Not only is TPM Plan 9-level bad, it is Mac and Me-level bad. It belongs on MST3K.
In the original version of ROTJ, this one is easily explained by saying that the ghosts are only appearing to Luke so are coming from his memories. That is, he’s seeing what he remembers of Yoda and Obi-Wan, and extrapolating Anakin from what he saw behind Vader’s mask, so puts Anakin in the same outfit Obi-Wan wore because he wants to think of him as being like Obi-Wan. Obviously in the edited version the ghosts have to be ‘real’ because he never saw young Anakin to form an image of him, but before the prequels (and that edit) he wasn’t actually stuck with making desert robes the Jedi uniform.
A lot of Plan 9’s badness is caused by the fact that it was being made with no budget by a guy who wasn’t even supposed to be on studio grounds who had his most impressive actor die during filming. And while it has all kinds of problems, it’s actually still pretty fun to watch, though you can’t take it seriously. PM was made with an astronomical budget and had no trouble getting big name actors to come in, it’s not remotely in the same league. I think it’s reasonable to take into account the resources available when evaluating a movie, and that makes the P9-PM comparison much worse.
I remember back before Empire came out, people were criticizing the idea of having a Muppet in the movie, but of course we ended up with Yoda. In TPM most of the complaining about horrible comic characters goes to Jar Jar Binks, but IMHO even worse is the two-headed race announcer. That character is like if Lucas had used Kermit the Frog as Yoda.
He didn’t have 15 years, he had far longer than that.
Was Lucas contractually obligated to release a Star Wars film in 1999? I doubt it, as far as I’m aware he was super rich and had full creative control over the franchise, so he could have taken as long as he wanted to perfect the script and release the story he really wanted to tell.
Why do you think he had to make up anything on the fly like some jobbing scriptwriter doing what the studio tells him to do?
So it doesn’t matter exactly when he started working on the project again, he could have taken the next 15 years if he had wanted to.
Mad Max: Fury Road is an example of someone who had years to think about a movie and did so. When something is born of passion - not obligation - things can really click.
Lucas lost any passion he had for Star Wars a long time ago, in a galaxy quite close by.
Not only were the sequels -and TPM in particular- badly made films, in my opinion they:
- didn’t have any interesting story lines or fill in any interesting back stories
- got us back to a point where we already knew what happened
So really apart from the exercise, totally worthless.
A common fault with “prequel” films - The Thing (2011) anyone?
if TPM was indeed intended for his tots, I wonder if it would have even been a Star Wars film had Willow not bombed. Like, maybe he was hedging his bets, and rightly so considering the only reason anyone even talks about it is because it’s adjunct to SW.
I bet y’all be griping over Strange Magic if were SW.
I don’t think TPM was intended for his kids…They were teens up by the time TPM came out. In the book I have, he even mentions that part of the reason he felt able to go back to work on Star Wars was because his kids were older.
A good prequel should work as a stand-alone movie–it should to be interesting to someone who has never even heard of the originals. Can anyone possibly say that anything about TPM made newly-introduced, never-heard-of Anakin Skywalker seem remotely interesting, or make you wonder at all what will happen to him after the end of the movie?
But as he himself said, if he didn’t do it then, he probably never would have done it. For whatever reason, from his point of view, it was sort of a now or never thing for him. You have to remember he was already in his 50s when he did the prequels. He wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.
I think you need to read the book The Secret History of Star Wars. Lucas may have been rich and in creative control, but he never abandoned the ‘on the fly’ style which he had during his younger years. The book, by the way, is not some Lucas love-fest. It’s basically an unblemished history of all the films. They were all sort of conceived on the fly. He was adding things as he went along, no matter how it went against what he earlier did.
Case in point: As late as the first draft of Empire Strikes Back, Luke’s father and Vader were two separate characters and appeared in the movie separately. Lucas didn’t even decide until the second draft of Empire that Vader was Luke’s father.
The entire conception of Star Wars changed between the first and second movie. Vader was just some bad guy, just one of the Emperor’s henchmen, in the original movie; then Lucas thought he could elevate this bad guy to being the true hero of the saga. The Emperor in ANH was a Nixonian recluse and a figurehead; no connections to the Sith or to the Jedi. And then, because of burnout and his marriage collapsing, the sequel series got condensed down into Return of the Jedi with “Luke’s sister” becoming Leia.
A lot of Star Wars was thought up on the fly and reinvisioned as he went along. This includes a lot of elements in both the originals, and the prequels, too. That’s just how the man operated. In the original script for Star Wars in 1973, Han Solo was a green gilled alien.
That’s the problem. They were made for the fans, and yet deviated so from what the fans expected. They’re enjoyable sci-fantasy films if you think of them not as the literal “truth” of what happened, but as some sort of story that’s been passed down and the details have gotten more or less misremembered as time has gone on.
As Star Wars films, the first two aren’t satisfactory. As pure science-fantasy entertainment, they make for enjoyable B-movies.
I consider them reboots, in a sense. In that they can be enjoyed separately from the originals.
The biggest problems with the prequels are:
Blocking, framing, character placement, and the lack of real sets. Too much talking, and sitting, and talking, and sitting. Too much shot-reverse shot conversation.
These are all issues with the direction.
Well, let’s compare them to other SF movies made around the time of the OT: Blade Runner. CE3K. ET. Alien. Watch one of those and then watch TMP and you will see what bottom of the barrel crap TMP really is. TMP is on the level of The Ice Pirates or Black Hole or *Krull. *
Alright.
For clarification – Lucas’s children were not, in fact, all teens at that point.
Lucas has three children. Amanda (whom he adopted with his then-wife Marcia) was born in 1981. After he divorced Marcia, he adopted Katie (born in 1988) and Jett (born in 1993). All three of them appear in cameos in the prequels.
TPM was filmed in 1997; at that point, Amanda was 16, Katie was 9, and Jett was 4.
I was curious if you’d be willing to do as in-depth an analysis of II, III, Rogue One, and TFA as you did here? You seem intelligent as well as a big SW fan, and I would be interested in hearing your perspective on those films.
Sorry, I had no idea. When he says his kids were “older” I figured that meant they were all teens, and I only knew of the eldest child, having seen her in the Making of TPM documentary.
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Due to their unique timing in pop culture history, the movies of the OT have engendered a very distinct type of nostalgia that I doubt will ever be equaled again (in the world of pop culture as we know it).
Similarly, because of their relationship to the OT and their almost perfect awfulness, the prequels engendered a very distinct type of disappointment that I doubt will ever be equaled again. Never have people had such high expectations that were dashed so low.
I will say also that I think The Force Awakens is utter garbage and people should have been as disappointed in it as they were in the prequels–more so, in fact. It’s an entirely new flavor of disappointment, almost a kind of willful mockery of the OT instead of a ham-fisted attempt to extend its brand.