call me the Rose Bride?” This slow disrobal very elegantly shows no explicit nudity of Anthy, but rather sihlouettes her body in black and white, and shows a shocking secret: there is a gaping hole in the center of her chest. This delicate reveal could not have been done without Youji Enokido’s graceful writing. However, another great example of Youji Enokido’s delicate, subtle, yet impactful script writing would have to be the final scene,  where Utena and Anthy are together, nude, in the car and are finally in the Outside World. The animation already makes this scene a standout, memorable scene, but the dialogue between Utena and Anthy solidifies this epilogue as one of the best, most satisfying endings for not only a movie, but any series, period. In said dialogue, Anthy and Utena speak together about how the killing of Akio (and thus, patriarchy and kyiarchical adulthood) were done not by just Anthy, but by Utena as well, and how both of them were born in the outside world before being trapped in Ohtori. They then both explain how, although this Outside World doesn’t have roads, they can always make new ones, and they can reshape society as they like in their image. These paraphrased lines, written by Youji Enokido, cements this film as the queer classic it is: not only does it emphasize how patriarchy can be destroyed by the solidarity of women who love each other, and that even those with charmed lives can end up getting stuck in cycles of trauma, it also emphasizes that queer people, in this case lesbians (binary and nonbinary alike) can create new worlds, free of the trauma they suffered and free from trauma for those after them.


In conclusion, through filmic elements such as music, animation, and screenwriting, Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence Apocalypse creates what I would call a queer hopepunk fantasy of escaping from trauma and reshaping society in your image. Through the cyclical elements of music, animation, and motifs in screenwriting, the film shows the cycles one can get trapped in when you stay too caught up in your trauma, and that through escaping it, you can create new worlds. Heck, it’s not just queer people who could benefit from this story, but anyone who has suffered any sort of trauma, not just cisheteronormative or gendered, escape from cycles they feel caught up in. Maybe you, too, will watch this and want to go to the outside world. Do you want to go to the outside world with me, too?

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Works Cited
Spadaro, G., & Yasha. (2002, February). Audiology of Utena: Adolescence Rush (Movie Soundtrack). Audiology: Adolescence rush: The adolescence apocalypse original soundtrack. https://ohtori.nu/audiology/08_Adolescence_Rush.html

in specific: the fat gremlin failgirl archetype is one of the few instances where a fat person is allowed to bottom AND allowed to bottom even though they don't follow stereotypically masculine OR feminine gender norms (especially if a woman or nonbinary)
like. despite my gripes with them and my disagreements with them in particular and how they go about things, i do understand what worth-beyond-a-number-scale/mod worthy from fatphobia-busters says about the "expectation for fat people to be masculine, to be tops, to never be lovingly touched" which is a good point to be made about the masculinization of fat women (even fat afab women), but like...what about the fat people who don't properly perform masculinity AND femininity? the ones who basically act like genderless gremlins as opposed to their assigned gender? well, the fat gremlin failgirl archetype allows the fat gremlin failgirl to be the bottom, to be lovingly touched, without having the fat gremlin failgirl be masculine or feminine in personality or presentation because it's important for fat people who AREN'T typically feminine, who DON'T have typically feminine interests, but don't fit masculine archetypes either, to be the bottom in a sexual interaction or relationship
it's a welcome departure from the idea that fat people, especially fat women and fat nonbinary people, have to be feminine and graceful and gentle and fit stereotypical positive feminine attributes to be able to be loved and touched and treated with the desire a bottom gets towards them

I’ve been wrestling with how to do this topic for ages, and even then, I’m still not sure if my qualities for a high quality film outlined in these five points really would be the same even after I finish this class. I’m a fluid person, with my metrics for what makes a good or bad film being equally fluid. But personally, if I were to list five qualities (non-essential for all of them, but at least one quality of the five has to be there in a film I personally find enjoyable, though not all of these examples may be critically acclaimed), I would list these as one of the non-essential qualities for a film I would enjoy:

1.) The film has a very consistent internal logic and is able to retain a suspension of disbelief. What do I mean by this? Well, that means that a film doesn’t necessarily need to be realistic to fit this criteria, but it must be consistent with the film’s own internal logic and reality in order for me to at least take the film more seriously. (This is also a quality I tend to like in shows, though not having a consistent internal logic doesn’t necessarily take me out of a flim or show I’ve watched or loved. Murder, She Wrote, for instance, has very poor and inconsistent internal logic, especially in the later seasons, but a lot of the plots keep me engaged to the point I can’t look away, even if the plots are campy or embarrassing. We’ll get to camp later, I promise.) For example, Tusk and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (both horror films I adore for very different reasons) have very consistent internal logic to me, and thus scenes like Wallace and Teddy mocking the Kill Bill Kid on their podcast being juxtaposed with more off the wall scenes like Howard Howe stitching Wallace into a man walrus mutant without anasthesia, or scenes like the normal, everyday school life of Laura Palmer being juxtaposed with the psychedelic Lodge Room scenes, or the scenes where Bob is overlaid on Leland Palmer as a representation of Laura Palmer’s ongoing abuse, feel real to me even if the worlds Tusk and Fire Walk With Me seem very far from our own (even if it resembles it some). The same goes for animated films such as James and the Giant Peach, Perfect Blue, One Piece: Film Red, or Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple: although the animated world allows more leeway of what someone can do physically and realistically, due to animation being a medium that only requires immense animation talent and voice acting, the internal logic of all of these films feel internally consistent. James and the Giant Peach, for instance, despite its wacky, Mathilda-esque tone, has a consistent internal logic and suspension of disbelief that would allow for, say, a boy finding a magic box of things that bring bugs to life and cause peaches to grow to enormous size, or a boy flying across the ocean with a sextuple of giant, human-sized bugs, or even (in the climax) a peach landing on the Empire State Building, to occur and still not feel out of place within the internal narrative.

2.) I agree with my classmate's point about how movies have to make you feel, but I’d take it one step further: the characters and writing, for me, have to make me feel, or else I won’t get invested in the movie, period. You could show me a movie with perfectly directed actors, stunning, avant-garde cinematography, metatextual references to thousands of films in the genre at once, a wholly original plot that hasn’t been thought up, and a movie with the biggest star studded cast in Hollywood, but I wouldn’t pay attention to a lick of it if it didn’t have character writing I care about. Now, a good character doesn’t necessarily mean a good character in a moral sense, or an “I agree with all their viewpoints” sense. Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (I will use this as an example a lot), Wallace Bryton from Tusk (again, I will use this as an example a lot), Uta from One Piece: Film Red or Osamu Dazai from Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple are, in my opinion, some of the best examples of character writing in any film, and all of those characters range from “morally dubious” (Laura Palmer and Osamu Dazai, both with trauma leading up to the circumstances of why those two behave the way they do), to “cringe culture SomethingAwful reject who got rich from making fun of disabled people” (Wallace Bryton), to “twenty-something year old girl who would literally commit omnicide and suicide at once so she wouldn’t have to deal with her own daddy issues and abandonment trauma and has an ambiguous fate whether she lived or died from her suicide attempt at the end” (Uta). Laura Palmer and Osamu Dazai, even being the most morally sound of the characters I mentioned, still have behaviors that would qualify as manipulative at best to some people and actively self-and-others-sabotaging at worst (such as Dazai’s insistence on making others believe he’s the one who caused the serial murders of the ability users, or Laura Palmer’s manipulation of Bobby into getting drugs for her addiction), and they’re still characters that feel real, human, and even relatable. So, when I say, “I want films with relatable characters”, I mean “I want characters written so believably and so well that we can see a bit of ourselves in them”, even omnicidal pop singers like Uta from One Piece: Film Red, suicidal serial killers such as Howard Howe from Tusk, or even the depths of depravity of evil orphanage runner who tortured children out of jealousy Tatsuhiko Shibusawa from Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple, or the id of our worst impulses, Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Basically, if our characters, not only the paragons of morality, the deepest depths of scum, and any in between these narrow standards, don’t make me feel? I’m not interested in your movie.

3.) Of course, a movie doesn’t just need characters that make you feel something or well written internal logic to be a good film; films have to have good editing, inventive editing even, or else I wouldn’t be interested. This is especially true for animated films; have you heard of the concept of “sakuga”? It’s basically a term coined by the anime community where “the quality improves drastically” (Yegulalp, 2018), such as a fluidly animated fight scene in an animated movie, or sudden moments where the animation in an animated movie can become incredibly fluid, experimental, or artistic. Again, a movie doesn’t need sakuga to be a good movie, anime or Western, but it’s a quality I heavily appreciate. It doesn’t necessarily need to be in anime, either: an oft-cited sakuga scene that many people don’t think about, but is frequently memed about as “representation of panic attacks in cartoons'' sarcastically by irony poisoned Twitter users, is the scene that represents Puss in Boots having a panic attack in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. It meets all the criteria for sakuga: the animation is suddenly more fluid in this moment, and represents the emotions Puss in Boots has while having a panic attack.

4.) In another node of movies represented by editing, I personally think sound design, such as choices for a soundtrack, diagetic and nondiagetic sound, sound effects, and music, are criteria I have for a film that is often overlooked. Think about it: the picking of music to movies is something that’s often not thought of when going into a movie, but when it hits right, oh, it hits right in the heart. Take the scene where Otto has a flashback to when his wife dies as he’s attempting suicide in A Man Called Otto, with Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work from her 1989 album The Sensual World being a nondiagetic song that, nonetheless, flows intensely well with the scene that happens. When they get to the prechorus, Kate Bush desperately pleading and singing “I know you have a little life in you yet/I know you have a lot of strength left/I know you have a little life in you yet/I know you have a lot of strength left” reaching its crescendo as Otto desperately searches in the wreckage for his wife as his PTSD reaches its peak, I’m just struck by how fitting and perfect of a lyrical choice the song is, with Kate Bush’s natural intensity in her voice and art-pop sound deliberately emphasizing the trauma of losing your wife. Even typing this now, it makes me cry because it’s such an intense scene, and it makes me remember how good a film that was.

5.) Finally, I believe every good film needs a great screenwriter behind the film. It is my personal belief that if you’ve directed a film amazingly, and all the pieces have fallen together, but the script is poorly written, you’re not in for a good movie, you’re in for a flashy blockbuster that you’ll forget about six months after you see it. A good movie has a good screenwriter at the helm of the project: people forget about this, but the director is not always the writer of the film, and sometimes, when the director steps up for writing, this can end up very badly. George Lucas’ film series Star Wars is unanimously understood to be great, but only during the first trilogy; this is because his wife, scriptwriter and editor Marcia Lucas, was at the helm, helping make revisions and reigning in Lucas’ tendency to make decisions that were less than smart. Unfortunately, Marcia Lucas wasn’t the scriptwriter for the second trilogy of Star Wars films George Lucas directed, which is why the second trilogy in Star Wars, not to mention the third trilogy, is so divisive.