Why is George Lucas despised by so many Star Wars fans?

Cafe Society
61

Irishman is talking about the original Star Wars movie and how Mos Eisley spaceport was changed utterly for the “remake”, not the pod race in the first movie of the prequels…

My nitpicks with the two series are:

  1. The time frames that would have taken place between the last of the prequels to the first of the originals. Obi-Wan is an old man already and there’s only supposed to have been, what, 20 years between them? Life on Tatooine must *really *be rough as he wasn’t all that old at the end of ROTS. He talks about the use of Obi-Wan and the clone wars like they took place a lot further back than 20 years prior.

  2. There are just too many inconsistencies in the plot lines. The one that comes to mind right now is from ESB: Luke leaves Dagobah to “save” Han and Leia. As he leaves, Obi-Wan says “That boy is our last hope” to which Yoda replies “No, there is another.” What? Did Obi-Wan develop Alzheimer’s when he transferred over to his “force” self? How did he forget about Leia?

  3. Why did they have to show Anakin as a young man? Obi-Wan was shown as his age when *he *“died”…

I know there’s more stuff that bugs me like that, but I can’t think of them right now.

I didn’t mind some of the SFX cleaning up for the original movies (some of the haloing was really distracting), but I really wish they’d left the songs in ROTJ alone! I liked Lapti Nek and Ewok Celebration and hated that they changed those. There was nothing wrong with those scenes that they needed to be changed. I found the whole celebration thing at the end of ROTJ to be overkill.
The only real change that I felt was necessary and really adds to the original trilogy was the scene in A New Hope where Han is chasing those stormtroopers down the hallways and turns the corner to see hundreds of them. This is how it was in the book and make more sense. It really makes his reaction that much funnier.

62

For my money, this is the crux of the thing.

Nobody is accusing the original movies of being particularly deep or “important,” but they absolutely work for what they are (the first two moreso than the third, of course).

They’re goofy, but they make sense internally and they’re brisk.

The prequels for the most part abandon any kind of logic in favor of juvenile comic relief, clunky spectacle, and stupid fanboy moneyshots.

Phantom Menace is really bad in this regard. There’s absolutely no reason for Qui-Gon and Obi Wan to stay on Tatooine as long as they did except to make us sit through all the pod-racing junk. Likewise, it makes no sense that they’d let Anakin’s mom rot on the planet except that it gives Anakin a reason to get more emo in AotC. And the only reason Obi Wan leaves Anakin to suffer a slow, torturous death in RotS instead of mercifully putting a lightsaber through his skull is because the latter needs to turn into Darth Vader and it was set up poorly.

That’s not even getting into all the goofy fanboy stuff like Darth Vader having built C3P0, who meets R2D2 because he belongs to Obi Wan (who fought Boba Fett’s dad, don’t you know) and Qui Gon but later also belongs to Darth Vader and Padme, and then wind up totally randomly belonging to Vader and Padme’s children decades later. And also Yoda knows Chewbacca.

I’m actually really, really surprised that they resisted the temptation to stick young Han Solo in there somewhere.

63

I stopped at TPM, so I didn’t see this part. Would someone explain how this connection was brought about in the movie?

64

“Knows,” as in, the Biblical sense of the word…

…I’d prefer to leave it at that.

65

Yeah, the prequel trilogy was really bad for making a galaxy seem really small. In a civilisation spanning light-years, if you can’t even even hide from someone without running into their step-brother, you really suck. There’s no reason why Anakin couldn’t have come from some other backwater planet without making it Tatooine.

66

The Wookiees show up in the third movie. They visit and talk to the Jedi, and are against the Trade Federation rebellion. Then they are attacked by the Stormtroopers when they turn on all the Jedi.

That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by unnecessary connections. There’s no reason for there to even be Wookiees in the first three movies. I mean, it’s not like we see every alien race that exists in the Star Wars universe. Similarly, why was that green alien kid in the Pod race on Tatooine, and was he Greedo, or merely a Greedo race? See, Greedo worked for Jabba, and Jabba had his home on Tatooine, but there’s no reason to think that Jabba only hired Tatooine thugs. I sorta figured Jabba for a more widespread kinda guy, with various activities on numerous planets across the Galaxy. So he has a diverse group of bounty hunters and thugs from across the Galaxy, that just happen to hang out at his place at various odd times when they aren’t working jobs. Or maybe Greedo was a freelancer trying to get some good will from Jabba. Whatever, the point is there is no reason to assume that Greedo was born and raised on Tatooine, he could easily have been an immigrant or passing through just like Solo. So why was there one of his race there on Tatooine?

You know, I’m surprised, too.

I get that OpalCat is an injoke, can you explain how JarJar is one?

Yes.

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While true in general, and that’s all part of what I’m listing as connections, in that specific case it does make some sense for the story. There has to be a reason that Obi-wan parked Luke with his uncle and Darth Vader didn’t bother to go looking for him. Having Vader not be aware he has a son helps, but it hurts that Luke and everyone else knows that Luke is a nephew, not a son, and that his father was Anikan. So the only way that can work is that Vader has a strong reason to not go anywhere near Tatooine. Thus, the trauma of his mother’s death at the hands of the Sandpeople. Bingo, now Vader never wants to hear the name “Tatooine” again in his life, unless it is in the sentence, “The next planet on the list for demonstration of the power of this Death Star is Tatooine.”

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Another seconded here. A movie can be great just because it’s well-made entertainment. I think Titanic and Pirates of the Caribbean are great movies. Heck, I think Dodgeball was a pretty good movie.

Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back were well-made entertainment. The other movies in the series were poorly-made entertainment.

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In a civilisation as large as the Galactic Empire, simply knowing someone is of the dominant species and knowing their father’s name shouldn’t be enough to go on. In the US alone, there are 50,000 people named “John Smith”. Obviously “Anakin Skywalker” is probably a comparatively less common name, but this is a galaxy of thousands of inhabited systems, some of which have multiple inhabited planets, some of which have high population densities. And Tatooine isn’t the sort of planet where everyone is on the census.

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I don’t mean to snip so much from your original post but, I would like to use this example.

Jar Jar actually plays a pivotal role in the story - and he has to be (for the purpose), this somewhat bewildering moron whom through chance, is over-appreciated by Padme (Senator) and thus, in a undeserved position of “power”. In her absence, he is the numbskull who, influenced by words of Palpatine, puts forth the motion in the senate to grant the Chancellor special powers, through which Palpatine creates the clone army.

I can see the validity in the complaints about style, screenplay, etc. It is a matter of taste in the end. I do think these movies touch a sensitive nerve in most, so there is a little too much nitpicking - however I am not about to claim Lucas is a good director, screenwriter or anything more than “I had a good idea and ran with it”.

However, many of the complaints about the prequels so far are that, they were forcedly flooded with tie-ins to the originals (IV-VI), and that there was no reason for this person, this character, that race, etc.

If you read the backstories, books and other novels based on this universe created by Lucas and pushed along by many, you would see the significance in most (not all) the characters and situations.

Another example: You can’t take Alec Guiness out of the originals. But you also can’t make Obi Wan older in the prequels, because he is supposed to be a padewan. Yes, not enough years have passed for him to be that old in Episode IV. No, you can’t explain it. Those are just things that couldn’t be helped. In reality, Alec Guiness was too old for that part.

The problem with movies like Star Wars, is not the movie or story itself (IMO), its the intensity with which people analyze them. Example: The Matrix. If you overanalyze it, its dumb. If you just watch it for what it is (a movie), its great fun.

Can’t we all just get along?

Did I mention…I liked the prequels!

71

I agree Jar Jar had a role, but it seems Lucas was aiming for “well-meaning, lovable, but not very bright” and what we got was “an annoying, interfering idiot nobody in their right minds would want to be seen with, let along grant a position of power”.

72

I actually thought that the overall plot of the prequels was excellent. The emperor grabs power during a war, but the surprise is that he is actually in control of both sides. As soon as the Clone Wars began, there was absolutely nothing the Jedi could do. Whichever side wins, they lose. I thought that was great. I actually liked that the stormtroopers were clones. It makes sense given the strengths and weaknesses of a droid army as we saw in Phantom Menace (massive numbers of soldiers that you can keep fabricating indefinitely, but they can be shut down from a control center).

The problem is basically everything else, including how Lucas chose to implement the overall plot, and with just plain sloppy filmmaking technique.

Let’s start with Phantom Menace.

When do we learn Qui-Gon Jinn’s name? It isn’t until the tongue-grabbing scene at Akanin’s house on Tatooine. Seriously. What has happened so far in the movie up to that point? They’re ambushed on the trade federation ship, stow away to the planet surface, meet Jar-Jar, meet the rest of the Gungans including their leader, take a sub to Naboo city, meet the queen, escape from the city, and end up on Tatooine. There was plenty of time to give his name, all you have to do is have Obi-Wan say “Master Qui-Gon” instead of “Master”, or he could introduce himself by name to the Gungan leader, or the the queen. This is just sloppy filmmaking, and there is no justifiable reason for it.

Now let’s skip ahead to Attack of the Clones.

The first scene in the movie is an assassination attempt on Padme. After this she tells the chancellor and some high ranking jedi that she thinks Count Dooku is behind it. They pooh-pooh her concerns - “Oh no, he was a Jedi and would never do that”. Her response is - literally - to pout and say “Well I think Count Dooku is behind it”. A few issues here:

[ul]
[li]You’re going to pout? Seriously? You are a Senator and you used to be a Queen. You sound exactly like a 5 year old that’s told to eat her broccoli.[/li][li]Who the heck is Count Dooku anyway? We’ve never heard of him before.[/li][/ul]

Dooku evidently has a lot of backstory - he was on the council, he was trained by Yoda, he himself trained Qui-Gon. This all was revealed in some “Tell, not show” scenes. These things should have been shown to us in the previous movie.

There was a scene where Dooku is trying to convince Obi-Wan to join him by saying he’s found out that the Sith are secretly in control of the Republic. I actually liked this scene, but it could have, and should have, been MASSIVELY better. If the Dooku character had been developed properly from the start, he could actually have fooled the audience. The Sith really are in control of the Republic, after all.

They should have had Dooku in the first movie, and played him like a straight-up good guy who is having to wage this war because he was shut down by the Jedi from taking action by conventional means.

Instead, it was telegraphed from the very start of the movie that he was eeeevil. And they even came right out and told you at the end that the war is fake. This should have been a huge reveal on the level of “No, I am your father”. Instead it was a throwaway line at the end of the movie to drive home the fact that Dooku was eeeeevil.

The way that Dooku and the Clone Wars were handled is my number one gripe with the prequels. There are plenty of other things wrong with them, but if they’d handled Dooku and the war correctly then the other problems would be a lot easier to overlook.

73

So I guess to “fit in” here I need to say:

The prequels were the worst movies since Plan 9!! They made Gigli look like Citizen Kane! George Lucas should be shot, burned, chopped up and his body fed to alligators!!

Is that better?

74

I’d seen the original movies and liked them well enough for what they were, but had no deep attachment to the series and didn’t have any particular expectations regarding the prequels and didn’t rush out to the theaters to see them.

I’ve caught all 3 on HBO over the years and all I can say is, my god those movies are terrible. There are so many valid criticisms that others have listed that I won’t even mention them, but I think the biggest flaw was that the characters’ actions and motivations make absolutely no sense. The example of this that to me sums up everything is when Anikin finally goes bad in the 3rd movie. I don’t remember the situation exactly, but ostensibly he is torn between trusting the Jedi or the Emperor, who says that the Jedi are traitors or something. So basically he is a confused, impressionable, guy who is a bit of a hot head who doesn’t know who to believe, but isn’t really evil. Fast forward a bit, Anakin decides to believe the Emperor and the next step is him committing the heinously evil act slaughtering children. What the fuck? That’s like if somebody convinced me dogs weren’t such great pets and I went out and started torturing and murdering puppies. It doesn’t make any sense.

75

Like a lot of films made in the 1970s and early 80s, the original Star Wars movies were pretty cheesy, but they were also quirkily endearing, and there was a great dynamic between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. The special effects were cool, not completely over-the-top, and it had maybe the most memorable movie villain of all time (Darth Vader.) There was a lot of interesting story material that could be developed into an “expanded universe,” as in the case of hardcore fans and RPG people, and for everyone else, they were just fun and entertaining movies.

The prequels have none of that fun, swashbuckling element that the originals did. There was no equivalent to the Han Solo bad-boy character, who provided a lot of the comic relief and the “cool” factor of the originals. And everything was just so goddamn plodding, heavy-handed and overly serious. As standalone movies, they are merely really shitty space-fantasy films, with lousy acting. As Star Wars Prequels - they are a huge, huge disappointment.

People were expecting something great, and they were let down.

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The novels et al. aren’t in the movies and so can’t be used to explain their shortcomings.

I don’t mean to nitpick but that just makes absolutely no sense at all. “Star Wars” was the first movie written and made, not the fourth, and established Obi-Wan Kenobi as being at least 45 years older than Luke Skywalker. There’s nothing said in that movie, or in the next two movies, that requires any deviation from that premise. There was no reason Obi-Wan Kenobi had to be in his early 20s at the commencement of “The Phantom Menace.” Nothing in the established CINEMATIC backstory necessitates that. Lucas chose to make him that young, and thus contradicted the preceding movies. He could have chosen to write the prequels differently to make the ages work.

I mean, I’m not even all that worked up about it; if you just assume Obi-Wan was a young-looking guy early on and aged fast living out in the desert you can pretty easily construct an excuse for it anyway; he was, say, 25 in Phantom Menace, 38 in Sith, and by Star Wars was 58 and looking 70 because he was living on Tattooine and was sort of depressed about helping to bring down the Republic. There, that was easy. But what I won’t buy is that Lucas HAD to do it that way. Why? He could have just made Obi-Wan 40 years old in “Phantom Menace.”

77

Took the words right out of my mouth.

The timeline of the prequels bugs me for pretty much the reasons that FalconFinder named. People seemed to have aged a lot in just twenty years and talk about the fall of the Republic like it’s something that happened a lifetime ago.

Aside from Obi Wan, you have Yoda, who between RotS and Star Wars goes from badass bouncy ball Jedi to barely mobile crone.

The short timeline sort of works with Palpatine having just dissolved the Senate at the beginning of Star Wars, but it’s clunky otherwise.

Introducing us to Anakin when he was an outrageously annoying nine-year-old (or whatever) was another one of those choices to pander to the seven-and-under crowd that was unnecessary and really ill-advised when taken with the whole romance with Padme thing, which is, frankly, really gross.

78

You know, I think that this is the bottom of most peoples’ complaints. We can forgive a lot of other stuff, but TPM, at least, was BORING. And annoying, and had unlikable characters. But its greatest sin is that it was boring. The only reason for watching any of the Star Wars movies was entertainment, they had no Great Message (or none that I could see) and no cultural value. They were just fun to watch, for the most part. Most of the time I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a sci-fi (as opposed to a science fiction) movie, but I took my younger brother to see A New Hope when it first came out, and I enjoyed it as much as he did. He was about 11 at the time, male, loved SF, and loved movies, so he was the prime target audience.

Just a little bit of thought and effort could have transformed the prequels from movies that are awesome in their horridness into movies that are just plain awesome. I don’t know why Lucas couldn’t be arsed to make that effort, or to farm out some of the more tedious stuff that he didn’t want to bother with. I can only guess (and I’m not about to research this) that he had surrounded himself with yesmen, who validated his every passing whimsy by assuring him that this was the most incredible idea ever thought up and the audience would eat it up.

79

You know, it just occurs to me (and remember, the only prequel I saw was TPM, so I don’t really know the details of L&L’s birth and childhood) that if L&L had been put in suspended animation, either just before or just after birth, for a couple of decades, the storyline and timeline would have worked out better. Vader would have no idea that L&L had been conceived, and much less any idea that they were alive and active when the main storyline started. This would solve the problem of the ages of Vader, Obi Wan, and Yoda. Of course, since Yoda was whatever species he was, it might be normal for that species to be in rude good health right up to nearly the end, when they go downhill at an incredible pace. It doesn’t solve the problem of Luke’s guardians, though. How old were they supposed to be?

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Actually, all you really need to do is not wildly misrepresent what other people are saying.