I think Miller should have been put in charge of the Sequel Trilogy. That’s a much better starting point than what Jar Jar Abrams gave us.
And why would Yoda repeat his error in the OT when he trains Luke? Luke had a relationship with his aunt and uncle, and had friends like Han and Lando, and a (until the reveal that she was his sister) a burgeoning relationship with Leia. No, “Jesus, we made this mistake with your father. You are not Jedi material because you have too many attachments and you are too old.”
That’s great. I love it.
But it’s true. Anakin’s actions make no sense at all. It would be like if I was an abortion rights supporter and was part of a group where the president intruded on my privacy, asked why I wasn’t donating more, etc. Instead of just leaving the group, I decide to become pro-life and bomb abortion clinics. It’s silly.
That’s why I think the entire character of Qui-Gon was unnecessary. Obi-Wan should have been Yoda’s former padawan, who as a newly minted Jedi Knight discovered Anakin and greymailed the council into letting him train Anakin by threatening to resign from the Jedi and do it freelance if they didn’t. Hence Kenobi’s guilt about his pride.
Yeah, his turn was really poorly handled in general. He walks into the Chancellor’s office thinking, “The Jedi are kinda bullshit,” and leaves thinking, “I’ma go murder some eight year olds now!”
The middle episode of the prequel trilogy should have mirrored the middle episode of the OT, and had an extended “Sith training sequence,” where Palpatine lays out the actual Sith ethos, the way Yoda did for the Jedi in Empire.
1) Because Yoda (and Obi Wan) really aren’t that smart/competent a Jedi. They’re just the ones that survived (mostly by running off and hiding*). They’re like the ruling class in 12 Monkeys.
or
2) bad writing
What we know about the Jedi pre PT all comes from Obi Wan and Yoda, who might just be the most unreliable narrators.
* Like Luke did in the sequal trilogy. Hmm, wonder where he learned that?
I don’t know what everyone has against her, but in my experience, what a lot of supposed fans had against her is that she had the nerve to be a Asian female character in a Star Wars film that didn’t cater to their penises.
Any analysis of “what went wrong with trilogy Z” has to account for who thinks it went wrong and how.
The prequels were just as successful as the originals. They broke box office records, they sold billions of dollars in toys and other spinoff merchandise, and people who grew up with them remember them just as fondly as older generations remember the originals. There are even Disney channel kids who are around 20-25 now who grew up watching The Clone Wars on TV, consider themselves “fans of the Clone Wars TV cartoon”, and may not have even seen the actual Star Wars movies. Yes, these people exist.
Film critics didn’t like the prequels (but a lot of them didn’t like Return of the Jedi and some of them even found an easy troll space by denouncing SW and ESB too). Manchildren who unrealistically expected to have the same emtional experience watching Phantom Menace as they did watching Star Wars, when they were 7 years old and hadn’t been watching Star Wars derivatives for 20 years, really didn’t like the prequels. These were the loudest voices and dominated the discussion with inaccurate concerns (“too much politics” when all the politics combined in the prequels is maybe one sentence in the crawl and five minutes of screen time, “too much moral ambiguity” when of course this makes movies better and ROTJ was chocked full of the same thing).
This is not to say the prequels were great. From the perspective of someone who can evaluate them in the wider context of cinema, rather than just the context of previous Star Wars products or loathsome “geek culture,” of course they had real problems - chiefly, the lack of Marcia Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan cleaning up George Lucas’s often non-human-sounding dialogue as they did in the originals, the fact that the first movie got too interested in how well they pulled off the Jar Jar CGI and ended up overusing an annoying and pointless character as a result, and the lack of stakes in action scenes where we already know who is and is not going to survive.
But, the prequels clearly had the bones of great Star Wars movies. The basic outline of the plot and characters could have been something on par with the originals, if the scripts had gone through three more drafts with someone like Kasdan and maybe if someone like Spielberg had been hired as a director to counterbalance Lucas’s worst impulses. That’s, I think, why intelligent people are the most frustrated with them. They very much are not movies like Avatar or Transformers that can only be explained as totally devoid of value and successful only because moviegoers are stupid, or Marvel-type movies where safe and predictable mediocrity is the strategy. These are movies that tried big things, mostly failed, but ended up as C- to C+ films with the skeleton of an A film struggling to get out. The things that didn’t work were things that survived into the final product because George Lucas self-financed three billion-dollar films that let him do whatever he wanted no matter what audiences or studios thought, as if he were making an indie picture in his backyard. That’s supremely interesting even if it’s not a good movie. And, of course, despite people who insist these are the worst movies of all time, they have their good points - the set and costume design in TPM is absolutely phenomenal, it’s one of the most visually interesting blockbuster movies ever made; the duel scenes in all the films are all very well done as choreography if you can get past the lack of emotional stakes; they have good musical scores and perfectly fine performances from Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and other actors who are generally recognized as being talented in whatever project they do.
The Abrams movies really have none of this going for them, other than lucking into a talented cast (which is mostly wasted). There’s nothing interesting about the way TFA or RoS are shot; Abrams is one of the worst directors at the technical aspects of filmmaking working on big-budget cinema today, certainly far worse than George Lucas at understanding camera movement, the use of color, blocking, etc. Instead of going for a big, different type of story and risking failure, these films slavishly copy the original trilogy as closely as possible without just being an outright remake. Characters have no arc at all, act in ways that can only be explained if you assume they watched the original movies on DVD, and never bother to explain why two tiny fleets fighting each other in remote space is supposed to matter.
Last Jedi tried to fix a lot of this and was clearly the better movie as a result, though it was still somewhat hemmed in by where TFA left off. And the backlash to it from online trolls scared Disney out of ever allowing someone to consider making a challenging or risky Star Wars product ever again. (I maintain that this was not from “Star Wars fans” - which is a meaningless description, this is the most popular film series of all time, everyone is a “Star Wars fan” - but from the same people who have problems with the slightest intellectual growth in their entertainment, or the presence of women, in every media franchise, and Disney just chose to listen to them because they can’t tell the difference).
Rogue 1 was “challenging and risky”. The Mandalorian is “challenging and risky”. The Last Jedi was not.
It’s like watching SNL now compared to SNL in the 70’s. Sure the sets and the titles and everything was much cheaper back then, but the original cast was only seven players plus a guest so everyone was much easier to keep track of. Today there are just way too many players that some barely get a mention in the whole episode. Too many to focus on, although they still come out with some great skits now and then. So it is with Star Wars; in the original movies there were three main characters and a few peripherals. In the sequels there are those same three plus about fifteen more. Too many to keep track of. What did Finn and Poe do again? What exactly was Rey’s journey? I think Kylo Renn was the only really memorable character but that’s about it.
Now having said that, I don’t think the sequels should be retconned away. Let them stand. They told their story, even if it wasn’t a particularly compelling one. Maybe it’s possible that after 44 years, we really just don’t care that much about Luke Skywalker anymore. And if we do, fine, let Sebastian Stan take over the role in the Mandalorian as mentor to Grogu, but the reason the Mandalorian worked is it felt like a new story in an old universe and wasn’t so focussed on the Force per se. it was so well done; this would appear to the future of Star Wars, in serial form. Plus ten hours of a series is much bigger than a three hour movie and with the Volume, they can set the story literally anywhere now.
According to Padme, SHE couldn’t be with anyone. She never explained why aside from “I’m a Senator.” The rules were not, to say the least, well explained.
“Return of the Sith” has no apparent narrative similarity to the Iraq War.
George Lucas made some great movies back in the 70s but he has a history of rather dubious claims regarding what he meant to do with his movies; I don’t for an instant believe he intended Star Wars from the start to be a nine-part story with “Star Wars” as episode IV. That story, to say the very least, grew with the telling.
My recollection is that the ever cantankerous Harrison Ford said that the only way he’d come back to the character is if they promised to kill Han off.
I swear, that silly statement is what killed the entire ST. This seems to have forced them into the conceit that each movie would be a coda for each of the three main heroes. And in the process they ruined them all.
Middle aged guy who grew up with the original trilogy here. I strongly disagree. The prequels and sequels most certainly had room to provide the same emotional experience that the original trilogy did. They just failed to do so. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, The Mandalorian did just that. The prequel trilogy at least attempted to do so. Episodes VIII and IX didn’t even try.
RotJ with lots of moral ambiguity? We must have watched different versions of the movie. Luke and crew (Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando, R2, C3PO) were the good guys. Palpatine and Jabba + his henchmen were the bad guys. Vader was on a redemption arc, starting off as a villain and returning to being a hero with his sacrifice at the climax of the film. That’s it. Where are you seeing moral ambiguity? ETA: Given how Boba Fett turned out in The Mandalorian, there is some retconning of moral ambiguity, but that’s about it,
We did know going into the prequels how things would end up, and that the bad guys would win. Lucas had to do the best he could with that restriction, so I cut the prequels more slack on that count than I do the sequels, which had no such restrictions going in.
The Marvel movies, IMHO, weren’t about safe, predictable mediocrity. I point this out not to sidetrack the threat into Marvel movies, but only to point out that we are. probably coming to our evaluation of the various Star Wars movies from very different perspectives.
Episode VII did have a lot similarities to ANH. IMHO this is a good thing, and made VII the best movie of the sequel trilogy. There were good options for VIII and IX going forward, Johnson just chose to go a different way, and Abrams was stuck with that for IX.
The Mandalorian, was / is challenging and risky, but not in the same way Episodes VIII and IX were. Instead the challenge was could Disney win back the fans that didn’t like the sequel trilogy by going back to something that was more recognizably Star Wars. They succeeded admirably with that. Should Disney have decided against going back to a more classic Star Wars feel, on the grounds that they should instead focus on “intellectual growth”? Maybe so, but I see nothing wrong with going back to the same well again if it’s been a proven success.
This was a big part of the problem as well. The OT was, when we get down to the basics of it, about the adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han as a group of friends who grew together. The sequels seemed like the adventures of Rey in one thread, the adventures of Poe in another thread, and the adventures of Finn in yet a third. They never did come together as a cohesive group like Luke, Leia, and Han.
Agreed. The PT shows that the Jedi are sort of fundamentalist, bureaucratic and largely clueless but it doesn’t do anything at all to paint them as evil or even ambiguous. They call out the atrophy of the institution but there’s not really any moral decay. There’s no traitors other than Anakin. They aren’t oppressors. They aren’t cavalierly causing a lot of collateral damage to innocents. They are very clearly still good, but they are a organization and not a small number of plucky individuals.
So that it’s clear where I’m coming from, here’s the order I currently rank I-IX + The Mandalorian.
V,IV,Mandalorian,VI…VII,III,II…I…IX,VIII
Your problem is taking anything Lucas says at face value. The guy has a long history of vomiting a lot of revisionist history about SW. At different times he’s claimed that the entire broad plot line of the PT was known when he was writing the OT. And then he turns around as tells you it was topical to what was happening in the 90s. Both can’t be true. Lucas wants to sound socially conscious and like he’s got something profound to say in his films, whether that fits with reality doesn’t really matter.
I would go like this and will also use multiple dots to indicate the big gaps.
VI, V, VII, Mandalorian, IV…III, VIII, II…, IX, I
I loved the Force Awakens and still can love it even knowing the two sequels were disappointing. It was better than IV and basically an equal to the original movies. Crying shame they blew it.
Mandalorian is also up there.
It was better than Star Wars?
It was basically a reboot of Star Wars.
So now they’ve got a Boba Fett TV show.
What?