I hate the prequels to Star Wars(although Episode III has a few moments). My question, though, is about what it good about the prequels. What things were successful despite Lucas?
I know most of these aren’t things Lucas did well, but rather things that turned out well by overcoming Lucas’ idiocy.
I’ll start:
The music - Williams contributed well, especially episodes I and III. Episode 2 felt like a rehash of old music.
Casting Ewan McGregor - He’s the only one who can push through Lucas’ crap to try and give a performance. He was well cast.
That light-saber battle between Obi-Won and Darth Maul. 40 seconds of amazement in two hours of crapola.
4.** Ian McDiarmid and Christopher Lee** - He didn’t really cast McDiarmid, so that credit goes to Richard Marquand(who, I believe overruled Lucas on that casting). However, Lucas did let McDiarmid act some. Casting Christopher Lee, though, was a good decision. If only they let him have some time on screen.
What have I missed? Everything else is lame, boring, or stupid in those movies. What else did he get correct?
The slow creep of the designs for classic Star Wars uniforms and spacecraft. As the Clone Wars went on things looked more and more like the Star Wars we grew up with.
I don’t know the prequels super-well. I’m a huge fan of the OT, and I’ve seen them a million times each, but I never obsessed over the prequels, so I don’t really hate them or love them.
I liked TPM in the theater, and then thought it was crap when I re-watched it a few years later.
I hated AOTC in the theater, and then liked it upon re-watching a few years later.
I absolutely loved ROTS in the theater, and have been afraid to re-watch it.
That all being said, I agree that the best thing that Lucas did was cast Ewan McGregor. His scene where he realizes Anakin is a cockhole and shouts “YOU WERE MY BROTHER!” is epic.
I think pretty much any scene where Jedi are doing their Jedi thing is pretty sweet – unlike the original trilogy where we only get a glimpse of what a Jedi is capable of, in the prequels we get a look at some fully trained, experienced Jedi doing their thing in their prime. That stuff was fun to watch.
And then Jar-Jar would show up and I had to stab someone in the face. Less cool…
The visual design is superb. Really, Lucas is just a geek like the rest of us, only he’s a movie geek and not a computer geek. He’s all about the pictures. When he can let the action and pictures tell the story, he’s fantastic. Sure, his dialogue isn’t too good. I’ve heard horror stories of his ham-fisted attempts to direct people - not because he’s a bad guy like Cameron, but because he simply doesn’t appear to have any real idea of what to do or what to aim for.
But when he can show… Damn!
Remember that scene in RotS? You knwo the one - Anakin sitting alone in the Jedi Council room, Padme looking out her window. Nobody says anything, but between the dafing daylight and the agony written (subtly) on his face, you can see the sheer torment he’s under and the terrible choice he’s presented with. Should he obey some abstract idea, when it may cost him everything and means supporting an utter dick*? Or should he support a man who is like a father to him and try to save his love?
It’s a powerful scene.
*Mace Windu. No, he’s not evil, but he he’s a jerk for no reason. If he hadn’t been such a jackass, Anakin would probably have chosen the Jedi. They almost drove him into the arms of Sidious, because they couldn’t get past their own theology enough to be human. Anakin cares about people - not ideas. Sidious understood that and in his own twisted way adored Anakin. Yoda and Windu did not and couldn’t be bothered to spare anything to show they cared about Anakin personally, if they ever viewed him as anything more than a threat.
I consider the character of Mace Windu to be a really powerful creation. He’s a hero, but a really Tragic one: he’s brought down by a small-but-unaddressed character flaw to an unjustified bad end - but one he made for himself.
Personally I like ROTS quite a lot and think it has some great moments. The concert scene between Anakin and Palpatine is one of the best talking scenes in all six films. The hunting of the Jedi sequence is beautifully shot. And I liked the final scenes which tie the prequels to the original trilogy. AOTC is also decent especially for the first 45 minutes with Obi-wan becoming an interplanetary gumshoe. TPM is a real mess but the climactic lightsaber duel is great, perhaps the best in the entire series.
Well, the reason the prequel trilogies were huge box office successes is that Lucas understood what people came to his movies for and saw that they got plenty of it. He delivered plenty of action, adventure, spectacular special effects, epic space battles, light saber duels, alien worlds (Coruscant was exactly how I imagined Trantor to be when I read “Foundation”) and Jedi derring-do vs. Sith vile treachery. What he did not and could not do is create movies that would answer all the problems of life, the universe and everything, incurring the wrath of fanboys forever, fortunately they are a small part of the total moviegoing public.
I thought that the Phantom Menace was like a Saturday morning cartoon for retards, and had to fight off sleep for the whole Revenge of the Sith (I almost walked out of the theater on that one. Which is rare for me). But Attack of the clones had some moments. What I dont understand, and I’m kind of highjacking the thread here is this:
most of the new trilogy is very childish in the way it treats its characters or their motivations (like, Anakin switching to the Sith because in a fucking stellar empire where they can grow clone armies, reconstitute limbs, and have all kind of fancy biotech stuff, they cant prevent a miscarriage. He HAD to use Darth Whatnot’s special skill in delivering babies…yarn.).
Still there’s a point in Aotc where Lucas reaches a point of utter brilliance. When Obiwan is captured by Dooku, Dooku tells him how some force is acting from the shadows to gain control over the Republic, and he, Dooku, has decided to sabotage the Republic lest it falls in sinister hands. Dooku appears here as a tragic hero (Windu can go stick his pimp laser in his ass, his character is only second to Jar Jar in lameness) that made the choice of destroying the very thing he has sworn to protect, sullying his name for ever, for a deed nobody would or could see as the rightful and heroic thing to do.
In short, he is the unsung hero of the new trilogy, one that will go down in history as a traitor. In opposition, it also shows the Jedis as an inept authoritarian body with their heads up their asses. This crucial plot point is essential and a lot of the things we took for granted in the new trilogy (and in the OT) have to be seriously reconsidered (like, maybe the Separatists are the good guys here and protecting a rotting Republic is not the heroic thing to do). This is the kind of stuff you look for in such epics (it’s almost as big as Darth Vader revealing he is Luke’s father)
BUT
Lucas ruins it all by having Dooku dismiss that two minutes later as an attempt to shake Obi Wan’s confidence. What was the fucking point for him of saying all that stuff if it is to dismiss it right after, even more so, why burn the cover of Darth Sidious (my this whole Darth thing is another stupidity the new trilogy was fond of)?
But , more importantly, Lucas had reached there a plot point absolutely fascinating, and it seems he was incapable of understanding what he had in his hands and just poured shit all over it. That’s the true regret I had in the new trilogy, that they reached such a high point and then, just tumbled down.
It’s a daunting task for me to find anything that was done right in those movies. Without the Star Wars mythos behind them, they are Uwe Boll style messes.
Jedi light saber and force fighting was a bright spot, though. Instead of seeing Luke struggle to move tiny objects, and he and Darth swatting each other like bind-folded kids at a pinata party, we saw genuinely fun tactical use of force powers and some wonderfully choreographed saber fights. During Darth Maul in part 1, and Yoda in part 2, I felt like a genuine kid again lost in the Star Wars magic.
I adore the RotJ lightsaber fight between Luke and Vader. That whole sequence, the atmosphere, the intonations of the Emperor’s voice, the music, the atmosphere again…
It may not have the acrobatics and choreograpahy of the Darth Maul fight, but it’s so much more dramatic and powerful.
Completely agree with you. The first trilogy was all about Wagnerian duels, the prequel trology sadly switched that for pseudo kung fu, it lost a lot there in terms of storytelling. The duels in the OT mirrored the dialogue and which Jedi was asserting his dominance over the other, in the PT, you can almost hear Yoda repeatedly click on the X button of his joypad.
Testify! I really liked Revenge of the Sith. TPM was a mess and AOTC was uneven but ROTS worked for me. It was a great bridge from the first two to the original trilogy. In fact when I first saw it, I came home after midnight and as soon as I we walked in the door , I put Star Wars into the DVD player. I felt like I had to watch it.
There’s good bits in RotS, I’ll admit. The biggest place it fails for me is the conclusion of the Kenobi-Vader duel, and the refusal to face up to the fact that Vader murdered all the little kids, but instead showing the ridiculous bit of him bowing to Palpatine instead.