I don’t get it. I saw VII, VIII, and IX in the theater. and I enjoyed every one. and yes, I saw the original trilogy when I was a kid too.
Please bring the EU back to canon please bring the EU back to canon please bring the EU back to canon
I agree. They all had flaws, but the original trilogy had some bad flaws as well. And the less we say about the prequels, the better. But I left the theater on eps VII, VIII, and IX happy. Can’t ask for much more than that.
Well, Opie Cunningham directed or produced it.
The original trilogy, especially Star Wars and Empire, are MUCH better movies than VII-IX. Saying “They both have flaws” is significantly downplaying the difference in quality. That said, XII-IX are usually fun, and are technically impressive and look great.
The prequel trilogy is just terrible. They’re not even visually impressive, often looking like soap operas.
Why bother? It’s not like anyone can un-see them or Disney will give back the $4 billion they made.
At best, they can try and make another trilogy to fill in the 30 years between Jedi and Awakens. You know - all that interesting stuff they alluded to in flashbacks and exposition.
And Frank Herbert rolls over in his grave.
I don’t think it really does. I will always love the original trilogy but my memories of those movies is clouded by nostalgia and youth. If you look at them objectively there are glaring plot holes, shades of incest due to incomplete plotting, cutesy crap like the Ewoks, and blowing up the same Death Star twice. They were never intended to be great cinema; they were fun, well made, and fresh.
So you can make new live-action and animated serieses based in a less craptacular timeline?
Return of the Jedi is definitely the weakest of the original films but A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back to me are almost “perfect” films upon a rewatch. Even if you erase Rise of Skywalker (pair it off against ROTJ) Force Awakens and Last Jedi are basically MCU popcorn films that will be forgotten in a decade much like the prequels basically became. They’re good but nothing in them stands out at all.
Hey thanks both of you, spoiler alert! I mean C’mon!!!
I couldn’t disagree more. The Prequels are bad in a lot of ways. Certain acting performances and the dialog generally is really bad. Like comically bad in spots and the love story is perhaps the only one which may not survive the “still a better love story than Twilight” meme. BUT, they are still better than the sequels by quite a lot. It introduces several great characters, has great action set pieces, and contributes a ton to the overall mythology in ways that don’t totally undermine the OG trilogy, Midichlorians notwithstanding.
The sequels are a fucking insult. I liked pretty much everything about Rey, minus the final reveal of course, and they got the aesthetic right with the practical effects but that’s where the positives stop. It’s alternately a heaping pile of shameless fan service and some of the most hamfisted bits of subversion I’ve ever seen. They gutted all three of the OG trilogy characters and frankly they should have just cut bait and made this trilogy about a totally new group of rebels, their insistence on making each movie a coda for each one left the plot with no where interesting to go. There’s no worldbuilding whatsoever, we learned nothing at all that made logical sense and they directly contradicted a bunch of the “rules” that were laid out by Lucas from the outset simply to expedite the plot.
Every time I think more about these sequels the more frustrated and disappointed I get. Retconning these movie out existence will probably make Disney a laughingstock but keeping them probably permanently kills the entire IP. I don’t know if there’s an elegant way to do it, and if they do do it they probably need to wait a decade or so, but I can’t say its out of the question.
Why not just start fresh with a new series of movies that takes place 300 years later or something?
Just because I feel a rant coming on…
Lightspeed skipping? FUCK YOU. One of the most foundational pieces of the “sci-fi” tech was how hyperspace worked and what it took to use it. You needed the navigation computer to plot the course for a time before you engaged it or else you risked death.
Han Solo: Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?
But then all of a sudden Poe can just drive the ship through a series of hyperspace jumps? Yeah, fuck that idiocy.
Also, tracking a ship through lightspeed? FUCK THAT TOO. How many close escapes were made in the first 6 movies using a well timed jump to hyperspace (after the appropriate calculations were made)? This is one of the reasons why there’s a rebellion in spite of the dominance of the Empire, because they can effectively hide due to the physics of the world. And no, this isn’t just some new magic technology that Galen Erso invents on a weekend. With this tech any future movie will basically be over in the first 15 minutes because if you can’t run and hide, you can’t have a underground rebellion.
And then they fucking run out of gas? That’s the big challenge that basically ends the rebellion? And to think people complained about the prequels’ focus on trade policy.
Yeah, I really, really hate these movies.
While I’m at it…
Jedi ends with the death of the Emperor. The destruction of the Death Star 2.0. The decimation of the Imperial Fleet. The salvation and death of the Empire’s main heavy in Darth Vader. Even TFA starts on Jakku where the final mop-up battle is fought and the Empire’s fleet is finally destroyed. By all accounts the Rebellion HAS WON. In both the Extended Universe and the new canon books the rebel alliance becomes the New Republic, the galactic government and the new power. There are pockets of resistance from both criminal elements and the remnants of the Empire, but the Republic is the main force to be reckoned with. Even the somewhat organized groups of Imperial insurgents aren’t strong enough to stand up against the full might of the Rebellion…they need to hide and bide their time.
Flash forward to TFA and suddenly the Republic is basically gone, wiped out in one fell stroke by another wildly overpowered super weapon. Total reboot. And frankly, this blow by the First Order is so decisive that the entire new rebellion is reduced to just a small handful of ships and they have not a single ally left? No place to hide, no one to help? Get the fuck out of here. Even in ANH when Alderaan is wiped out it’s a survivable dent in the rebellion’s strength because they are dispersed with bases across the galaxy. Yet in their zenith, 30 years after the fall of the Empire, they are able to be reduced to basically platoon strength in one strike?
Seriously, I can’t fathom how a supposedly intelligent group of adults convinced themselves that this was a reasonable plotline. And I can’t fathom how Dopers in this thread can defend these movies, how they can think they are somehow better than the prequels just because “sand is coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.”
The main issue with the prequels is not that they are often dull and plodding interspersed with some cool scenes, but that they turned Darth Vader from a great baddie to a whinny little kid and mopey adolescent who becomes evil almost at the drop of a hat. Yes, there were cool characters like a young Obi-wan, and there were some good plot elements here an there, but the core story just completely destroyed the image we all had of Darth Vader.
The recent movies did change the way the Star Wars universe operates, but restored to some extent the fundamental thing that people liked of the Original Trilogy, that there are good guys and bad guys, that you can tell them apart, and that the good guys can win even though they have no realistic chance of doing so.
//i\\
I always thought that they missed a chance for a really great character study.
They should have shown hints of a ruthless and cold side of Anakin even as a child. Then a gradual step by step progress to the dark side, led by ambition and a desire for power, with him justifying every step in his own mind, and slowly getting in deeper and deeper. That would have made the prequels worth watching.
Actually, the point where the series lost me was at the end of ROTJ when Darth Vader is ‘saved’ and shown in ‘heaven’ (as it were) along with Obi Wan. At that point the morality of the series was lost.
That continued in the prequels with an unconvincing attempt to show him as a good guy at heart. What’s a few million murders more or less anyway? It was like trying to portray Stalin as a good guy who just had an unhappy childhood, or something like that.
Maybe in retrospect—certainly confirmed by the prequels—but if the prequels had done a better job of giving us either a “gray” Vader, or in showing him as someone whose downfall did not contribute so directly to the rise of the Galactic Empire and the construction of the Death Star, he might have been shown to be worthy of that redemption arc. Because in ANH, the one instance of just straight up murder using the Death Star, Tarkin was the bigger bad, “holding Vader’s leash,” so to say.
So… a better crafted fall for Vader, coupled with his actions in the OT being more of a “fighting for the wrong side” variety, might have improved upon his redemption arc.
But, yeah, child murder, domestic abuse (against Pasme), and being a crypto-fascist by the time he was a teenager? Not cool.
The thing about the prequels is, just going off a back of the book summary kind of description, there’s a good story in there. Lucas just told it so ineptly.
But I didn’t feel that in retrospect, I felt it the first time I saw ROTJ.
It’s not much gone into but it was clear to me that the Republic and Resistance are not the same thing. The Republic and its fleet are a force that governs most of the galaxy, while the First Order rules a different part, and the two are in some state of war. The Resistance is a group of guerrilla fighters who fight the First Order from within the First Order’s territory. The destruction of the Republic fleet didn’t reduce the Resistance at all; they’re not the same thing.
Of course, that opens up any number of other questions. As fun as VII is, it really is just a soft reboot, not a logical continuation of Return of the Jedi. But to answer your question as to how intelligent adults could come up with it, it’s obvious; they knew it would please audiences and sell tickets. The point of The Force Awakens was to be a soft reboot, full stop. Whether it made any sense didn’t matter.
The prequels did NOT have cool characters; it barely had characters at all. Almost all the new characters - Qui-Gon Jinn and Padme Amidala being the worst examples - have no particular characterization. They’re flat, dull, have few distinguishing traits. The only traits they have are “good” and even that isn’t consistent; when Anakin tells Padme he just committed mass murder, she doesn’t recoil in horror, she just says words to the effect of “whaddya gonna do, people make mistakes, amirite? I still love ya, ya big lug!” That makes no sense; if Han Solo had told Leia he’d just slaughtered women and children, it would have destroyed her. She would have had him arrested. Or what’s Mace Windu’s character? He just says vague Jedi things.
The one “new” character who had something going on in terms of being identifiably a character was Anakin Skywalker, and as others have pointed out, Lucas blew it.
Yep. This may be the way to go. There are a ton of good stories in the EU. Get the authors to do a story treatment, then turn the script over to someone who can write a tight, coherent screenplay. Alternate between “Post-RotJ” New Republic (sans any characters from the past!) and Adventures of The Old Republic. New heroes! New villains! Ban Abrams from any country they shoot them in. If Sith, Skywalker, Palpatine or a dozen other references show up in the screenplay, you shoot the screenwriter’s dog.
Disney needs to make a complete, total public acknowledgement that they screwed the pooch with the sequels and beg forgiveness. To demonstrate their commitment to doing it right this time, Disney then cuts the cost of any pass to their various parks by 50% for 3 years. Then they torture and kill Abrams on Disney+.