What, you think you’re too sophisticated for comic books? 
Gee, Kurtz, I saw “The Searchers” also.
I hate to have to say that Lucas was right, but he was. It is okay for a movie to end down, but they don’t all have to. Empire being dark fits the flow of the plot nicely, but the Flash Gordon serials did not end with Flash or Zarkov dead and Ming raping Dale (or marrying her - same thing at the time.)
The prequels end with a major character dead, and Yoda walking off into the sunset - so they must have been great. I think the prequels were guaranteed to suck because they were going to end down, and Lucas is not the kind of person who can write that kind of material.
As for the Ewoks - well, think of Endor as Vietnam and you might get the point. Not really something people connect with today, but those of us who saw it as adults when it came out got it.
I actually liked the Ewoks, dammit! Yub yub!!! You don’t mess with them – they’re nasty little bastards.
(And I liked the prequels too. Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, gorgeous costumes – what’s not to like? 
If Endor is Vietnam, wouldn’t the Imperials be the Americans?
It’s hard to point at one scene and say “this sucked” in a movie. Movies succeed or fail as a whole.
The problem with the prequels, especially the first two, are quite numerous. To use “The Phantom Menace” as one example, you have two overriding problems:
- The story makes no sense. Really, think it through; again and again it totally defies logic.
- The characters are awful. There’s no clear protagonist, the villain is mostly unseen and doesn’t act rationally, the two main heroes don’t behave consistently, and the female lead has no personality at all and is played by an actress who appears to be acting at gunpoint.
It’s difficult to become emotionally involved if the characters and story don’t make any sense. In “Phantom Menace,” who am I cheering for and why? Why does Palpatine try to kill Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan at the beginning of the movie? That makes no sense at all; he has no reason to kill them and if anything it contradicts what his intent seems to be. Why is Naboo being picked on? Why is the Trade Federation helping Palpatine? Why does Darth Maul chase them back to Naboo? Why does Palpatine want all the Gungans killed? Why doesn’t the Senate believe the two Jedi when they state there’s an invasion going on when they were sent there inthe first place to find out what was going on? Why does the Jedi Council reverse their decision on Anakin? Why does the Council say they’ll find out who Darth Maul is and then not do it?
I’m not asking for fanwanking here, like asking about Star Wars “Why did the Emperor dissolve the Senate?” At the time that movie was made that’s not explained; it’s just a line to indicate the Empire is not a nice organization. But the question of why the Senate was dissolved isn’t really material to the story of Star Wars. The basic motivations of both the good buys and bad guys are still clear in Star Wars. In The Phantom Menace the villain’s motives are, well, inexplicable; we know Palpatine wants power, but the manner in which he goes about it is absurd and he does things that contradict and undermine his own plan. The heroes similarly lack logic and direction; Queen Amidala says she doesn’t want war and then does things that lead to war, Qui-Gonn’s erratic, Obi-Wan doesn’t really seem to have any motivation at all and Anakin is just a child.
As to the OP:
“Return of the Jedi” is a mess of a movie, but the stuff as described in the OP’s link doesn’t even constitute a coherent alternative; it’s just “It would have been better if Han had died.”
As has already been pointed out, darker does not mean better. There’s still no idea for a movie contained in Mr. Kurtz’s complaints. You can’t just kill a principal character and think “Well, that’ll be awesome.” Why? What does killing Han do that not killing him doesn’t?
Would any movie be made better by killing a principal character? If body count made for better movies, Dolph Lundgren movies would be Oscar winners.
Furthermore, I don’t understand WHY you’d kill Han Solo. That doesn’t make any sense in the context of the trilogy. By the time Return of the Jedi starts, Hen has already been brought low by the Empire. You’re going to rescue him and then kill him thirty minutes later… okay, why? What dramatic purpose does that serve? What arc is being completed, what story achieved?
I’ve never understood why anybody cares about the off-screen rapport of the actors; I can’t imagine why it matters. And I agree that the acting (not to mention dialogue) of the Trek films is better than the (non-Solo-Leia) dialogue of the SW films, and much, much better than the prequels.
I should point out that The Phantom Menace has a clear protagonist. It’s Jar-Jar. He undergoes the entire hero’s journey through the movie, it’s a point-by-point happening. And that’s not accidental. He’s also the one who brings Palpatine to become leader later…
It’s just, well, the character is repulsive, even as a False Hero, and the movie is written as if it were stitched together as something to happen between climatic set pieces. Not to mention every advance by the heroes is accidental, or feels that way, down to Anakin’s destruction of the command vessel.
To be honest, the second and third are much better.
Thanks for posting this. He does a great job of articulating some of the same feelings I’ve had about the prequels. A lot of people focus on Jar Jar, but the flaws are so much deeper than that. Lucas took the fun out of every single thing that made the original movies cool.
It’s a cliché to pretend that bad installments of a series don’t exist, but it seems like that’s the only way to live with them. I have such love for the originals that to retroactively dismiss them would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Of course having Lucas make unadulterated copies so difficult to obtain does not help.
To address the OP, I’m glad Gary Kurtz didn’t get his way. As a kid I would have hated having Han die. The empire had spent all of the last movie beating up on the good guys, and it was time for things to decisively turn around.
Now posting it for the third time: This will do it take 2 hours out of your day and watch it cover to cover.
It is an awesome critique, and well represents what’s WRONG with the prequels, but you didn’t answer Canvas Shoe’s statement:
MAKE a story that solves all these issues. The problem is that it’s easier to say something sucks than it is to create a better replacement. It’s like trying to determine the right shade of blue, when all you get for feedback is ‘Man, that blue SUCKS, pick another shade!’
Give me $200 million and I’ll hire some top screenwriters and do exactly that. Why should I do something like that for free?
Lucas is a moviemaker and he made some bad movies. He’s not immune from criticism just because we aren’t professional moviemakers and don’t have the means to hire professional screenwriters to write a better movie.
If I’m served a shitty meal in an expensive restaurant, my complaint over the crappy food is no less valid for the fact that I would not be willing to go back into the kitchen to make it myself.
Okay. Here’s some changes I would make:
Change Naboo to Alderaan. The destruction of Alderaan is one of the signature scenes of Star Wars, and it’s astonishing that Lucas entirely missed the opportunity to explore this setting. Plus, it more easily sets up Leia as a Princess of Alderaan in the second trilogy. Keep the look of Naboo, which was pretty good. Remove the Gungans.
Explain why Naboo is blockaded by the Trade Federation. Both sides have greivances: Alderaan accuses the Trade Federation of smuggling, the Federation accuses Alderaan of piracy. The Jedi are present to mediate a peace between the two nations. This establishes the conflict driving the plot, and could be done with a couple lines of dialogue. Obi Wan expresses sympathy for Alderaan, Qui Gon rebukes him and insists on neutrality.
The good guys should not be using an army of clones. The whole concept of a cloned army of slaves bred to kill and die is deeply immoral. Establish in the first movie that the Trade Federation uses clone armies, and that this is generally considered creepy as hell as by most of the rest of the galaxy. Make sure the Jedi remark on this.
The Jedi meet with the Alderaanian delegation, which includes Head of State Princess Amidala, and Head of Government Palpatine. The Federation sends a strike team to wipe them out. The Jedi protect them and they manage to escape the attack, along with one member of their fighter escort: Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker is a brash young fighter pilot in the Alderaan navy. Make him essentially Han Solo at Luke’s age. He, Obi Wan, and Amidala are all roughly the same age, and a love triangle between them is established in the first movie. Also, making Anakin a native of Alderaan would be the sort of thing that recontextures events in the original movie in a more interesting way: imagine how the scene of Vader watching Alderaan destroyed would play after watching him fight to defend it.
Tatooine does not appear, at least not in the first movie. One idea I’ve played with is establishing that Obi Wan Kenobi has a sister named Beru - who would later be the Aunt Beru who raised Luke. I don’t know if I’d have her living on Tatooine or not. I think it’s important that Annikin is never on Tatooine, though. Having Obi Wan choose his former pupil’s home planet as his secret hiding place was too stupid to believe. It should be someplace Darth Vader could never have heard of.
Some other planet can substitute for Tatooine. I’d leave the pod race in the movie, but make it shorter. The Jedi see Anakin demonstrate some intuitive Force powers: he telekinetically pushes a rival podracer into a wall, or something. Obi Wan argues that he should be trained, Qui Gon has reservations. Obi Wan gives Anakin some training in secret. They are attacked by Darth Maul, per the original film.
On Coruscant, Qui Gon personally protects Amidala while Obi Wan and Anakin investigate some plot coupon dropped in the fight with Darth Maul. This leads them to uncover that the Sith exist, and have been manipulating both sides of the conflict, but they are too late to prevent Amidala from successfully convincing the Senate to censure the Trade Federation and elect Senator Palpatine as Chancellor. The Trade Federation storms out of the Senate in protest. You can easily demonstrate the magnitude of this fracture by showing the Federation forces streaming out of the Senate, and seed the various alien races that will appear in the next two films. This signals civil war: Palpatine assumes war powers and sends Republic forces to Alderaan to help protect the planet from the Federation attack, with Anakin participating as a pilot. Qui Gon and Obi Wan remain on Coruscant and hunt down the Sith. The final climax cuts between the space battle to prevent the invasion of Alderaan and the fight between Darth Maul and the Jedi. Anakin successfully destroys the Federation flagship, and the Republic and Alderaanian forces drive off the rest of the Federation forces. The lightsaber duel plays out just as in Phantom Menace.
And that’s the first movie. I’m not 100% sure where I’d go from there. One thing I’d do is have increasingly large numbers of Sith. There’s just Maul and his shadowy master in the first film. The second film has a team of Sith assassins pursuing the heroes. The purge of the Jedi Temple in the third film is a climactic battle between small armies of lightsaber wielding Jedi and Sith. By this point, Anakin Skywalker is, of course, leading the Sith army.
Speaking of that, Anakin’s fall should be modeled on Othello’s. Amidala ends up falling in love with Anakin at the end of the first movie, but Palpatine manipulates Anakin into thinking that she’s cheating on him with Obi Wan. The climax comes when Anakin leads the Republic forces in a brutal attack on the Clone Master’s homeworld. He destroys their massive clone farms, effectively ending the clone threat, and bringing a close to the clone wars. In the aftermath, in reuniting with his unsuspecting wife, Palpatine’s lies and insinuations finally push him over the edge, and he lashes out at her with force lightning, seemingly killing her. The third movie will reveal that she survived, but I’m not sure what her role would be in the film.
In the third movie, I’d like a scene similar to the Dagoba scene in Empire, except from the Sith point of view, with Palpatine, now revealed as Darth Sidious, instructing his new apprentice in the philosophy of the dark side. Ideally, the Sith would justify all of their actions from the previous movie. For example, by provoking the war with the Federation, they claim to have forced the Republic’s hand on the issue of clone slavery, which will eventually lead to the end of a greater evil.
Chancellor Palpatine, in the second film, does things like establishing a military draft, and suppressing dissent in the name of the war effort. By the third movie, he’s passing anti-alien laws, because the separtists are mostly non-humans. Planets that protest too loudly, such as the Wookies, are declared secessionist and brutally suppressed. This is what finally forces the Jedi to move against him. The attempt to arrest him plays out more or less as it does in the third film, except Anakin is already turned to the Dark Side, and actively defends Sidious.
Well… okay, as long as Samuel Jackson remains a bad motherfucker.
I like it. It’s certainly better than the dreck we ended up with.
Also, What ain’t no star-system I ever heard of! They speak English on What?
Thanks UB, and I also appreciate Rickjay’s answer as well. I’ve asked this before over the years, but that’s the first time I’ve seen opinions that went beyond “it sucked” or (I’m so hip I know a new saying) “oh, it was just so wrong, in so many ways”.
So, I’m 51 and when I was a high schooler Star Wars had just come out, the year I graduated if I recall. We all loved it, but as others have mentioned, as I got older I could see the “annoying teenage angst” of Luke as others have mentioned. But since the original trilogy was based on fairly campy “Serials” I didn’t mind, I expected the characters to be somewhat glorified Flash Gordons, just every so slightly cartoony, with a lot of corny sayings and unrealistic situations.
I get what Rickjay was saying about some of the storyline also, there were parts regarding the whole downfall of their political system which seemed to have created the rise of the Empire (in the second trilogies) that left me saying “wait, why’d that guy do that?”. But it didn’t really mar my enjoyment of the movie. I mean, it’s a shoot em up bang/bang space movie. Having seen, (and loved) MST3K movies, I’m sorry, none of the Star Wars movies can come close to being bad enough to be in that category.
And sorry to the person that posted the critique link, the narrator sounds like a decades long brain-damaged drunk, I couldn’t get through 10 minutes of his voice. That’s an honest apology, not a snark. I trust and believe that it is a reasonable critique.
To Miller’s additions, a few of yours were more along the lines of explanations of what happened when and why and how it led to occurrences in the original movie. I think a lot of those things happened because of the need to keep the movie lengths down to a reasonable time period. As to the others, they sound like what you would have liked to have seen in the movie, not necessarily what was “wrong” with the movie in the first place.
Not that that’s wrong, I agree there were things I didn’t like about how they explained things either.
My biggest beef was what they chose as the impetus for Anakin’s downfall and eventual metamorphosis into Darth Vader. I didn’t think it was a strong enough reason to cause him to abandon his earlier status as a Jedi hero. I was expecting something huge and well…unexpected.
And then there’s Jar-Jar. I didn’t feel the ridiculous sense of betrayal so many Star Wars fans expressed, but he was a bit too silly.
But despite the things I didn’t like about the movies, I still found them entertaining and intriguing enough to enjoy. They were clean, fun, and imaginative. I get that they (the second trilogy) didn’t go the way everyone would have liked them to go, I just don’t get the extreme hatred, and I really REALLY don’t get the hatred for the first trilogy. But oh well…to each his own. 
Sure. Remember when the original movie came out Nixon had left office only a few years before, and also remember that Lucas’ first movie was THX-1138. At that time and at his age, he was much more likely to connect with rebels rather than the government. He was a zillionaire then, but I think he was still pretending to be a young and brash filmmaker.
That’s because that’s what you asked for. Remember?
And, honestly, if you’ve never heard anyone describe why they hated the prequels, or how they’d have fixed it, you haven’t been listening. There’s no end of places on the internet that describe it in detail, including this very website. Threads on just that subject tend to pop up on a regular basis.
[quote=“Miller, post:77, topic:550134”]
That’s because that’s what you asked for. Remember?
Right, which is why I followed the statement you quote above, with “not that there’s anything wrong with that”. I wasn’t baggin’ on you, just musing.
That is what I was talking about. Here, on the Dope, in the “I hate Star Wars” threads in which I’ve asked similar questions yes, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone make a specific, beyond “it sucks” complaint. And yes, I see threads pop up here on it, but am only occasionally pulled in out of curiosity. I meant the times I’d actually been in such a thread and asked.
As to the “places on the internet that describe it in detail” I’ve not visited any of those places. Websites about what should, or should not have been done in the Star Wars sequels aren’t something I seek out on the internet. It just occasionally piques my curiosity when I see it here on the Dope. 
Just this bit alone would have made TPM much better. One of my biggest problems with TPM was that Anakin was so very young. He was too young to really have a love interest, and he was too young to be such a great mechanic/pilot, I don’t care HOW precocious he was. I could not get into the movie at all. If Anakin had been somewhere around 14-18 years old, the story would have been much more believable.
Are you figuring that Darth and Palpatine are the only Sith to survive that climactic battle? I mean, there are no other lightsaber-swinging Sith force-practitioners in STAR WARS and EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI, so I figure you’ve got to explain that somehow…