I liked all 3 of them too. I don’t think any of them were bad. But as I said above I didn’t go in thinking they were going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
I agree Hayden Christensen was not good for that role, he was too stiff. He is OK in other movies so he was just a bad choice. But since these are action movies I don’t expect to see great acting.
Actually, only really one ending if you think about it. Because Empire doesn’t really have an ending, in any sort of traditional sense of the word. Nothing’s resolved.
Really the only weakness of ESB (and in some ways it’s even a strength in itself) is that it doesn’t function as a standalone movie. But it wasn’t supposed to be, it’s supposed to be “Act 2” of the play (yeah, I know it’s labeled Act V but it’s act 2 of the “play”.)
But if A New Hope and Jedi didn’t exist, ESB would be unsatisfying because you wouldn’t be introduced to the characters or see their resolution.
My opinion of George Lucas is simply that he has proven himself a bad storyteller. How else can you assess someone who, in telling you a story, keeps saying, "oh, wait, did I say that? no, what I meant to say was this … " over and over again.
I think the prequels got better as they went along. I think episode 3 was definitely more enjoyable to me than episode 1. And I never saw episodes 5 & 6 until this year (please be kind - my parents “didn’t believe in movies” and I had to wait until I was an adult - then I waited until I was with a group of fellow geeks to do a movie marathon of 4-6).
As a geek girl, I have this to say. None of the romance in episodes 1-3 used would have ever allowed me to keep a straight face when Ani went in for the kiss. I would have laughed in his face and said “are you serious? that’s your best line?”
No doubt the romance was the weakest part of episodes 1-3. Lucas should have brought in someone else to write that part. But I think that was partly due to Christensen being so stiff. Lucas admits he can’t really do love scenes and we saw the result of that.
FTR, I don’t even think he should have done that. The improved effects are jarring, and just don’t fit with the look of the rest of the film.
For this Star Wars fan, the biggest thing for me is the “kiddifying” of the series as it went along.
There was a lot of humor in Star Wars and Empire that rose out of the characters and situations. C3PO and R2D2 are essentially an old married couple with a fussy prig for one half and an independent, somewhat rude, but very capable mechanic for the other. A little bit of The Odd Couple in space. Once you establish the characterizations, and give them a reason to be in the situations they are in, the humor arises naturally. The protocol droid gets caught in the middle of action he is in no way suited for, and the astromech gets to make fun of him the whole time. Han and Chewie (with a little help from Leia now and again) provide the rest of the humor. Pirates meet Princess. Scoundrels unwittingly get caught up in a noble cause. It works and it doesn’t feel forced or overly juvenile.
ROTJ introduced alien belching as humor (not once, but twice). Still, it wasn’t totally bereft of what appeared in the first two. I thought the initial scene where Luke, Han and the rest encountered the Ewoks worked pretty well - Han wanted to blast his way out, and C3PO found portraying a deity distasteful. Unfortunately, this was all within a framework that was much more contrived than the previous two films. Seriously, the rescue-Han-plot was sooo needlessly convoluted and patently ridiculous that I could have come up with a better plan. A shiny gold protocol droid on a commando mission? When everyone else is dressed in camouflage? It seemed as if there was no effort at creating plausibility within the framework of the story.
The prequels just continued that thread. Jar Jar Binks served absolutely no purpose aside from being slapstick humor. That’s it - that was his whole raison d’etre and he wasn’t even that funny to anyone older than 10 or so. The battle droids were just plain dumb (“Roger, roger!” Really?), and the Separatist leaders were so cartoonishly written as to be insulting to most fans’ intelligence.
And then there’s the story line. Events from A New Hope flowed pretty logically into Empire, and reasonably well into ROTJ. Taking all of this (even the obviously shoehorned Luke-Leia-Vader relationship), one could construct a back-story whose events flowed logically from Episode 1 into the events of A New Hope. It feels like, instead, Lucas came up with some ideas he liked (child Annakin, midichlorians, etc.), and then forced events to sort-of come together to lead into Episode 4, most of which seemed highly implausible within the confines of the over-arching story. Robot Chicken did a great send-up of this when they “re-created” the scene where Vader tells Luke he’s his father, and then spins the whole back-story ("…and I built C3PO") at which point Luke walks away and says something like, “Well, if you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m outta here.”
I’m not going to defend the first couple of movies as the greatest ever, but they were decent. The story hung together, the acting was serviceable (particularly by the time Empire came around), and there wasn’t a lot that seemed totally gratuitous. I can’t say that about the prequels, and I guess that’s my problem. It felt like Lucas got lazy.
carlb, this sums it up perfectly.
All the movies were rated PG except episode 3 which was PG-13 so I guess he wanted to make sure kids could watch them.
I am not at all bothered by the changes he made but maybe that’s because I view them as movies, not a way of life. 
I think that’s a little unfair and a bit of an excluded middle. It’s possible to love the movies without being obsessed, and to be disappointed with Lucas’s choices.
There’s a difference between making a film that kids can see, and aiming the film at kids in terms of tone and humor.
At any rate, the PG-13 rating wasn’t introduced until 1984, after the original Star Wars trilogy was released. A lot of films then rated PG would be PG-13 if released for the first time today (although perhaps not Star Wars, because in spite of the dismemberments and such it doesn’t have any cursing, sex, etc.)
Agreed! I think fans were expecting the series to grow up as they did. Lucas instead either never advanced or even dumbed it down.
Look at what Rowling did with the Harry Potter series. The first book was targeted at young children. It had very basic themes and characters. But as the fans aged Rowling had the series growing up too. More complex themes, storylines, darker characters. She did what the fans wanted her to do, take this whimsical fantasy world of my childhood and make it mature as I do.
Lucas, for some inexplicable resaon, chose to never mature his epic. He wrote Star Wars for 10 year-olds, they loved it, they turned 30, and he wrote the prequels for more 10 year olds.
Agreed. It can even still be funny, if your idea of comedy isn’t limited to belief-defying negative portrayals of characters (like “funny” incompetence or “funny” stereotypes).
To expand on what carlb said, there wasn’t a consistant villain on the same level as Darth Vadar throughout the prequels. Basically, Lucas created this “Prequel Bad Guy Action Pack” consisting of Darth Maul, Jango Fett & Son, Count Dokuu, General Greivous and Emperor Palpatine. The romance between Padme and Manaquin Skywalker was totally creepy and unbelievable.
And most importantly, the battles sucked. First of all, the Battle of Hoth and the Battle of Endor were some of the best choreographed battle sequences in movie history. The battles in the prequels were just commercials for a bunch of Hasbro toys.
I think a lot of the issues with the prequels trace back to Lucas taking back more control of the movies.
He wrote and directed Star Wars, then, handed the writing and directing roles off to others for Empire and Jedi. In the case of Empire (which many fans feel was the best of all of them), the screenplay was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, and it was directed by Irvin Kirshner.
Over the intervening years, Lucas expressed regret that he’d put so much creative control of the movies in the hands of others, and, when he finally went back to make the prequels, he decided to re-take that control. So, he was the primary scriptwriter, as well as director, once more. The problem was (and is): those aren’t his strong suits.
Even in the original Star Wars movie, the actors chided him for writing bad dialog (“you can type this, George, but you can’t say it”), and for uninspired direction (according to several of the actors, his direction usually consisted of “faster, more intense”).
In the prequels, you’ve got a ton of actors who have won awards for their work in other films. But, here, they’re put in films with poorly-written dialog, being asked to act in front of a green screen, against (digital) actors who aren’t even there, and they have to do all of this with a director who’s not great with people, and not very good at giving direction. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that the prequels, while technically breathtaking in places, seem to lack a spark of life.
Star Wars was the first time someone filmed an issue of *Planet Stories * with both a decent budget and an appreciation of why many people liked this kind of stuff. And it worked. The cantina scene was exactly like the kind of scene on Mars that Leigh Brackett wrote about. Star Wars was simple, it moved, and it all made plot, if not scientific, sense. I did get through the prequels, not that I ever want to see them again. Lucas seems to have zero respect for any audience who are not fanboys and fangirls. He shovels in the characters, the trivial ones getting equal time with the important ones. In the last movie especially, really important stuff, like how Obi wan and Yoda could go into the Force, gets tossed off in about a line. I think Lucas had been working on back story for the past 20 years, and had to cram it all in. The movies would have come out much better if someone had taken them away and cleared out the underbrush. TPM, by the way, sins less in this regard than the others.
Heinlein was smart enough not to write about the rise of Scudder. Lucas should have done episodes 7 - 9, and let some writers do 1 - 3.
I thought the prequels were okay. My complaints were that they didn’t fit my preconceived notions of what the stories were going to be, based upon how they were characterized from before, Lucas was too fixated on tying in characters that had no reason to be there, and there were stupid things that didn’t fit.
Differences from expectation: Midichlorians, Clone Wars refers to clone soldiers on one side of the battle all of one person, the portrayal of the decision to accept and continue to train Anikan by Yoda and the Council, the death of Padme during childbirth, Sith only coming in twos.
Unnecessary connections: Jengo and Boba Fett being involved, Anikan being the builder of C3PO, every loose end being tied up at the end of 3, including plans for the Death Star and the droids being given to the captain that owns them at the beginning of A New Hope.
Stupidity: The Pod Race (by children using self-built equivalents of cars), Jar-Jar being so incredibly pathetic, droid soldiers that are not scary or intimidating, trying to mix representative government with monarchy and coming up with an elected 17 year old queen (because, really, when you want level-headed political decisions, who better to turn to than a teenage girl?), Anikan saving the day by flying the fighter.
Similarly, the reedits to the first three wouldn’t have been bad if he hadn’t reworked essential details. For example, complaints against A New Hope largely boil down to two more minor annoyances and one big blunder.
Adding more size and scope to Mos Eisley, and making it busier, was an attempt to make it more of a large, busy port to fit the role it plays, given the crowdedness and diversity of the cantina. Okay, but then the scene where they are confronted by the Stormtroopers in the street, he puts too much digitally inserted that actively blocks the view of the main characters and their interaction. It’s an obstruction of the plot for no good reason.
Adding back in the exchange between Han and Jabba - it was interesting and mildly helpful to the story, but because the final conception of Jabba worked out to be an oversized slug, the blocking of the scene has one fatal element that just couldn’t be digitally avoided, so Han steps on Jabba’s back. That makes no sense, and shouldn’t have happened, but the best the animators could figure to do was shift Han’s path upward a bit. I would have tried to have Jabba turn a pirouette to stay facing Han, but that’s just me.
Greedo is a blind idiot who can’t shoot from 2 feet away. That one ruins one of the most important elements of Han’s character that the scene established. Han shooting first was iconic and necessary. Han shooting second makes him an impossibly good ducker. And Han doesn’t even have the Force on his side.
Well said.
That’s not what bugged me. The problem was not the results, it was the path to the results. I expected Padme to live and marry Bael Organa after Anikan went dark and became Vader. I expected a more believable path to the dark side for Anikan. I expected the Emporer to look horrible because of being incredibly old and corrupted by evil, not because he accidentally spilled blue Force electricity on himself. I expected the Clone Wars to be about lots of people being cloned, and the fighting to be over cloning. I expected Obi-wan to have taken on Anikan himself rather than taking him to the council. I didn’t expect Anikan to build C3PO. I didn’t expect Anikan to be a 10 year old superpilot. I didn’t expect Padme to be several years older than Anikan. I didn’t expect Luke and Leia’s mother to be a Queen. (Leia was a princess because her father was a prince under the emporer, so her mother could have been anyone as long as the prince married her or adopted Leia). I didn’t expect Boba Fett to show up at all, or the armor to be in this movie. A little comedy is fine, but I didn’t expect a clown. I didn’t expect a scientific explanation for why someone has more ability with the Force than someone else. I expected Vader to spend time* hunting down Jedi to exterminate them, not have them wiped out in one fell swoop by the Stormtroopers.
Maybe I’m a horrible judge of acting, because I see people complaining and I don’t see what they’re complaining about. But was it Hayden Christensen’s acting ability at fault, or Lucas’ direction? Because Lucas purposely directed for a stilted style. Hell, people were complaining about Natalie Portman in these movies. Natalie Portman!
That!
*Maybe not even shown in this movie trilogy, just the Jedi scattered and shows him wiping out one or two, then leaves the movie with the promise that his role for the Emporer is exactly that - Jedi head-hunter - and he sets of on that mission.
Nitpick: the podrace took place in Mos Espa, not Eisley.
(And I actually enjoyed the prequels, so I’ll keep out. As far as the re-package of the originals, I think it started out as fixing the the TECHNICAL aspects-as the film had faded and such. I will admit I enjoyed the ending song better-and I liked seeing the extended celebration of the Emperor’s death-I don’t think that was so much a change as just getting to see more of what was going on.)
Maybe it’s just because I read the books, so I know more of the backstories? I don’t know.
Not to mention recognizing them as bad movies without liking Star Wars.
Bijou Drains, you seem to be arguing from a false premise: that the prequels are good and the only reason that someone could dislike them is due to their familiarity with the original films. You’ve brought that up several times in the thread. You’re ignoring:
[ul]
[li]The terrible scripts. The prequels are packed with horrifically bad dialog. There’s hardly a line in those movies that the best actor in the world could deliver naturally.[/li][li]Even the best actor in the world wouldn’t give a great performance because Lucas intentionally tried to downplay the humans in his films and insist on emotionless, stilted performances.[/li][li]JarJar Binks was based on OpalCat and no one likes in jokes like that.[/li][li]Terminal pacing problems. How long did we need to see the pod race? Why couldn’t back story be integrated naturally instead of slowly doled out in the most boring ways possible? Why does nothing happen for the first half of Clones? Someone tried to defend these things as necessary earlier in the thead while overlooking the fact that they were done poorly.[/li][li]An awful lot of “Well, it’s in the script!” plotting: the stories of the movies run on coincidence and people doing certain things just because they’re in the script rather than as an outgrowth of their characterization.[/li][/ul]
It’s outside factors that would let someone enjoy the movies rather than cause people to hate them.
Just a small hijack - I find the prequels much more entertaining when they are dubbed in a language I don’t understand, without subtitles, of course. I can make up my own story and dialogue, which can be a great party game when accompanied by adult beverages.
Other than that, what everyone else said. Empire expanded on the first film and gave it all sorts of intriquing depth, and I hoped the trend would continue rather than drawing back and dumbing down. After the first two films, the Lucasverse seemed huge and potentially full of interesting things, but it turns out it’s really the size of your high school. Disappointing. Still, I don’t hate Lucas. It’s his sandbox, he can build whatever he wants. It just looked like it was going to be so much more.