Correct, to a point. But those first two movies were a long time ago. Lucas was a promising filmmaker when he made an homage to the cheesy Saturday morning serials.
Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to happen. Lucas fell in love with the technology to the point where he abandoned the first rule of storytelling: be true to the story. When he “fixed up” Episode IV to the point where Han no longer shot first, he lost my respect.
True enough, but we sometimes shake our heads in sadness because they’ve lost the magic that made them great.
An artist can never please pedantic nerds, it will never happen. George was screwed from the git go. There’s a reason William Shatner wrote a book titled* Get A Life!*. Hell, Tolkien is lucky he’s dead.
As a casual fan, the prequels for me were just unengaging. I didn’t really care about the characters because they didn’t seem “real”. The “acting” was awful, but apparently that is what Lucas wanted.
The special effects while very good overwhelmed the story. The humor was forced and dreadfully unfunny. Christopher Lee was wasted and the only character I found interesting was Palpatine.
Lucas has said that now that Star Wars is finished, he can focus on smaller projects that he would have preferred to be working on. So far, I haven’t seen anything.
As far as the Force goes, I look at it this way. It’s like having charisma. If you have a lot of charisma, you have a lot of friends. But having friends doesn’t GIVE you charisma. It’s just a sign that you have charisma. The more charisma, the more friends. Now, just think that charisma is the Force and friends are midichlorians.
Switch that. Charisma is midichlorians, and friends are the force. Everyone has the ability to be charismatic (just like everybody has midichlorians) some just have more than others and can use it to get friends (use the force).
I didn’t like the prequels at first, but taking all 6 parts into a giant saga the “dullness” of the prequels had to happen. I actually like how the first three movies are set up (again in relation to the whole saga). There are many small things explained in 4-6 via 1-3…
You need the boring politics stuff to get a sense of how the rebels in 4-6 operate as opposed to the Galactic Empire, don’t forget Leia was on a diplomatic mission from Alderaan. Not to mention too, in the real world if you were gonna amass a grand army to stop a rebelling group of people you would have to go through a million and a half political hoops in order for this to happen (think going to the UN to stop Germany or something).
You need to show how little Ani is SO attached to his mother, and SO attached to anyone who shows him affection (as opposed to an absent father figure and an abusive slave owner) that he will do ANYTHING to keep them from getting hurt, and when they do (mom dying) he goes off the deep end knowing he has the power to stop it, but due to circumstances couldn’t. Learning how to stop death was another desperate attempt to keep someone with him forever If you think about it, that’s pretty damn damaging to anyone’s psyche. Not to mention the fact that throughout 1-3 they are saying he will bring “peace to the force”, and in 6 by killing the Emperor he actually DOES that, thus making him the true hero and not Luke.
The semi-unfortunate part is that Lucas released the best part of the whole series first, gave us a taste of that, and then threw the boring parts at us, tried to jazz it up by races, starfights, and cool lightsaber duels (Phantom has the best in the whole series IMO) and left us all more sad after our initial excitement.
I think once you’re at the point of arguing that a movie “needs” to be boring, you have to start asking yourself if the movie should exist in the first place.
Technically, you’re right. The first Star Wars came out about a week before Memorial Day 1977. However, due to movies like Star Wars, “Hollywood Summer” starts around mid-May and goes until Labor Day weekend.
Honestly, I am bored to tears by the orginial movies, but I can still sort of see how the later movies failed the fans. He took so very long to get back to the movies that people figured that they’d at least be good given how long the project dragged on. He dragged on so long that he ended up making fewer movies than initially planned (at least that was a common complaint that explained their cancellation.) Lots of time for practice makes perfect with the movies that would actually be made, right? And then the movies finally came out…yeah.
If he had merely spent this phase of his career making a bunch of movies that weren’t anywhere near as good as Star Wars, that would be one thing. But to do so when you’re supposedly making more Star Wars movies, and in the process bastardizing the whole franchise is something else.
The first ones were aimed at guys in their 20’s or so, and the new ones were aimed at seven-year-olds, complete with fart jokes. And then Lucas has the gall to pretend that he was only trying to make movies for grade schoolers all along. I’ve seen some of the early drafts online, and it’s quite clear he wasn’t writing for kids (or even to make it comprehensible to kids).
Shatner’s book was ironically titled. It was actually about Shatner’s attempts to understand the Trek fan base and to connect with it, not disavow it. Hell, Shatner wrote several Star Trek novels in which Kirk was resurrected and had many adventures with Captain Picard. Shatner seriously can’t understand why, if he could bring back Kirk for the novels, then why can’t J. J. Abrams put him in the next Trek movie? I don’t know if it’s greed, because whatever Nimoy gets, Shatner covets, but he’s proving himself to be the ultimate fanboy.
TPM was so bad that I couldn’t even watch the other two movies.
Episodes IV-VI were FUN to watch. Sure, they were sci-fi, as I define it (not good SF, but more like space opera). The science sucked. They had the Mystical Force to explain anything that needed a real explanation. Most of the dialogue was painfully bad. But the movies were fun to watch, and I felt energized after watching them.
I was very excited about seeing TPM. In the theater, though, I winced and shuddered at the acting and dialogue. I could not lose myself in the story.
I will not mention Jar Jar Binks. There is no such creature, and never has been, and I WILL NOT remember him any longer. And I certainly don’t want to chance encountering this nonexistent item again.
Suppose George Lucas had been hit by a truck back in 1982. His filmography would consist essentially of the following: THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Raiders of the Lost Ark (I’m leaving out his executive producer credits) - he’d be remembered as one of the lost giants of movie making who was struck down in his prime.
Now suppose somebody else had come along and bought the rights to Lucas’ estate. And they had gone on to make Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which were serious drop-offs from the earlier works in those series). Suppose this guy used Lucas’ estate to make Howard the Duck and Willow. Suppose he went back and re-edited Lucas’ early classics to make them “better”. Suppose after twenty years he decided to milk the cow to death and make a new Star Wars series, which he claimed was the real trilogy, and make Indiana Jones fight the Commies.
And that’s what actually happened. The only difference is that the guy who trashed George Lucas’ legacy was George Lucas himself.
Besides Lucas wasn’t all that in the first place. Star Wars didn’t start the golden age of science fiction movies - it ended it. It made the genre about cool special effects rather than cool ideas and turned science fiction into sci-fi. So even at his peak, Lucas was entertaining but never thought-provoking. Lucas is a fallen Stephen Spielberg.
I liked the prequels, see the point in the story being told (even Jar Jar which I have distaste for but is necessary), and don’t really understand why everyone is so hell bent on hating it. Must be some sort of inner child disillusion or something.
I like the prequels - all of em. There, I said it.
Don’t forget for the 3 prequels everybody knew exactly how they would end - Darth Vader would be created from Anakin Skywalker. There was no surprise , we just did not know exactly how that would happen.
For the first 3 movies nobody knew what would happen. Of course for episode 5 I heard before I saw it that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. But even then some people said he was lying and it was not true.
I’m 51, and I was either about to be married or I was married when I first saw SW. So, I was an adult when I saw it.
TPM was just complete and utter crap. There’s no way around that. I think that a better director and writer could have made an amazing movie out of the same backstory. But that’s not what happened.