I didn’t really like any of the prequels, ROTS was ok but still fell short somehow.
But one thing I did like was Boba’s backstory in AOTC, he was a peripheral enough character it didn’t feel tacked on and forced. And the scene in the arena where he sees his father decapitated and then cradles his helmet(Boba’s future signature helmet) was one of the few genuinely human and emotional scenes in the whole damn PT, along with one of the most memorable. Right there we the audience could imagine perfectly how Boba got to Jabba’s palace, a emotionally scarred ten year old left with nothing but a ship full of weapons, we had all the info we needed.
So I’m kinda confused to see that the same things I liked were almost universally hated and reviled, what gives? Almost every review and dissection hates on the Boba scenes.
I think it’s a number of things, though I am strictly speaking only for myself:
(1) Daniel Logan is a bad actor. Perhaps not Jake-Lloyd-bad, but still not good, so for me, he doesn’t sell that moment one bit.
(2) But there’s not much emotion to sell. We see no love between them, no real emotional bond. Jango is protective of his (literal) MiniMe, but we never have a scene that establishes any relationship between the two beyond crude biology.
(3) If you blink, you’ll miss the shadow of Jango’s head leaving the helmet (which, btw, makes absolutely no sense) when he’s decapitated, so Boba holding Jango’s helmet has the unintended comedic tension of waiting for the head to drop out.
(4) It once again reduces a cool bad-ass character (the Boba of Empire) to a stupid, one-dimensional psych study, because goodness knows giving a ruthless bounty hunter a dead-daddy-fixation makes him so much more interesting and complex (Please note: Not)
I’ll admit it may have been a case of picking corn out of shit when the other relationships on display are the stiffest love story ever seen, and the worst depiction of a mentor/student dynamic(the opening scenes of Anakin and Obi are some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen).
So being that the Boba story was not offensively bad and somewhat logical hey in AOTC I’ll take it.
I agree with MovieMogul a lot here. Jango and Boba are so wooden that it’s hard to care about them in the prequels. Character I don’t care about dies? So what?
I did think the “Boba picks up dad’s helmet” scene was good, since it was just there for a moment and gives you some insight into the character, but the rest of it sucked. (Although, I missed that Jango’s head came out, so the scene was more “This is why he’s like Rorschach from Watchmen” than “this is why he’s like Neo from The Matrix”.)
Boba Fett didn’t need a backstory. He was a plot device, nothing more. It’s not so much that it was a bad backstory, which it was, but that Lucas took something cool from the original trilogy and permanently linked it to the prequels. He answered the question that absolutely no one asked ever, “Why did Boba Fett decide to become a bounty hunter.”
As others have noted, Boba Fett is a character who is cooler when he doesn’t have a backstory. He’s supposed to be the mysterious badass. He has all of two or three lines in the original trilogy - he became a fan favorite ONLY because he was mysterious.
On top of that, it kinda makes him less impressive when you learn that his dad (who he is a clone of) was cloned into the entire stormtrooper army. While it’s unclear how many of the stormtroopers in Episodes IV-VI are still Jango clones, they’re not much more impressive in the prequels either. Yeah, you can make the argument that he was a “true” clone and the others were incomplete, blah blah, but still, it makes him less impressive.
Also, anything involving kids tends to be lame. The fact that both prequel Boba and Jango are horribly wooden actors (or at least, come off as wooden like everyone else thanks to Lucas’ wonderful directing skills) doesn’t help.
What you have to remember is that Boba Fett isn’t really a character from the original trilogy. I mean, he’s there, but other than hiding in some garbage, he doesn’t actually do anything. He’s just a name and a cool helmet. Boba Fett is primarily a character in Star Wars fans’ imagination, and as such, no actual onscreen depiction will ever be good enough.
Which is too bad, because Temuera Morrison gave one of the better performances in the prequels. Just thinking of his face under that helmet makes Boba Fett a more interesting character.
Yeah, I REALLY don’t think it’s fair to call any actors in the prequels “wooden” or whatever. Lucas, as director, demanded a certain type of performance… and the actors gave it. Every actor that I’ve seen do a terrible job in any of the prequels have done many other wonderful things outside of Star Wars. Lucas just really liked the sound of stiff, unemotional dialogue that also happened to be extremely poorly written.
That being said, I’ve never seen the actors who played Jango or kid Boba in anything else, so they may be bad actors. But if you’ve never seen them in anything else either, I say give them the benefit of the doubt.
Other than that, I agree with everything the others have said. Boba Fett was a minor mysterious character who didn’t need a backstory explained. In fact, even though I just rewatched the prequels a few months ago, I don’t even remember the scene with the helmet. Utterly forgettable.
You know what just struck me? Another director who demands wooden and unemotional(downright creepily unhuman) performances is Tarantino, the dialogue is also not really badly written but often stilted and unrealistic. But it doesn’t seem to harm the movies, look at Kill Bill for a blatant example.
It works for Tarantino because he doesn’t do it ALL the time, and when the actors are doing it it’s for an effect that harkens back to his inspiration, or parody, or whatever you want to call it. Tarantino’s movies are all more-or-less black/dark comedies (or at least amusing in some violent way) so odd types of acting are actually preferable. He’s not going for “believable” in other words, he’s going for a certain “feeling.”
Yea I was just wondering if Lucas was going for…something that he just didn’t manage to hit. I often can’t believe someone who created his earlier films could be so bad at his later ones.
Seriously? Wooden? How about comparing, say, Samuel L. Jackson’s performance in Star Wars to Samuel L. Jackson’s performance in any Tarantino film. Would you say that they’re essentially the same?
I was thinking of the scene where the Bride takes her revenge and then tells the daughter of the woman she killed she would be within her rights to come after her after she grows up. Keep in mind this small child just saw her mother killed. Wooden? Yes:p
Tarantino writes movies about tough guys (and gals), and his characters often talk like movie tough guys, meaning in a controlled, underplayed manner. That’s not the same as wooden. A wooden performance is when the actor is trying to display emotion, and failing. A restrained performance is when the *character *is trying *not *to display emotion, and succeeding.
