I’m sure a thread like this has been done before, but with the new movie coming out I thought I’d try this idea out again. Would the prequels have been better if The Phantom Menace hadn’t been made? Attack of the Clones could have been Episode I and Revenge of the Sith could have been Episode II. The theoretical Episode III following Revenge of the Sith could be about the Clone Wars. We would have then had an entire movie of what I think everyone wanted to see, Darth Vader in the suit with his red light saber and voiced by James Earl Jones.
Sorry about the typo in the thread title, it should be they, not the.
The viral success of the Machete Order shows just how disposable Episode I is. Nothing in it happens that’s really necessary to understand what follows.
I think it’s mostly agreed that out of the prequels, Episode III is the best one. It’s still debated whether I or II is worse, but II at least establishes some important character-building for Anakin and Palpatine. I think the prequel trilogy could’ve easily been improved by just stretching the stories of II and III into three movies.
I’ve often suggested viewing Episode II as the first one in the series. Stuff is kind of happening and characters even know each other, which makes it feel like a movie you are just coming into.
Nothing in the Phantom Menace feels important to the story. We never needed to see where Anakin was before he was found. If they wanted to explain/show Anakin’s origin, a brief flashback to when Obi-Wan found him(assuming Qui-gon does not exist) would suffice.
Revenge of the Sith could even be the first one if you slowed it down a lot and ended it with Anakin joining the dark side. If we joined a story about two Jedi Knights doing…some quest and we gradually learned that one has dark side leanings, it would be interesting to watch a hero decline into darkness.
(Bolding mine)
Really? There are people who think I is better than II? I mean, look, II is not a great movie, but at least our exposure to Jar Jar is limited.
The only thing I’d miss in 1 is Qui Gon. I liked his scenes, I like his interaction with Obi Wan.
AotC has the incredibly awkward, painful, stilted romance scenes between Anakin and Padme, which feature some of the most awful dialogue in the entire series. As much as I dislike Jar Jar, those scenes in AotC make my skin crawl.
Also, TPM, for all its flaws, does have Qui-Gon, and the Duel of the Fates fight.
There is a story arc in episodes 1 thru 3 that is potentially Shakespearean. I hope I live long enough for someone who knows how to make movies to tell it correctly. So no, I don’t think the problem is confined to episode 1.
Every one of the prequels is painfully bad. Not only are none of them worth watching in their own right, but watching them drags down the overall SW story and milieu.
There’s precious little of TPM that contributes anything to the story arc. Anakin was a slave. He was rescued by Jedi. Palpatine maneuvered himself into the Chancellorship through a crisis he manufactured himself. The rest is marketing for games and toys.
The other two movies are OK. Not good, but OK. I think of them like Saturday morning cartoons. Removing TPM won’t salvage them, but removing TPM from any collection will improve the overall quality.
By the way, my biggest idea for salvaging TPM: it needs to be a movie about Kenobi, primarily. It needs to explain the ghost-Kenobi’s confession on Degobah (“I thought I could train Anakin better than Yoda” etc.) That Degobah confession is actually contradicted by most of the prequels - there’s never a Yoda/Kenobi conflict about training Anakin and no real indication that some failing of Kenobi’s lead to Anakin’s fall. (Perhaps Lucas intended to show this and it was just lost in all the ham-handed dialogue and acting, but it was certainly not made clear.) So TPM should have been an in-depth character study of Kenobi’s transition from apprentice to master, and it needs to clearly set up everything that follows.
Instead, it’s a movie about a little kid, an elected Queen and a rabbit-eared doofus who have some adventures and accidentally save a planet though the sheer stupidity of their enemies. Oh, and there were two wooden Jedi cut-outs following them around.
My only issue with watching the Prequels in between Episodes 5 and 6 is Episode 3 visually leads so well into A New Hope. I remember when I came home from seeing it, it was like 11 pm but I had to pop in Star Wars and watch it.
I also thought II was better when it first came out, but after watching Plinkett’s review of II, I think that it is at best equally bad as 1 and likely worse.
Wasn’t there a disagreement on whether Anakin was too old to start Jedi training? Yoda was arguing that he was and Kenobi arguing otherwise (and Kenobi offering to train Anakin himself)?
Yoda argued that Anakin was too old; it was Qui-Gon who argued otherwise. In that scene in TPM, Obi-Wan was still only a Padawan, and I’m not sure that he was even in the Council chamber during that debate.
But, after Qui-Gon died in the Battle of Naboo, it fell to Obi-Wan (who had just been promoted to the rank of Knight) to train Anakin.
Also, PM’s actions scenes were mostly alright. There were structural problems with some of them (that podrace scene absolutely kills the film’s momentum) but as stand alone set-pieces, they were alright. Except for the big Gungan-Droid battle at the end, none of them were out right stinkers, and some were genuinely cool.
AotC’s action scenes were things like the Super Mario Brothers Droid Factory Level, or Super-Ball Yoda.
Although Obi Wan v. Jango Fett on the rainy landing pad was pretty sweet.
Overall, while Phantom Menace is bad, it’s mostly Hollywood Blockbuster bad. Attack of the Clones is bad-bad. If you gave Roger Corman a bottomless barrel of money, he would make Phantom Menace. If you gave Coleman Francis a bottomless barrel of money, he would make Attack of the Clones.
IMO, TPM is better than AotC. Yes, TPM had some problems, like too much JarJar and the whole midi-chlorians thing that he learned to cut out of the other movies, but the thing is, if that movie hadn’t happened, that stuff would have been in AotC instead. So, I don’t hold those aspects against TPM as much as I do against the entire prequel trilogy.
In my view, the problem with the prequel trilogy isn’t in the story, in a broad sense, but rather in the specifics. That is, the whole idea of a chosen one is straight out of mythology and fits perfectly in the mythos of star wars, but the whiny naive character that Anakin gets is what ruins it. The whole idea of Palpatine creating false flag assassination attempts to play both sides of the clone wars to use it as an opportunity to seize power is great, that they shoe horned in Jango Fett and the whole ridiculously racist trade federation nonsense is what ruined it.
The overall story arc of AotC is great, but I feel like the execution fell even flatter there. If one of the primary focuses of the movie is this forbidden romance and it just utterly fails on all levels, the primary aspect of the film falls apart. Queen Amidala is a young and strong-willed leader willing to make whatever sacrifices she must to support her people. This even carries over into the beginning of AotC where she’s now Senator and there’s assassination attempts on her life. But then she gives it all up for this romance with Anakin that makes no sense, for which there’s no chemistry, that she even indicated a complete non-interest in in the first film in a “isn’t that cute” kind of way. It basically took all of her character development, what little there was, in the first film and first part of the second and flushed it down the toilet. By the time RotS came around, she spent most of the movie just crying.
Another thing that was critical that they barely hinted at was the friendship between Obiwan and Anakin. In the original film, Obiwan mentions that Anakin was a great friend and pilot. Yet, they spend almost all of the film separated on different story threads. How are we supposed to get the idea that they’re great friends when we hardly see them interacting with eachother on film? There’s a snippet here or there, and they put a little bit of it in RotS, but it’s almost completely nonexistent in AotC.
And from a set piece perspective, AotC is lacking. I wouldn’t normally put too much weight on that, especially if it’s a great movie, but George Lucas said repeatedly that he was a visual storyteller and that Star Wars was about the spectacle. Yes, the ending sequence with the clone troopers attacking and the fight with Dooku was neat, but that’s about it. Worse, as cool as the encounter between Yoda and Dooku was, and as excited as I was to see it at the time, I also feel that Yoda fighting like that with a Lightsaber undermines his character. Maybe less spectacular to see, but him controlling the Lightsaber with just the force or finding a way to fight him with just the force or helping Anakin and Obiwan without all the hopping would have made more sense. And yet TPM has two really good set pieces. The podrace, while I felt it was a little bit long, was a good set piece. And the whole sequence of the fight on Naboo (minus the JarJar junk) was great, especially the Darth Maul Duel. Hell, that duel, with the music, being the best Lightsaber fight we’d seen to that point by a long shot was a big part of why I originally walked out loving the film. Subsequent fights weren’t as spectacular, relatively speaking, even though I think that the fight between Anakin and Obiwan was, taken alone and without the historical context, a better overall fight.
No, I don’t think taking out TPM makes it better. The same logic that applies to TPM makes AotC equally expendable, and then it’s just whether or not we need RotS or not. The way to fix them was to have hired a screenwriter to give us better and more consistent characterizations, better dialogue (seriously “I hate sand, it’s so coarse and it gets everywhere”… UGH), and to hire a director that could actually get good performances out of his actors. Hell, Samuel L Jackson, and Natalie Portman are great actors, and they looked like blocks of wood, so I think that all the blame on Hayden Christensen and Jake Lloyd is misplaced. He did a great job with the world building and visuals, but he surrounded himself with yesmen and didn’t get the talent to fill in his weaknesses like he did for ESB and RotJ.
I waver between which I dislike more. AotC is bad for all the reasons mentioned above, but I didn’t get quite so bored as I did watching TPM. And I realize I’m a minority here, but I really liked the pod race scene (once Jar Jar is out of it). It’s nothing special on a regular TV, but on a big screen with great sound where you can feel the pods’ engines through your body, it was damn exciting. Miller’s right that it didn’t fit the story’s flow, but by itself I enjoyed it.
So get rid of the Anakin-Padme love scenes and Obi Wan’s visit to the clone makers (but keep the end fight with Jango Fett), add the pod race in a way that structurally fits, and I’ll take AotC. Of course, it’s kind of the same way I’ll take the crown over the root canal.
I think part of the reason Phantom Menace has such a bad reputation is that expectations were so high. Aside from Jar Jar, who was annoyance personified, it was basically a middle of the road three out of five star sci fi flick, but for those who waited in line for days to get it must have appeared as a crime against humanity.
I agree that it didn’t add much to the plot (I would have preferred a plot line revolving around a Jedi and a Sith trying to woo a young Skywalker into their point of view.) But I would go ahead and include it in the canon for completeness.
My impression on watching Attack of the Clones was that it was a good movie except for any scene in which Anakin opened his mouth. Seriously, I don’t think I have ever seen worse acting in a mainstream movie. He was trying presumably to exhibit gravitas but it just came out as stilted and wooden, which wasn’t helped by the awful dialogue that was scripted for him. If you could just replace the actor and dialogue on those scenes it could be a great movie.
I actually like AOTC more than the other two. And the awkward romance is part of it. These are two people who are socially retarded and stunted due to their professional lives. She’s a politician ruling planet as a teenager. He’s a former slave turned warrior monk.
These folks are going to be messed up when it comes to personal romantic interactions.
I think the land battle scene at the end of AOTC is an awesome battle and I like the jerky handheld “war footage” look they gave that sequence.
I think starting with that movie would have been better.
I was just thinking yesterday how much i liked the sound structure of the pod race.
Wow, that sounds sarcastic doesnt it. But its not.
Take out Jar Jar and you have a perfectly decent 70 minute film