No, Disney should not re-make the prequels. They happened, we have to live with them.
The Phantom Menace is a bad movie with a few really good scenes. It’s bad mostly because of Jar Jar and Jake Lloyd. It also seemed to steer quite a bit far off the course set by the original trilogy. Sith was never mentioned until this movie and the rule of 2 is just stupid.
Attack of the Clones is a slightly below average movie with some very good scenes and some very poor acting from Hayden Christenson.
Revenge of the Sith is a fine movie, given the hole that it had to dig out of.
Maybe I didn’t run in the right circles. I wasn’t following fanzines or anything like that. It’s not something I recall ever hearing. I suppose it’s possible it was floated as speculation among a lot of other stuff, but it wasn’t something I put to memory.
The rumors I recall were mostly the three trilogies and iirc the bit about Vader being Luke’s father out before the movie aired. And the character names of all the figures on the card back panel, even if no name was ever mentioned in the film.
Likewise, and I had a subscription to Bantha Tracks and everything. I remember a theory about Obi-Wan being a clone, and his name actually being a serial number (OB-1), but nothing about Stormtroopers being clones.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “widely” but it was certainly the confident assumption amongst anyone I talked to about Star Wars. But then again, we were 12.
In the beginning sequence, the Jedi’s plan is to fly to a space ship and rescue Palpatine.
They fly to the spaceship and get immobilized by forcefields. Then Anakin says, “The forcefields, shit, how could we forget!” No shit. If there were Jedi trapping forcefields in common use, why the fuck was their plan to rush the ship?
Were they hoping that Grevious would forget? Which, in their defense, he almost did.
“Oh shit, I have a button that immobilizes Jedi, I almost forgot.” Why isn’t every Jedi meeting ever started with, “Remember, pretty much anytime you’re on someone elses property, they could theoretically immobilize you with a button push. You’ll be fucked.”
The rest is little better. Every minute is rubbish. The ending fight scene is moronic. “I have the high ground!” So what? We were just fighting on flying robots. There was a point when we were running and flipping down a collapsing tower. Who cares if you’re two feet above me on a gentle slope?
Padame lay dying, the medical droid is all, “It’s as if she’s lost the will to live.” What the fuck? The will to live? Intubate her you fucking dipshit.
I sometimes wonder if the prequels could have been good if Lucas had some collaboration. It’s certainly possible.
But now that we’ve seen the story unfold, I don’t think it’s worth going back to. Here’s the thing: the prequel story, faulty or not, ultimately didn’t really tell us anything new about the characters in the OT. It just told us the story we were expecting to see. Anakin became Vader, the republic fell, Obi-wan went into hiding, Luke and Leia were born. Sure, we learned what pushed Anakin over the edge, but it doesn’t really make us view anything Vader does in a new light.
What would’ve been interesting is if we learned something about the world that would completely change how we viewed the characters. But the OT is still watchable without knowledge of the prequels at all, so I say let’s just forget they ever happened.
“Aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?” was the one line–a tiny kernel of information-- that led to some fans thinking Stormtroopers were clones.
The Expanded Universe media REALLY early on tossed that out probably as early as the Tales of Mos Eisley anthology book. It had a short story about the Stormtrooper who said “Look, sir, droids!” That guy was just some guy and not a clone. That’s probably when you friends view on it started to shift away from “they are clones!”
Well, I was a Lucasfilm employee during this period and I feel very comfortable saying that by even the most generous standards, all 3 prequels are terrible films, and while Jedi (the worst of the OT) has some undeniably painful moments, they are vastly outnumbered by those in Sith (the best of the PT).
There is simply not a single genuinely good performance in the entire PT. That doesn’t mean certain people (Neeson, McGregor, Lee) don’t go relatively unscathed through their professionalism and commitment, but that’s different than “good”. The characterization is awful, the dialogue is worse, the action sequences are bloated and fake-looking, and the plotting would be ridiculous if you were inspired to care.
My association with the franchise behind me, I’m looking forward to the new films, though Abrams has a tough job ahead of him and I’m not completely convinced he’s the best guy for the task (witness the equally terrible STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS). But I’ve also seen an entire generation who are fans of the prequels. Investing hundreds of millions of dollars to redo them is folly, and the Mouse is no fool–they have much better things to do with the universe and its possibilities. Little good can come of redoing them wholesale. Let supplementary stories shore in the gaps so that they might finally look slightly better through association.
No…they should move on. There are tons of story lines for Star Wars from the various books they could go for. If they are going to do a young Han Solo movie then whoever they get to play Han should be signed up to do a series of movies along those time lines. If the new Star Wars taking place 30 years later or whatever is successful they should go with that, use those actors and just move forward. I’m pretty tired, personally, of all these reboots in various movies…just move on and tell some new stories.
They never should have made those prequels in the first place. If Lucas had to do prequels, they should have been set in the far past of that universe and detailed the first discovery of the Force and the origins of the Jedi.