You know, people ask about the one thing that they didn’t like about a movie, Anakin was the most annoying character in The Phantom Menace. I didn’t mind Jar Jar so much, though he could have probably have been toned down a bit. I never understood the “Jar Jar is racist!” thing. He’s a clumsy amphibious dude with big ears and buggy eyes. I mean, who saw that as a caricature for any actual group of people?
That said, as for single scenes overall that are inarguably bad? “Greedo shoots first” pretty much sums up everything that was ever wrong with updating the original shows. Fixing shooting errors, touching up the FX, even adding background stuff, all super, but that one change I think pissed off a lot of people.
Thanks Miller that’s a good outline for a good series of movies. Next question: How could your movies go horribly wrong. That’s not a snub, I’m just saying there’s MUCH more to a movie than the initial synopsis. If you distill the prequels to a couple of paragraphs, they sound okay, it’s the execution of those ideas that make a person say WTF?
Star Wars was a magic movie. It hit the world at the right time, with the right budget, did enough things that were different (Spaceships that look USED? Awesomesauce!) and hit on enough points that it changed everything in sci fi to a Before-Starwars and After-Starwars point in time. The Empire Strikes back was GREAT. It had the right writers, is had the right restraint, the characters were pitch-perfect and grew in expected directions. And the Rebels had an undending stream of Mondays.
RotJ came along and Lucas was under the gun. He had all the effects money in the world, and he had to close out the trilogy in such a way as to bring a resolution. I don’t think the Ewoks were bad, I think they may have been a mis-step, but I also see what he was trying to do with them (the backwards natives against the mighty empire) FWIW, to my young mind, I like it the best of the three, but I’m clearly alone in that assessment.
The prequels come along and money is no longer ANY kind of object, computers have gotten to the point where the only humans you need are the principal actors, and Lucas is committed to a prequel, so no matter WHAT he writes, he’s gotta end up at the events of Chapter 4.
At which point you have Darth Vader creating c-3p0, midichlorians, and the surprise twist that Darth Vader wasn’t created, it was a sadistic mofo from the very beginning. Only he wasn’t…or was he?
At any rate, Lucas wrote himself into a corner around the third movie, what came after has some really good looking stuff, but none of this was ever going to stand up to the sniff test. It’s not the worst of the worst, it’s not the best of the best, but it’s not bad. And we have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight in saying ‘dayum, that Jar-Jar idea sure was half-baked’.
That wouldn’t be hard. It’s clear (or at least it can be made more clear) that the Sith select for ruthlessness, that the first thing they do after gaining power is turn against each other in a winner-take-all battle for that power. Just before ANH (i.e. just before Palpatine dissolves the Senate and assumes total control), Palpatine and Vader eliminate all Sith rivals. Only after the events of ANH does it occur to them to recruit Luke Skywalker.
Exactly, the Jedi Purge between ROTS and SW doesn’t have to only be a purge of the Light Side of The Force. This could even tie into The Force Unleashed EU stories about Vader trying to raise an Apprentice from Childhood in the ways of the Dark Side. Having a more or less disposable killing machine is a powerful weapon.
My 5-year-old nephew thinks Darth Vader is the coolest thing, evar.* But prefers the prequels to the original trilogy. He likes Anakin – but only the Phantom Menace version, not the later emo angsty version.
I have concluded from this one datapoint that people are very much overestimating the audience age that Lucas was targeting.
Which I’m encouraging, of course; I just got him the Darth Vader Star Wars Force FX Lightsaber for his birthday.
I was at the Star Wars Celebration convention this weekend. John Stewart interviewed Lucas, and this came up. The answer was basically that the movies were for kids, and that there had been a “Dare to be cute” sign up in the production studio when the idea came up.
I found Lucas to be pretty humble about the whole thing. Jar Jar was made fun of as well. His response was that there is always going to be a character people do not like…C3PO played the same annoying prototype on the first files. At any rate they have a full-size Jar Jar encased in carbonite at the ILM studio now.
Oh, and the trilogies will be released with never before seen deleted scene footage on Blu-Ray next year. They showed one such scene, which was a very ominous intro to Jedi where Vader is reaching out to Luke via the Force while Luke is sitting in a cave on Tatooine with the droids, prepping for confrontation with Jabba.
His face is covered by a black hood, but you can see his mouth, which is expression-less until he smirks when he hears Vader, then looks at the droids ominously as he ignites the lightsaber is constructing for the first time. Kinda spooky. Someone posted it on youtube already:
Then who the hell is all the political crap for? Putting convoluted political situations alongside Jar Jar is not how you make a movie accessible to all ages.
Well, he made the comments in regards to Jedi. Basically also said that most of the backstory, which eventually became the prequels, was written around the time of the originals as they needed a context for the events of 4-6. So there was a significant time difference between the plot and the characterization in the prequels.
Overall I found it interesting that he had not ever planned on filming the prequels as he did not expect the digital technology to be around to do it. He said this in the context of the droids, yoda, etc, and how challenging it was to get puppets to simply ride around on people’s backs, much less interact in complex scenes (Yoda fighting Dooku, for example).
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not defending the prequels. But I also never minded the Ewoks when I saw Jedi as a kid (although now I agree, a planet full of Wookies would be much cooler). I also see kids that were my age when I saw the originals seem to like the prequels better than I ever will, so I think he was making some fair points in terms of how all of the movies were essentially made with a 10 year-old audience in mind.
The original movies were for children, but they weren’t stupid. I wanted to be Han Solo when I grew up. Children can perfectly identify with adult characters if the story is compelling.
Actually, I disagree with this. Sit down and spend thirty minutes distilling the events of The Phantom Menace into a synopsis of roughly the same length and detail as the one just offered by Miller (which, by the way, was awesome and would make a great movie). After you’re done, read it out loud to someone. You know what you’ll find? It will make no sense.
You can quibble with some of Miller’s ideas if you want to, but his synopsis was of a well-constructed story where events led to other events in a logical fashion, and where characters take actions consistent with their motivations. The same is true of the original triology. Even on the most basic level, even ignoring how it was executed and Jake Lloyd and Jar Jar and the rest of it, the core story of The Phantom Menace doesn’t make sense, which is the real reason the movie doesn’t hold up.
Children like the original movies, but ANH was not marketed for children. i know people who saw clips at an sf con in Chicago late 1976 or early 1977 and they thought it was awesome. I suspect he was targeting the same audience that watched “American Graffiti” which had done very, very well. Empire is hardly a kids movie at all - it is way too dark, and there is little if anything cute about it. Maybe by RotJ they were making sure the kiddies had something, but not before.
Well, they were marketing “Star Wars,” not “A New Hope.”
Quibbling aside, the “it’s for kids” bit is illustrative of much of the problem with ROTJ - it veers from silly to dark like a drunk on a sidewalk. It doesn’t really explain the prequels, though, which are violent and dark quite a lot more than they’re cute.
Complaints about Jar-Jar and Jake Lloyd are, I think, kind of beside the point. Jar-Jar as a character is no more irritating than C3PO, and Jake Lloyd’s acting isn’t any worse than Natalie Portman’s and if you don’t believe me go back and watch the movie again; Portman’s acting is the worst you’ll ever see in a professional motion picture. The dialogue is unspeakable, but then, the dialogue in the original films wasn’t all that great either.
The problem with the prequels is really quite straightforward:
There are no memorable characters, and
The story doesn’t make any sense.
If you had memorable characters and a good story, you’d overlook other problems. “Star Wars” has a lot of little holes, some of the acting isn’t great, the dialogue is often poor, and it’s not always the best directed or edited film. But it holds up because it’s got a lot going for it - mostly, it has solid, memorable characters, who progress through a logical story. At the end you care about the outcome and what happens to the characters.
At the end of The Phantom Menace what do we have? The character who died was a cipher anyway. Naboo’s been saved, I guess, but we don’t really know what it was saved from; the person who was saved acts more like a robot than R2D2. Obi-Wan isn’t really much of a character. The villain’s plan never made any sense and so it’s impossible to ascertain of he’s been set back in his plan (I think actually he came out of it okay, though.) What emotional payoff are we supposed to get?
Re: prequel problems and the hate for Jar-Jar and Ani
In my house, the computer is in the same room as the TV. So when my brothers decided to watch Star Wars, I’m in the room surfing the web for most of it. I personally wasn’t very familiar with SW, in the sense of plot, dialogue, or what most of the characters actually looked like.
I wasn’t quite paying attention, but there were scenes I felt the need to comment on (paraphrasing):
“Who is that floppy-eared purple dinosaur thing? His voice is so irritating.”
“That kid is disgustingly cute. ‘I just want to help people.’ He’s the one who grows up to be Darth Vader, right? Okay, I get that they want to contrast Good Little Angelic Anikin with Evil Darth Vader, but this is too much. I think I need to leave before I develope diabetes.”
(Unrelated to the current discussion, but…) “Hey! Is that Yoda speaking? Yoda sounds just like Grover from Sesame Street!”
So I didn’t know about the traditional fan-hates, but I still hated them anyway.
Actually, it seemed pretty clear that Senator Palpatine’s plant the whole time was to get the Chancellor’s chair. The whole operation seemed just pretty much set up to stir up sympathy for the proud Nabooeans so he could win the no-sympathy vote (whether he set up the obstructive bureaucrats to hinder the Chancellor or if they were naturally occurring is kind of irrelevant of course)
Of course, there is one last hint in the movie if you pay attention, that I didn’t realize for something like a decade: The happy jumpy parade song at the end of TPM? Slow it down a bunch and drop it an octave or two, and what Star Wars song do we get?
Kay, I didn’t before, but now I am gonna bag on you a bit.
Alderon was Leia’s home planet, but I thought that the Princess was a political role that served the federation and wasn’t for just a specific planet. That said, mho is that the venue doesn’t make a move “bad” or “good”. I GET that it makes some viewers who would have preferred storyline segments of their own choosing, disappointed, but still don’t see how it makes it so “MST3K bad” (as I have seen here on the Dope a few times).
I don’t know, I was willing to go along with an unspoken “because it was a planet of some importance/with an important, worth guarding, resource of some sort”. Again, didn’t strike me as something making the movie horrible. Again, these movies weren’t made as cultural genius akin to the writings of Aristotle or something. They were intended merely as a fun space romp. Again, based on the old serials once shown at movies.
Weren’t the army of clones what eventually became the storm troopers who ended up “belonging” to the empire? Not snarky, I honestly don’t remember. I’ve only seen the second trilogy twice and quite a while back.
Interesting alternatives, but still don’t think that what actually played was horrible, those are just alternatives, not better (or worse) story ideas.
Hmmm really? Purloined Letter anyone?
Ugh, this is one place I’m in complete agreement with some folks. I HATED the pod race, it was boring in the extreme and ridiculously long. As to Anikin’s Force powers, Obi-Wan caught on to that pretty quickly, I rather liked that it was he that recognized it and started grooming him and that the Jedi wasn’t necessarily privy to it right off.
Really? But that’s ummm.. pretty much copying Shakespeare instead of the movie having its own story, isn’t it?
Seriously? Okay, something like that would have REALLY bugged me. This is Star Wars, not “Peyton Place” or “As the World Turns”. As it is, one of the things that bugged me about the movie was the use of Padme’s potential death from childbirth as part of the impetus for Anakin’s beginning to slide toward the dark side. More soap opera stuff would have been worse, imho.
I mean come on, a society that has star cruisers bigger than planets and a woman at the top of the socioeconomic food chain is in danger of dying in childbirth? And a man who’s a Jedi, with all of the intelligence and hero-ishness that implies, is so afraid as to not seek out a more intelligent answer to that? Grrrr.
Hmmmm…perhaps she too has was transformed by the Force lightning so she’s no longer recognizable as Padme, and she becomes a Jedi fighter in the resistance herself? I dunno.
I agree that they shouldn’t have had her die, if only because it’s an error re: what Leia said to Luke about her mother, and she told him (paraphrased) “…she was always very sad”. I always had the feeling that the funeral scene should have been shown to have been some sort of decoy to not allow Darth Vader to know she was still alive. In fact, I’m not sure that it wasn’t. They never said it, but she still looks visibly very pregnant in that scene. Someone as slim as Natalie Portman/Padme, isn’t going to still be that big. Not even right after giving birth.
Hmmmm kind of agree here, I’ve always hated the reason Anakin became Darth Vader as portrayed in the movie…For me, I always got the impression from the scene toward the end of RotJ, where Darth Vader rescues Luke from the Emperor, that he had suffered the same fate as Luke was about to suffer, and that THAT had been (at least partly) responsible for his going to the Dark Side. I would have liked to have seen something like that instead of the whole “I can’t lose you in childbirth, Oh wait, now I have THE POWER come with me to the Dark Side” thing.
I never felt the need for more political mumbo jumbo. I thought that the oppression of the people under the thumb of the empire was already apparent enough.
Nothing wrong with that. Shakespeare’s Othello was also inspired by an earlier story. The original Star Wars is in some senses the least original of the six, and is better for it.
That’s not a snub, I’m just saying there’s MUCH more to a movie than the initial synopsis. If you distill the prequels to a couple of paragraphs, they sound okay, it’s the execution of those ideas that make a person say WTF?
