To me, all the Star Wars movies can be explained very simply. Lucas doesn’t just make sci-fi movies, he also watches them and is influenced by them. The prequel movies had too much other-sci-fi influence (diplomacy, trade, technobabble, medicine, special effects) and not enough Star Wars (wisecracks, swashbuckling, against-all-odds battles, simplicity).
Examples: Star Wars. “We have just heard from the Emperor that he has dissolved the Council permanently.” Revenge of the Sith. “Let us cut away to an unnecessary hologram of the Emperor saying this himself, taking twice as long and fifty times the budget to accomplish the same thing.”
Empire Strikes Back. “Look, Luke’s injured. He’s floating in a thing full of stuff. We don’t know what it is called, but it looks medical. Ah, he’s better now.” Revenge of the Sith. “We need to invent some medical reason to explain why Padme died. What would sound convincing?”
Star Wars. “The Force is this thing, okay?” Phantom Menace. “The Force is created by these bacterial whatchamadoodles in your blood, blah blah blah, blood test, etc.”
My gosh, I just had a brainstorm! I know who could have been the perfect bad-boy character for the prequels: Prince Bail Organa.
Picture it: the “spare” to the “heir” of the royal house, Bail starts out as a young hellraiser, who when we first meet him is in semi-exile for his rakish behavior. Maybe the party encounters him on Tatooine, where he is having “a little trouble” with gambling debts, and takes the opportunity to go with them and get the heck out of Hutt space. He’s forced to grow up fast as danger and responsibility are thrust on him. By the third movie, his older brother is killed in a Separatist attack, and he assumes the throne and custody of the young Skywalker twins.
And think of the dramatic moment when Bail orders the murder of his other brother, Oderf Organa, after he finds out that Oderf was secretly making deals with the Emperor.
Am I the only one who also thinks that perhaps the prequels were bound to be at the very least, a disappointment-considering all that they had to live up to, with the hype and such?
(I don’t think you can deny, however, that John Williams did a kickass job again)
Personally, I think people expected a LOT from the prequels. Maybe too much. But that doesn’t excuse the the poor quality of the films on their own merits. These movies were just BAD, In no uncertain terms. Bad in plotting, bad in writing and bad in direction. Others in this thread have done a much better job in highlighting specifics than I can so I’ll leave it be. That doesn’t mean there weren’t moments to get excited for,(I thought Obi Wan’s duel with Boba Fett was good for example…) but overall the prequels did nothing but undermine the foundation established by the original films. They made every attempt to remove the wonder and fun and, more importantly, didn’t replace it with anything but badly reasoned politics and biology.
I really wish I could find the original article this appeared in but I can’t, so I’m just going to say it as I think it holds a great deal of truth. Circa 2002, 2003 I read an article comparing the LOTR films, (FOTR and TTT at the time), with the SW prequels and the seeming disparity between fans acceptance with both franchises. The article proposed that the LOTR films were providing what fans, and the general audience, were looking for that the SW films were lacking. A simple, but well executed, clash between good and evil. Grand and epic stories with, ultimately speaking, simple morals to follow. (Cheer the good guys, jeer the bad guys…) Now, I know and understand, that “Star Wars” had a slightly more complex code than that with Vader’s story of fall and redemption across the series but I think Lucas missed the boat on his understanding of what made the original films appealing in the first place.
Not at all. Hype of any medium, in my experience at least, leads to little more than more than a letdown. But again, I don’t think that excuses Lucas’s fundamental misunderstandings of his audiences expectations. Predetermined fans or otherwise.
John Williams might be the greatest movie composer of all time. It’s not his end where the ball was dropped.
I now actively avoid the prequels, and yes, I will admit to seeing all three in theaters. I also have 4-6 on DVD, but I specifically bought the double-disk ones that had the laserdisc transfer. Yes, it’s a shame that that transfer doesn’t scale properly to my HDTV and that the audio is, I think, only stereo, but it’s those or hooking up my VCR and watching the THX-remastered release on VHS from the mid-90s. (Honestly, if I could find those cheap in widescreen I’d consider buying them.) I am willing to watch Empire in the “improved” version, but that’s because the changes are so small overall as to be pretty much unnoticed. In fact, the thing that sticks out to me the most in ESB is that there’s a rather unneeded addition of extra footage during the start of the Battle of Hoth that wasn’t scored and thus breaks-up the very long composition John Williams did for that part of the movie. SW and ROTJ only get watched as the original theatrical release.
And that is what makes me unhappy with Lucas. I am willing to ignore the existence of 1-3, much like I am willing to ignore Indiana Jones 4, Star Trek V (and several other Star Trek movies, not to mention entire TV series), Highlander II, Robocop 3, the last two Matrix movies, Spider-Man 3, X-Men 1 and 3, and any number of other movies, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment that I either didn’t like or didn’t like the sequels. But I want the original theatrical versions of the Star Wars trilogy in a high-quality, anamorphic widescreen format with surround sound and the best I can get legally is a laserdisc transfer and can only get higher quality from (I think, as I haven’t been looking) bootlegs out of Hong Kong. Honestly, I tend to feel that (and please, can we keep the actualities of copyright laws out of this), having done my best to get what I want and giving the man money for something that is maybe half of what it should have been, I am morally (again, not legally) in the clear if I do go out and get myself a set of HK bootlegs with an anamorphic transfer from the Laserdisc with either an audio conversion to 5.1 or even the original PCM, either of which my receiver can decode. And yes, it can decode Pro Logic II, so I do get the cues. And the thing is, if he would just clean up the video (maybe not even that) and release an anamorphic version in 5.1 as a box set I would pay $40 or $50 for it.
See, I think this could have been Annakin Skywalker, at least at first. I think that, in the first film, Obi-Wan should have been a recently-knighted Jedi, and Annakin should have been a young, brash, hot-shot pilot (maybe part of a local planetary defense force in whatever conflict is raging) who meets Obi-Wan when he’s sent to mediate/intervene/do whatever. Obi-Wan senses how strong the Force is in Annakin and brings him to the attention of the Council, who deems him too old to begin formal training. Obi-Wan figures, “better to give this guy some guidance as opposed to turning him loose on the Galaxy untrained,” and the unfortunate chain of events begins. In some ways it would mirror Han’s arc, with Annakin ultimately taking the other fork in the road. If Annakin began the prequels older and already established as a pilot/warrior, and a bit closer in age to Obi-Wan, I think it would have set up a richer dynamic between the two characters.
In A New Hope, when Obi-Wan is telling Luke about his father and he says, “He was a cunning warrior…and a good friend.” there’s a real sense of loss there. Watching the prequels, I never got the sense that Annakin and Obi-Wan were all that close. A little bit of the dialog said so, but I never felt it. I think more time on the depth of the Annakin/Obi-Wan relationship would have made Annakin’s fall that much more poignant, and would have accurately reflected Alec Guinness’s delivery of that line on Tatooine.
I lost all interest in the sequels or any justifications for them at that point early in AotC where Obi-Wan mugs at the camera and sighs “That boy’s going to be the death of me.”
It really felt like if Lucas had been sitting on my couch, he would have dug an elbow into my side and giggled, “You see what I did there?” Yes, George, we all see what you did there. :glares over lorgnette: And we are not amused. That wasn’t funny. It wasn’t hip. It wasn’t ironic, or clever, or anything else even remotely positive. It was stupid and annoying and would have been better replaced with a fart joke.
Argue all you want for why the time line and various other stoopit (imo) plot elements had to be the way they were. But there is NO excuse for that kind of crap. None.
Jar Jar Binks is an abomination and easily one of the most annoying characters in any movie I’ve ever seen. The scene in the submarine where he’s just rambling on and on just grates on my ears. How could nobody say “no” to that? Whoever it was further up the thread who said Lucas surrounded himself with yes men is absolutely right.
I understand the need to have someone clueless to introduce the “emergency powers” legislation, but it didn’t have to be someone so actively annoying, and it didn’t have to be someone who is actually stupid. It could have been a new, wide-eyed idealistic young senator. Perhaps Bail Organa. This would have lent more weight to his future actions, and we would have actually known who he was.
Maybe Yoda meant … Vader? (Who, it turned out, was the one who ultimately did the deed.)
Jar-Jar’s manner of speaking, and many aspects of life on Naboo are explained quite neatly in the webcomic Darths & Droids, wherein The Phantom Menace is portrayed as a science fiction roleplaying campaign. The GM hadn’t detailed the planet, as he only intended his characters to make a brief stop on the Trade Federation space station. But best-laid plans … the players end up deciding to make a trip to the planet, where they encounter “an alien”. The 8-year-old sister of one of the players happens to be there and decides she wants to play, so they let her play the alien. She promptly names the alien “Jar-Jar” and comes up with his voice and dialect. Then, as the GM frantically attempts to detail the planet “on the fly”, the 8YO sister’s imagination goes into overdrive and she starts making up a bunch of stuff and the GM decides to just go with it. And so…
Qui-Gon: Jar Jar, are there any humans on this planet? Jar Jar: Ooh, yessy yessy! Obi-Wan: Who’s their leader? Jar Jar: Their leader issa Queen Amidala! She issa very old and smart. Qui-Gon: Sounds like the person we want to talk to. Jar Jar: She issa 14 years old! All the peoples voted for her!
In any case, if you look closely enough you will discover that the prequels are actually extreme fundamentalist Christian anti-homosexual propaganda. Obviously, the Jedi represent Christians, who kindly rescue poor Anakin from a life of slavery. But, unfortunately, Anakin’s attachment to his mother and lack of a father in the home have left him emotionally damaged, and thus vulnerable to the grooming techniques of that pedarast, Palpatine (c’mon, go watch that scene in the circus/opera/whatever that was). In denial, Anakin puts on a macho, super-hetero front, and even goes so far as to enter into a sham marriage with Padme. But finally, the evil Palpatine’s years of grooming finally bear fruit, and Anakin explodes in one last attempt at denial in which he violently destroys everything he loves. In the end, he accepts that he can no longer continue living a lie, and comes out of the closet and gives himself over to wanton homosexuality, aka “The Dark Side”.
For me I think the important thing is to look at who was responsible for the films:
Using IMDB:
Original Trilogy
A New Hope
Story: George Lucas
Script: George Lucas
Director: George Lucas
The Empire Strikes Back
Story: George Lucas
Script: Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan
Director: Irvin Kershner
Return of the Jedi
Story: George Lucas
Script: George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan
Director: Richard Marquand Prequel Trilogy
The Phantom Menace
Story: George Lucas
Script: George Lucas
Director: George Lucas
Attack of the Clones
Story: George Lucas
Script: George Lucas and Jonathan Hales
Director: George Lucas
**Revenge of the Sith **
Story: George Lucas
Script: George Lucas
Director: George Lucas
I’d argue that not only had George Lucas forgotten how to direct in the twenty two years between A New Hope and The Phantom Menace (during which he directed nothing) but he had also forgotten how to write a screenplay (IMDB appears to show no screenplays written by him between Jedi (which he didn’t do himself) and The Phantom Menace.
He has simply forgotten how to do the somewhat important jobs of directing and screenwriting, yet due to being surrounded by yes men he deluded himself into thinking he could do both for all three trilogies, apart from Attack of the Clones where he deigned to share script writing duties (and the cynic in me thinks that the script bits he did write were limited to the droid factory scenes that were added later on, according to IMDB).
Does anyone else here remember liking The Phantom Menace when it first came out. I remember being so pumped before going in and wanting to like it so badly that I told everyone for a week how awesome it was. But I realized I was only fooling myself.
Later on when I made a mental list of the great movies that came out that summer (The Matrix, American Pie, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, etc.) I realized that The Phantom Menace was nowhere near the top 10.
I just want to stand up and be counted as one of the excluded middle - I did not see the original Star Wars until I was an adult and still really liked them. I’m no fanboy. But the prequels were bad. The romance was the worst and should have been kept off-screen. When you watch the banter between Leia and Han and see her falling for him despite the bad boy he is that’s charming. The dialogue is well-written and witty. When Anakin and Padme romance, I wanted to throw up.
Jar-Jar doesn’t annoy me as much as others but his role needed to be kept much more to a minimum. I agree that everything he did in the Senate should have been better done by Organa. I would have liked to see more of Organa’s backstory.
And Anakin just comes off as surly and disrespectful of his master, and that really annoys me. Obi-Wan has done everything for him, and there is no sign of gratitude. And I don’t think it was necessary to make him such a punk. As others have mentioned, we have already seen Han playing a bad boy and not being a punk.
I’m tired of being lumped in with this great big bunch of fanboys - whom I don’t even see in this thread! - who apparently only despise the prequels because it doesn’t satisfy their wet dreams. Everyone here is giving reasoned answers for their dislikes and yet we’re all being shoved in one big pile.
