I think another problem with the digital sets is that the actors aren’t given anything to do besides walking down fake grandiose corridors talking, or twirling and doing backflips. You see Han and Leia in ESB on the run from Hoth, and they’re busy trying to keep the Falcon flying: they’re in a tiny cramped grubby environment and they’re hammering and cussing and fleeing and bickering, and for all that it’s a fantasy setting and your head knows it’s a cramped plywood set in Pinewood, you still feel that they’re real people in a real place doing real stuff and they’re getting hot for each other. Then you get Anakin and Padme, and they’re pretending to walk in front of a baize cloth while talking a lot, and you never once feel, yeah, real people in a difficult situation. It’s all so sterile and airless.
That’s not entirely fair; there’s plenty of interacting with couches!
I’m not disputing that Lucas said this, but I am disputing the notion that “it’s for kids,” not considering what we see going on in ANH and ESB. By ROJ, okay, what with the Ewoks and all, sure, it’s “broadening its appeal” (merchandising to kids
Did G. Lucas decide to “tone-shift” the entire saga to “lighthearted children’s entertainment?”
But by what definition of “kids film” do we have a seven-foot tall Scary Black Armored Dude neck-lifting and throttling a guy, and flinging his corpse around, all in the first five minutes or so of the movie?
I bet the kids loved this! And this too, George!
Can we ease off a little?
They’re not as good as the originals, but we’re not talking Plan 9 from Outer Space here.
Like I said Fanboys felt betrayed. Epi1 wasnt as good as Epi4, aka a New Hope.
Thus Lucas is a asshole and a idiot, and Epis 1, 2, & 3 are utter total garbage, worse than Plan 9. :rolleyes:
It’s been nearly 20 years. I’m over the initial disappointment of it not living up to my expectations. But I do feel I now have enough perspective to be able to rationally deconstruct it as a film and discuss what does and does not work and why.
I have to say, the middle portion of Attack of the Clones is not that bad. Obi-Wan has his own little movie there. He goes and investigates the clones and has a pretty good adventure. Sets look pretty real, the effects are solid, Ewan Mcgregor acts fine, and the whole thing is pretty good.
Everything with Anakin is a waste of time.
Christopher Lee, of course, is amazing.
This movie is making me feel better. I had hoped to find good in Phantom Menace, but really struggled. There is a lot to like about Attack of the Clones, though.
I swear it is like watching George Lucas re-teach himself how to make movies.
Back around 2006 or so, I said that it was clear to me that Episode II should have been Episode I.
I see now that I was quite right. All of the Phantom Menace could be skipped. Clones should have been Episode 1, leaving him another movie before some of the events in Episode III.
I think if AotC was Episode 1, we’d hear a lot of complaining, but nothing like the attacks we get on Menace. It is just so incredibly bad, it drags things down.
There’s been no small amount of debate in the fan community about the order in which one should watch the films, especially for a first-time viewer, since watching them in numerical order spoils the big reveal at the end of ESB.
Someone came up with the idea of the “Machete Order”: watch ANH and ESB, see Vader say “Luke, I am your father!”, and then go to the prequels (to understand how Anakin became Vader) before watching RotJ.
However, the Machete Order also suggests that there’s no reason at all to watch TPM – there’s isn’t anything in that film that’s relevant to events in the other films, that isn’t easily explained by those films.
Could’ve done AotC as Ep 1, The Clone Wars as Ep 2 (hit the major points of the cartoon series, including the Ahsoka character’s arc, the Jedi’s relationship with the clones, etc.), and then wrap it up with Ep 3.
Lucas himself felt later on that TPM was filler.
You see, he had a basic storyline of how things would play out. The problem was that 75% of that storyline was in Episode III. He had to make up the rest on the fly.
He had 15 years!
“The one we worried about most was Episode I. The backstory wasn’t meant to be a movie.” - George Lucas.
'For one, the original outline had been written to occur across a time span of only a few years. Now it spanned well over a decade. As a result, Episode I contained little of the original plot, while the second and especially the third episode had to be condensed - instead of events occurring across three films, they were now compressed into two.
“Episode I was a film about a kid, the young Anakin Skywalker, and Episode II was his coming-of-age. The problem is that 60% - maybe 80% of the backstory-is contained in Episode III” - Lucas.
I’m not sure I understand this. Who was making him do it this way? Why, after 15 years of thinking about it, and supposedly having an outline, was he suddenly making the prequels on the fly?
He didn’t start working on the prequels until November 1994 actually. After his divorce with Marcia Lucas in 1983, he was DONE with Star Wars. That’s why Return of the Jedi is a condensed version of episodes VI - IX. Originally, Luke’s sister was a separate character, who was to be introduced in the second trilogy. But Lucas was burned out emotionally, so Leia became Luke’s sister, and the war with the Empire was wrapped up. Lucas didn’t work on Star Wars at all until 1994. He also felt that the technology didn’t exist to do what he wanted with regard to sequels or prequels anyway.
By the early 1990s, Star Wars was considered a thing of the past. However, the Heir to the Empire series of books was published starting in 1991 and became a smash hit and reinvigorated interest in the franchise.
There had always been vague plans for three trilogies. Lucas was especially interested in telling the tale of Obi-Wan’s younger days (that was originally going to be the focus of the prequels), but after the divorce he lost all interest.
However, with the fans becoming interested again, and hoping for more films, and with Jurassic Park showing him the technology now existed to do what he wanted to do, he began work in earnest on the prequels in November 1994.
So, no, he didn’t have 15 years. He didn’t really think about SW until 1992, 1993.
I can’t copy the whole book, but he felt a need to show Anakin as an innocent basically (that’s a small part of it)
He didn’t “have 15 years to think about it”
He had a brief outline - not a script - basically sketches.
He also didn’t want to direct the prequels, but several of his friends who he asked turned him down and assured him he could - and should - do it on his own.
“I realized the audience for Star Wars was still alive. It hadn’t completely disappeared after fifteen years. I decided if I didn’t do the backstory then, I never would. So I committed to it. Part of the reason for doing it is that it’s the first question I get asked. Not ‘this is who I am’ or anything, but ‘when are you going to do the next Star Wars?’ So if I do the next ones hopefully people will introduce themselves first.”
He didn’t decide on continuing the series until after he saw Jurassic Park, and didn’t officially announce it until October 1993. He spent a year in research afterward.
“The actual pre-1983 “outline” itself was only brief in length and vague in content - Lucas’ description of it wavers from seven pages to twelve pages. The actual length of it is certainly the lower estimate, roughly seven pages, and that also appears to include background information, miscellaneous notes, and character sketches…It seems it is not an actual seven page narrative summary of the prequel, as one might assume, but rather is seven pages of notes.”
Also must remember: After 1983, he was busy:
-Raising his kids
-Developing ILM
-Producing and working on Indiana Jones II and III
-Doing production work on Labyrinth
-Doing production work on Land Before Time
-Doing production work on Howard the Duck
-Doing production work on Willow
-Creating and producing the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1991 through 1996.
-Working on Indiana Jones IV (1993-1996)
Basically, he set the story much earlier than he had planned originally because he wanted to show Anakin’s rise and fall in full. He felt he had the potential for a truly complex character in Anakin. In his earliest sketches of ideas for a prequel trilogy, the idea was Obi-Wan would be the focus. That the prequels would be the early adventures and failure of Obi-Wan - that Obi-Wan failed Anakin. This idea of the prequel series being from Obi-Wan’s POV was in Lucas’ head as late as 1993. But then he decided that telling it from Anakin’s POV would be much more interesting - and he had to go back to the drawing board. He wanted to show that Anakin didn’t start bad, or even have a seed of bad in him from the beginning, and he felt that in order to do so, he had to go back to the character’s childhood.
While Lucas had never had a firm idea of what the prequel series would be about, he had a very vague idea: Obi-Wan would discover Anakin when Anakin was a young man and they would join the Clone Wars together.
But with the decision to make the prequels a tragedy about the fall of a good man to evil, the whole thing had to be rewritten, which meant a lot of new ideas had to be drawn up on the fly.
What was a side-event (the rise of the Empire) now had to become a macroevent within the prequels, as the fates of Anakin and the Emperor were tied basically. Since were now seeing this from Anakin’s POV, the political machinations and such had to take up a much larger role than originally thought of - they were supposed to be just a backdrop beforehand.
Even the conception of the Jedi itself changed. As of 1983, the Jedi were an almost militaristic super-police. They were to be akin to Templar Knights in space. Luke’s black costume in Return of the Jedi was supposed to be how the Jedi looked, for example. But during the production of the prequels, he changed his view of them to being more monk-like, more dogmatic, and more priestly. In the course of it, Lucas kind of forgot that the robes Obi-Wan wore in Star Wars were desert robes- a fuckup which first manifested in Return of the Jedi (Anakin’s ghost is dressed in the same clothes as Obi-Wan). Fans had cemented this image of the Jedi as such into their minds as being warrior-priests, where in his mind they were more akin to Templars or Samurais. So he felt the need to marry those two concepts together. They were galactic police - and also dogmatic, arrogant, monk-like priests.
They were originally supposed to be “swashbuckling para-military warriors”; “Here their heroism was re-interpreted, portraying them as sowing the seeds for their own demise with their arrogance, complete with an “ivory tower” temple where they reside.”
I disagree. You’re as guilty of a bad generalisation as the one you’re trying to lambast.
I’m a fanboy, but I do not feel betrayed, the simple bald truth is that TPM is a shitty movie. No it’s not z-grade schlock, and they would have been all but impossible given the budget, but it is overall poor. I strongly suspect that Mr Lucas succumbed to the trap that many creative people do, that with a given level of success they are able ignore dissenting/moderating voices/opinions, which often were at least partially responsible for their success in the first place.