He walks through each movie and (with heaping doses of sarcasm) calls out why they’re so painful and disappointing. Most of his points seem to make sense too. Anakin comes back to Padme towards the end of 2 and says “Hey I just slaughtered this whole village”… and she doesn’t react? Why? Besides the fact that she needs to still be keen on him in 3… until she suddenly gets upset (well, whiny) when he commits mass murder again in 3?
I knew the prequels were irredeemably bad when, during the pod race, I caught myself thinking “I wish I was watching the lightcycle sequence from Tron right now”.
I don’t care that George Lucas felt the need to “fix” his various intellectual properties but I reserve the right as a consumer to dislike the result.
I did. Largely because the hype was so intoxicating and also because I was 15. The first time I saw it, the few cool parts were enough to give me an overall positive view of the movie. It wasn’t until subsequent viewings that I realized how bad it is.
Why is George Lucas despised by so many Star Wars fans?
Imagine, if you will, that Peter Jackson had gone on to make The Hobbit.
When it came out the entire movie consisted of the dwarfs doing stupid CGI ninja stunts on Smaug’s back, interspersed with long, pointless scenes where Bilbo disappears over the side of a cliff for no discernibly good reason.
I had a look, but I really don’t like him so far. If he’s going to complain about non-issues like the relationship of the Republic to Naboo and the Trade Federation (what, has he never heard of the UN?), he can at least be funny.
No, this is not a case of Luke having the same last name and Luke’s father happening to have the same first name. Luke is placed with Anikan’s step-brother, Owen Lars. This is Anikan’s family - what passes for a family, anyway. So Darth Vader needs an incredibly compelling reason to not know that he has a son living with his step-brother where he himself grew up, or thereabouts.
Now, if the story was as originally presented, there would be no problem with Obi-wan hiding out with the son of some random Jedi that Vader killed, keeping that boy with that Jedi’s family on some obscure planet. There’s no reason Vader should be hunting down the children of all Jedi, and as long as Obi-wan keeps a low profile, there’s no reason the Empire will notice. But ROTJ ruined that premise by introducing us to Luke being Vader’s son, and Vader being Anikan Skywalker.
Version 2: Vader didn’t really care he had a son, he was more concerned with being Evil and hunting down Jedi and having power than having a family and all. Until said son shows up with lots of Force, and he has the option of killing him off as a Jedi, or trying to bend him to the dark side like himself. And of course the Emporer sees the benefit of an Evil Luke at his side, a second Darth for more Sith badness. And we know where that ends up.
Okay, but now along comes the plot that has Anikan deeply in love with Amidala and thinking about his children. So their existence has to be kept a secret from him. And so what does Obi-wan do? Takes Luke back to Tatooine, where Anikan himself grew up, and hands him over to Anikan’s step-brother to raise. And let him go by his own real name, Luke Skywalker, because that will never be a flag to Darth Vader. Right. Hello, Witness Protection Program! What’s the number one rule? You can NEVER have contact with your old life again.
So the only way this works AT ALL is that Vader has such an aversion to the planet Tatooine that he has threatened everyone with slow evisceration if they even mention the planet’s name in his presence. Which makes it very challenging when Leia’s diplomatic vessel is running and happens to be going close to that planet. Everyone has to talk in circumlocutions in the bridge.
officer: “Sir, the transport is running from us, headed toward a planet.”
Grand Moff Tarkin: “Which planet?”
officer: “That desert planet over there, sir.”
Grand Moff Tarkin: “You mean Tatooine?”
Darth Vader: “Who dares mention that foul word in my presence?”
GMT: “I do, you pompous jerk, and you know I have more authority with the Emporer than you.”
Vader: “Crap, okay, but only you, the rest of these buffoons in funny pants better keep their mouths shut.”
So some mindless bureaucrat running through tax records turns up one “Skywalker, Luke, nephew of Lars, Owen and Lars, Beru, son of Anikan”.
Bureaucrat 1: "Hey, isn’t Anikan Skywalker the name Darth Vader used to go by?
B2: “Sure, but don’t let him hear you say that. What’s up?”
B1: “I think he has a son.”
B2: “Really? Where?”
B1: “On Tatooine.”
B2: [looks both ways] “Shhhh, don’t let anyone hear you say that.”
B1: “Oh, yeah, sorry. You think he’ll be interested in knowing he has a son?”
B2: “And how do you propose to respond when he asks where the boy is?”
B1: “Well, we could tell GM Tarkin, let him pass along the news.”
B2: “Oh come on, you know Vader, he will want to rain on someone’s parade, and you know that flows downhill. Who do you think it’s going to land on?”
B1: “Uhhh. Never mind.”
B2: “Didn’t hear a thing.”
All of that is post-hoc reasoning to justify the things Lucas did in the movies. The movies came first. Lucas had primary authority and ability to nix any idea from any other author. Timothy Zahn had to fuzzy up some stuff about the cloning chambers because of that (in his books set after Jedi). Fan wanks by approved Lucasfilm authors are still fanwanks. Lucas created the stupidity that had to be explained, so people stuck their creative talents to create interesting explanations. But the stupidity was not erased.
Example: Why must Obi-wan be a Padawan? What about the story in Star Wars (i.e. “A New Hope”) required Obi-wan to be a Padawan when Anikan was first met? Where was that conveyed in any of the first three movies (IV - VI)? It wasn’t. What we know is that Obi-wan was a close friend of Anikan and his mentor, that Obi-wan trained Anikan, mostly on his own rather than taking him to Yoda. It is entirely conceivable, in fact largely expected, that Obi-wan was a young adult Jedi Knight who thought he could train Anikan on his own rather than get the Jedi Master’s involved. But Lucas threw all that away and restructured the story, with Yoda and the Council telling Obi-wan to train him against their better judgement. Well, guess what, that still makes the Council responsible. In fact, Lucas introduced an unnecessary character, Qui-gon, and made Anikan Qui-gon’s mistake, not Obi-wan’s.
I suppose it is acceptable that Obi-wan felt more guilt than was actually his. After all, people do that. But that doesn’t make it feel contrived and contradictory to the originally presented story.
That’s a fine premise. It’s the details of execution where the timeline doesn’t fit, the events don’t mesh with what is later presented, and the things that are shown have too many coincidences.
Like how many Clone Wars are there? I see one. So why are they called “the Clone Wars” and not “the Clone War”?
Sure, there was bound to be some level of dissatisfaction - that is inherent in any followup movie, especially one with a strong fan following with strong opinions. But it could have been so much better.
I will come on record as saying I really liked RotJ, despite the Ewoks and fart jokes and reuse of the Death Star. My complaints against that movie are a lot more minor. A lot of people think that one sucks, but I didn’t. But TPM butchered the expected history, tied in too many unnecessary coincidences, and then did it with stiff acting and poor dialogue. It’s almost as if Lucas said, “There’s no way I can make all my fans happy, so let’s see how few I can.”
That’s mostly because Lucas didn’t let anyone feel anything in those movies.
About Timothy Zhan and the Heir to the Empire trilogy:
When you say, Irishman, that Zahn had to “fuzz up” things about cloning, does that mean that in the latest reprints of the books that the problem of clone insanity caused by the Force no longer drives part of the story?
(And yes, I will admit being enough of a fanboy that the problem of the Clone Wars without having an explanation for how they solved clone insanity without making a Force bubble using ysalamiri actually did bother me. However, that problem hit me much later after seeing Attack of the Clones, once I had dealt with the straightforward pile of crap that was that movie.)
My info comes from Timothy Zahn at a convention circa 2000. He commented that he orginally spelled out more explicitly the ownership and location of the cloning facilities, and was told by Lucasfilm that Lucas had not made specifics on that and he shouldn’t commit to something that Lucas could change later. So Zahn made the chambers as something of the Emporer’s private collection or some such, essentially justifying it as a special collection rather than the nominal set used by the Emperor. I have no idea of anything about re-releases. I did read the first one about that time, but nothing since. So no, it has nothing to do with your question.
Look, we can quibble over the details of the story all day. But here’s what it boils down to.
Remember in Boogie Nights, in that scene at the pool where Dirk Diggler says that he’s watched Star Wars “about four times” and Reed Rothchild says, “people tell me I look like Han Solo?”
Now imagine similarly hip, cool characters in an equivalent scene in a current-day movie, having that same exchange of dialog about The Phantom Menace or any of the other prequels.
That about sums it up. The original Star Wars perfectly encapsulated a certain time and place in film history, as a slightly cheesy, un-self-conscious, hip and entertaining 1970s space-adventure movie. The prequels just…don’t.
They’re just not cool.
I say this not as a “fanboy” but just a guy who loves the original Star Wars movies because they’re cool. The battles are awesome, Han Solo is a badass character, the aliens look trippy, the villain is appropriately evil…and that’s all that’s necessary.
The new movies are totally bogged down in their pretentiousness and self-seriousness. They’re ponderous, boring, and childish all at the same time. They’re basically just “epic fail.”
And that is the failure on Lucas’s part that I’m talking about. Kenobi doesn’t need to hide anywhere with a connection to his enemy, when he could just pick a backwater planet at random and disappear completely.
To put it simply, George Lucas did not know when to stop.
I don’t just mean in the number of movies. By the time of the prequels, he was throwing everything possible on the screen. There’s a space battle with so many ships we don’t know who’s who. Anakin and Obi-Wan are bobbing and weaving around among the ships. Someone shoots at them, little droids are crawling all over Obi-Wan’s fighter, Anakin knocks them off, they slip through the closing hangar doors, slide to a fiery stop, mishaps in the elevator shaft, lightsaber fights, Artoo being ingenious, rescue the emperor, the ship is crashing, must pull out of the dive, aarrrrghhhhhh! The spaceports look like beehives. The senate chamber stretches so high that no one could see anything from the cheap seats. It’s just too much. The final duel in ROTS is the perfect example. Two guys, with lightsabers, in some kind of factory, over a volcano, that’s erupting, with earthquakes, and equipment breaking up, and falling, into rivers of lava, and THEY’RE HEADED FOR THE FALLS!
It’s the bouncy ball that’s the problem. The bouncing around is the equivalent of smoke and mirrors at a magic show. When it’s over you look around and say “what just happened?” The Princess Bride did a cooler fight with two guys and a stone staircase because we could see what the hell was going on.
At some point, any artist has to decide that his creation is complete. Someone said Lucas was surrounded by yes-men. I don’t think he needed to hear “no”, I think someone needed to say “enough”.
Exactly. The ways you mentioned, and also by cramming in the backstory. Way too much backstory for 3 movies, so much he had to do a cartoon series also.
In Muppet Babies, Gonzo (who stood for all us freaks) would often start spouting out some incredibly complicated story or scenario which he had clearly cooked up in his mind, only to be stopped by the uncomprehending stares of the other characters. Lucas was Baby Gonzo, except, as you said, he had so much money that no one stopped him until it was too late.
I agree that there was too much explanation. In the other three, Han and Wookie are thrown at you and you get a sense of his character as you go along. The action moves fast, and carries you with it. In the first three there’s always a sense of hand-holding and detailed explanation and trying to force the char on you.
One set showed the character’s personality.
The other set tried to convince you of set personality traits which were not in evidence.
Lucas didn’t know when to stop when it came to visual effects, plot-unrelated bells and whistles, cool sci-fi ideas, and pizzazz. He didn’t know where to start when it came to characterization, emotional resonance, depth, and dialogue.
Face it: the best of the Star Wars movies is the one Lucas had the least to do with: Empire. Lucas didn’t direct it, and he didn’t write it. Result: awesome movie with a lot of memorable scenes and characters, and few logical holes.
The best character of the series is Han Solo, and that’s because Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher sat around re-writing his dialogue to make it snappier (in addition to the script-doctoring done by Lucas’s friends, whom I can’t remember… the Huycks?).
I’ll give Lucas full credit: he’s a decent director of photography. He just isn’t very good at knowing his own strengths and weaknesses in other areas.
I think the best example of that is from RotS, when Obi Wan (or was it Anakin?) is piloting his fighter in the opening space battle, and hits a mine, which spits out a bunch of little robots that start disassembling his fighter. It looks neat on the screen, so long as you don’t consider the fact that a mine packed with explosives would disassemble the fighter a hell of a lot faster.
Yes, that was my point, too. A New Hope gave us Ben hiding out on some backwater planet with the son of his slaughtered friend. * Empire *changed that story, to Ben hiding out with Vader’s son with Vader’s step-brother on the planet Vader grew up on. Oops. How do you fix that?
So why does Ben need to place Luke Skywalker, under his own name, with Vader’s step-brother? Try to hide the “Skywalker” by calling him Beru’s son by another father?
Okay.
DOH!
Fine. Alec Guinness was about 60 when Star Wars was filmed. Obi-wan was about 30 in RotS. Add 20 years for Luke to grow up, you still are missing 10 years. And those are conservative numbers. Alec was a little older, if Kenobi was yonger in Sith, and Luke was only 18, that’s more time to account for.
Besides, at no point did Kenobi take on Anakin on his own, thinking he could teach better than Yoda. Every decision was made by the Council, perhaps against their better judgment, but by them. As described in Ep IV, Obi-wan says he thought he could do as good a job himself. But that’s not what we are shown.
Another clumsy scene was one of the final scenes in Revenge of the Sith. Lucas apparently wanted to link the later trilogy with the original one, so he had a scene where Vader and Tarkin are standing on the bridge of the Death Star - just like we had seen them doing in an early scene in Star Wars.
The problem is that the beginning of Star Wars was supposed to be set twenty years or so after the end of Revenge of the Sith. Did Vader, Tarkin, and the Death Star crew just stand around waiting for all that time? You’d think the Emperor could have found something useful for them to do in all that time.
Of course, I suppose the fanwanking is that they didn’t stay there the whole time. They went off and did other things, which apparently were never important enough to mention. But right before they went off Vader said “Hey, this moment’s really special and I don’t want it to end. I know…let’s put this brand new Death Star we’ve just build away for a couple of decades and not use it. Then on the twentieth anniversary of today, we’ll bring it back out of storage and we’ll all meet back on this same spot.”