Nitpick but Palpatine did not create Anakin, it was actually Palpatine’s master Playgeus the wise who created Anakin through the force to be the perfect force user apprentice to replace Palpatine, which is why Palpatine killed him in his sleep.
Assuming the story he told Anakin in opera was true, and not just bullshit. It didn’t appear Palpatine even knew where Anakin was before the events of TPM.
Have you followed Rebels? Its quite excellent.
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The Prequels basically had the quality one would expect from direct to video, at best.
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That is excessive. The prequels were respectively poor, average and very good. The originals were good, outstanding and average.
The hatedom is pretty stupid at times.
I maintain perhaps the biggest issue with the prequels is Lucas was obsessed with showing Anakin as a child, which made the first movie too thin on plot. Then the next two were too crammed.
What everyone wanted to see was the relationship between Obiwan and Anakin during the clone wars, that we heard of in Obiwans house in ANH.
Start the prequels when these two MEET, spend more time fleshing out their time together.
:smack:So obvious.
I also had a big issue with the Clones.
What is their motivation? So all the Storm Troopers were just clones?
That was my biggest issue with the Lord of the Rings trilogy: you had a basically faceless army of evil that, to me, lacked motivation (they’re evil, because they’re evil, which makes them evil).
The original Star Wars had that WWII/Nazi vibe, where you could imagine the Storm Troopers and the Officers possibly being normal people caught up in bad times.
But a bunch of clones? Or worse, droids?
It’s good to see Abrams seems to have changed the issue I had with the Prequel Storm Troopers.
I loathe the Prequels.
And yes, it is pretty stupid. But it makes me feel good to publicly hate them.
Why don’t you want me to be happy? 
(PS: I hate that smilie.)
I’d go poor, abysmal, and slightly sub-par, personally. AotC is legitimately one of the worst movies I’ve seen, not counting grade-z MST3K fodder.
I actually agree with you there, though. They’re just bad movies. They’re not a war crime.
I genuinely feel sorry for the amount of abuse Lucas takes over these films. The only reason people are so pissed at him for making bad movies, is because he made some really, really great movies first. I’m more invested in all the fun he gave me growing up, than I am in the six hours or so i wasted on the prequels.
I should have just admitted I was wrong but I looked it up and it appears much more unclear then I thought. It almost sounds like Anakin was a Force antibody created by the meddling when Palpatine and Plagueis unbalanced it, or some nonsense like that.
Since the next move is called “The Force Awakens” maybe Luke will explain something about how all this works.
AoTC has a legitimately excellent last 40 minutes (basically from the time they go to Tatoonie and Obi Wan gets captured). Thats what improves its grades. Possibly the best action of the entire saga thus far. If only all the prequels had been like that.
PH only has the duel on Naboo to go for it (and oh the ending score).
RoTS: Its dark, they are not afraid to show us atrocities, its mostly well acted by Ian McDiarmid, McGregor, Jackson et al.Even Hayden Christensen manages to pull off a good performance, when he is not speaking that is. What pulls it down is the rather confused way Anakin’s fall is executed.
Personally I feel like the prequels should never have been made. Much like Vader, the whole Clone Wars / Obi Wan / Yoda / Jedi backstory had a lot more mystique as part of the lore in their world.
Also, one thing I particularly hated in the prequels (aside from the characters, dialogue, plot, pacing, excessive use of CGI , etc) were the actual battles. The three main battles in the original movies (Battle of Yavin, Battle of Hoth and Battle of Endor) all had a certain tactical and strategic logic and epic scale that I would expect of a battle between two interstellar militaries.
Yavin - Using small squadron’s of fighters on what is more or less a suicide mission to exploit a tactical weakness (albeit an absurd one) on the Death Star before it orbits into position to blow away the Rebellion with it’s superlaser.
Hoth - A rear-guard action by the Rebels to escape an orbital siege while the Imperials launch an armored ground assault to outflank the Rebel defenses.
Endor - A commando raid to disable the Death Stars defector shields so that it can be engaged in a massive fleet battle while still under construction…except IT’S A TRAP!
In contrast, the prequel battles were just swarms of CGI action figures and toys blasting each other without rhyme or reason.
I’ve seen ideas for what would have been better. Darth Vader carving out his reputation as a bad guy as part of the story seems plausible.
There is a real issue with respect to the sequencing of the films, whereby the Machete order is pretty much the most sensible order to watch. (For those not familiar, someone called “Machete” proposed a viewing order of 4, 5, 2, 3, 6 – it skips the dreadful Phantom Menace as just about everything of worth we can figure out in Clones, and more importantly, it allows the dramatic reveals to play out. There’s threads already to discuss that.) My point is that we would still have that issue, probably solved the same way: Watch in order of release, not timeline order.
No, I don’t think he says a word. Darth Maul was never intended to be the Darth Vader analog. He’s the Boba Fett analog. Despite the key battle at the end of PM being him against the Jedi duo, he’s not really the big heavy for the movie. He’s the number one henchman for the big heavy, Darth Sidious, who hangs out making evil plotting but not actually doing anything directly. But he’s still the scary big bad. Or at least, that’s what is intended.
It’s a big universe, but we keep seeing all the same old faces and same old places. Sure, there are a few new things - all pretty poor additions. Why Boba and Jango Fett at all? Ridiculous, except some sort of bad fan service to plug Boba in somehow.
I suppose Tattooine showing up to explain Luke’s “aunt and uncle” living there is something, except it has the result of undoing the thing about Luke being on Tattooine in the first place - it was a backwater hell where the Empire didn’t spend time and nobody was looking too closely. Except now Vader knows about it, knows he has a sister there, and knows that Obi Wan knows that.
And then there is C3PO being build by Anakin. GAH!!! And Greedo as a boy.
Just everything about it was “let’s see who we can plug in here that the fans know” rather than making an exciting story with new, interesting characters that only overlap on the highest and most significant levels.
Not really. That did twist one comment by Obi Wan and kinda pucker up the squick on the front end of Empire, but it isn’t as completely ridiculous as any of the shoehorns in the first three.
I didn’t. Why did Boba Fett have to have anything to do with stormtroopers? Sillyness. Boba Fett is completely unnecessary in the prequels and instead, to me, is one of the symptoms of the problem. Sure, he was cool in Empire. But he’s supposed to be a creepy badass bounty hunter that shows up and we know nothing about him. Giving us this backstory hinders that, IMO.
That’s a strong point. We wanted to hear about Obi Wan training Anakin, and the Clone Wars. We wanted to see how they had their falling out, maybe some of Vader’s badatude after the fall. We wanted to see Clone Jedis or people getting duplicated.
Yeah, we got a lot of Jedis. Okay. We got some Yoda badass moves - arguable in how it was executed, but not dreadful. And maybe we got a glimpse that the Republic and the Jedi leadership were not all they were cracked up to be.
But we also got a lot of unnecessary dumbitude.
Empire was pretty damned hyped and anticipated - and it came through. In no small part because Lucas had collaborators.
When I heard Clone Wars during ANH the last thing I was expecting that the clones were Storm Troopers on the side of the good guys.
This was part of the Greedo shooting first syndrome. In the OT the good guys shot real enemies. They were serious. But this wouldn’t do, so in TPM they shot robots and in the rest the Storm Troopers they shot later were just clones (which brings up all sorts of philosophical issues which Lucas never considered, no doubt.)
I would have liked to see badass clones. I’d also like to see movies with big bad villains not appear out of nowhere for those of us who didn’t watch all the non-movie stuff.
All three movies would have to be reworked and rewritten to be truer to what was said in the OT. Obi-wan speaks of the Republic as a noble thing, instead we got a bunch of incompetent politicians and incompetent Jedi. Maybe we could have the first movie be a prequel showing the real nobility of the Republic, so we can see what was lost.
Just to refresh my memory, the action scenes you’re talking about would be the fight in the droid factory, Obi-Wan versus Jango on the landing platform, the three monsters in the arena, the arrival of the Jedi with the clones, and the big duel against Dooku, right?
Pretty much the only scene there I’d say was any good was Obi-Wan versus Jango. The droid factory scene is a waste of time. The characters come out of it in pretty much exactly the same state as when they went in: they neither gain nor lose anything of interest or moment. The monsters in the arena don’t make any sense on multiple levels. The Jedi rescue is dull, and the duel with Dooku… well, bouncing Yoda might have been acceptable if the movie had made any interesting choices in the rest of the film, but as it stands, is mostly memorable as another missed opportunity.
I agree with msmith on the action sequences in the prequel. For the most part, they’re lots of action with no clear narrative, just a bunch of people running hither and yon until we’re arbitrarily told that the fight is over.
I think the opening scene of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan escaping the Federation battleship is well done. Regarded on its own, the pod-race is actually a very well constructed action scene. It doesn’t work in the overall context of the movie because it’s an extremely lengthy diversion that kills the momentum of the film, and requires a significant amount of character sabotage to justify its inclusion in the plot. It’s very difficult to view Qui-Gon sympathetically once you see him cheat at dice for the opportunity to endanger a small child in a death sport. Also, I’m a sucker for giant sea monsters, so the whole “There’s always a bigger fish,” scene really worked for me.
On the other hand, Jar-Jar. So “Phantom Menace was better than Attack of the Clones” is not a hill I’m prepared to die on. They were both bad movies.
Yeah, I’m with you on that, for the most part. I think the single worst piece of character assassination against Darth Vader in the entire trilogy was having him kill the Jedi kids. It’s not so much that it was too evil for him, as it was too… petty, I guess is the word I want, although that seems a weird word to use for cutting up six year olds. I don’t have a problem with Darth Vader being evil enough to murder a bunch of children. I do have a problem with him doing that himself, instead of having some subordinates do it for him. Of everyone in the temple, they’re the easiest people to kill. Darth Vader should have been throwing himself at the hardest fight in the temple, not the easiest. He should have been fighting Jedi masters in the ruins of the Council Chambers while his clone minions gunned down the kids. He shouldn’t have been doing it personally, while the clones did the real fighting.
He’s got one line, to Palpatine, after Palp finishes an exposition download. “At last, we will have our revenge,” or something like that.
Agreed. I was expecting people to be bumping into each other’s clones or their own, not cloned soldiers to be the origin of the stormtroopers. It lacked something in the flair department. On the otherhand, making the stormtroopers originate as troops for the good guys was an intriguing twist. First the leader puts troops in place, then through a series of power grabs, turns them into a tool of oppression. That was a nice twist of how they came to be. I just hated the clone bits on that. And the connection to Boba Fett, for no good reason except Lucas.
Yeah, I hate relying on non-main film stuff to be able to follow a plot. I don’t like it in my TV shows, either. I’m not playing “Defiance” the game. I don’t follow web-only segments. I got duped into a few on Battlestar Galactica, with bitterness. I like my TV delivered via the TV. In a real pinch, I’ve watched a few things over my computer that were “on Demand” or otherwise looked up afterwards, but it’s not as enjoyable a delivery.
Anyway, Darth Grievous, was that his name, the techno battle droid out of nowhere? Yeah, WTF?
So, on one hand, it would be nice to see the shiny Republic before the fall. On the other hand, for that installment of the trilogy to really just be setting up the Obi-wan/Anakin dynamic, it pretty much would need to be during the drawn out process of the Republic going downhill. How reasonable is a timeframe for the fall? Yeah, “the Clone Wars” makes an argument that a rapid transition is allowed, but in theory, the plot was to show the Republic was crumbling without people necessarily noticing, until it was too late to stop it. There is some merit in that concept for the setting of those three. I just think the execution was weak in all the ways previously mentioned.
Yes, this was a big WTF. I guess the argument is made that it took demonstrating that level of commitment to cement Anakin’s turn, and nothing as noble as fighting powers that can fight back would be as sinister as merely executing kids who are basically defenseless. Thus, he’s finally truly committed. But then why the whole “Amidala has to die” thing?
When I was a kid, in the early 80s, it was widely believed that Stormtroopers were the clones of the Clone Wars. Sometime in the 90s, that seemed to have been forgotten (or not known) amongst my newer nerdy friends, and the origins of the Stormtroopers was speculation again, generally believing that when you go into the Imperial Academy, you start out as a trooper or pilot before you get to be an Officer, much like regular Army.
I never forgot the Stormtrooper clones thing, so being vindicated was quite a nice feeling. I now assume the original theory I heard when I was a kid was a tiny line of leaked info from George Lucas in some interview or other, now lost to history. Maybe the same one where he, supposedly, actually revealed who Darth Vader was long before ESB came out.
I have designed a revolutionary new engine that is powered by the rage of Star Wars fans. When you press the accelerator, a recorded voice says “The Phantom Menace wasn’t so bad” or “Jake Lloyd is an underrated actor” to nerds inside a hermetically sealed blast chamber.
But, seriously, back to the OP. I doubt that the prequels will ever be remade, because that’s not the way the Hollywood film industry usually works. They’re only interested in remaking successful movies. Nobody wants to remake a flop or a misfire.
I guess it’s possible that Disney could wipe out the entire Star Wars canon someday and start over. But the OP seems to be describing remakes of I-III that replace the original films and fit into the existing continuity, and I just don’t see that happening.
Right. Really none were actually bad. The issue was mainly fanboy expectations, which could not have been met. PM gets 57% Fresh on RT and a 6.6 on IMDB, which indicated a OK but not great film. New watchers enjoyed them.
The fanboy rage is not critical to how successful a film is.
So true. I know, I know- we all expected Greatness! and got “just OK”.
Yes, good points, the “Bigger fish” trip was fantastic.
There was just too much Jar-Jar.