Well, tastes differ. I loved the original Star Wars, thought “Empire Strikes Back” was also great, was disappointed in “The Return of the Jedi”, and found “Phantom Menace” boring. Clearly your mileage varies.
I am glad to hear, though, that visually the “later” episodes still stand up even if they’re seen, not in order of production, but in narrative order. I’d wondered about that.
Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi do not come close to TPM and AOTC in terms of visual power. But they’re still really damn good.
I agree; I always wanted to be Han Solo after I saw Star Wars (the first time, and every frickin’ time thereafter) and Empire and Jedi, but I always also had a strong admiration for, and interest in, Obi-Wan Kenobi. I am gratified that the prequels have featured at least one actor I enjoy watching. I think Ewan McGregor is great, and by far the most enjoyable parts of these movies for me have been watching him bring the young Obi-Wan to life in such a way that I can identify with him. He is the center of these movies for me, and that is why I have been able to enjoy them more than most people I have spoken to. I was also gratified to see Christopher Lee featured in Episode II, he was a joy to watch. Too bad he didn’t get more screen time.
Of course, the transformation from Anakin to Vader is central to the story, but Ben plays a vital role in it. I think if it were a lesser actor playing Obi-Wan in these films, I would be much more negative about them.
It may have seemed to Lucas that Anakin/Vader had to be the main character in the prequels because he is the source of everything: he is the engine that keeps the Empire running, assisting the Emperor’s reign of terror in the galaxy, and, at the same time, the source of his own redemption and the ultimate destruction of the Empire. To me, he is like a black hole that the rest of this galaxy swirls around, and I don’t think he is served by being the primary character of the Prequels. He should remain dark and mysterious, until the series of reveals (he is human under the robotics, he is Luke’s father, he will choose the life of his son over his own life and the life of his Emperor who he is sworn to obey) in Empire and Jedi. It is possible to make a good movie where the character who is the primary force is not the main character.
Ah , but I do believe that we can have the Young Han Solo , depending on who you think could play him.
Right around this time , he should be putting in his application for the corellian academy i believe. Something like a 17 year old Han solo should have some of the later magic.
Declan
Same
Depends , BattleStar Galactica was good , Buck Rogers was good enough ,but got lame in the end , cinema movies were all rip-offs of starwars , so I would totally discount them, maybe with the exception of Alien , the first movie.
Depends on your flavor , I wanted to be StarBuck. But I can concede that the character Starbuck was probably heavily influenced by Starwars , if not outright Stolen. I just happened to like him better. Dirk Bennedict probably showed what you could do if you stretched Harrison Fords character beyond ninety minutes.
Declan
Truthfully, give me an enjoyable story, likeable characters… and Han Solo;), and you can film it in super 8 and I’ll watch it. I saw PM and was disappointed… I saw AOTC only because I was at a friends house when it was on. I doubt I’ll lose much sleep if I don’t see the next one.
Han ends up with the fairly blah Leia for part of a movie. Xander shags the much hotter Anya for a couple seasons, straight (with several mentions of kinky shagging).
Xander’s waaay cooler.
Besides, your premise that SciFi nerds want to be one or the other because the characters are cool is, I believe, somewhat flawed. It’s not the guns; it’s not the witty sayings; it’s not the fast space ships. Instead, it’s the one thing that SciFi nerds want–no, need–more than anything else; it’s the brightest burning thought in that worm-filled asteroid cave used for a noggin’.
SciFiers wanna have sex. Xander and Han are cool because they can get laid–all else is just dressing. 
Does anyone else cringe whenever R2-D2 flies?
SkipMagic, you make a good point. How good is a vicarious hero if he can’t get the girl?
Which begs the question of why any good sci-fi geek would wanna be a Jedi? True, they do have a really powerful weapon, a remarkably powerful phallic object. And the costume’s really easy to make, if you own a brown bathrobe.
But the only Jedi who ever gets any is the bad one.
And on a related note,
Dunno if I’d agree. When I was a kid, I liked Battlestar Galactica, but today when I see it, mostly what I see is “Star Wars Ripoff.”
And when *Buck Rogers * was in its first run, frankly the only reason I watched it was because in the 25th century, the only thing women seemed to ever wear was spandex…
This thread has reminded me that there is one spaceship-intensive, acrion-adventure science fiction film coming out in spring 2005 that I can’t wait to see… and George Lucas has absolutely nothing to do with it.
After all, what was Firefly but Han Solo: The Series?
I’ll concede that the first movies needed a drop of humor, but I think it’s already been said: if the Jedi were more like Obi-Wan, then there’d be no need for Jar-Jar. They’re basically Zen masters, or kung-fu instructors. We’ve seen this character work before! Where’s Pai Mei, smacking the crap out of his student because the student dares to be as irreverent as he? Where’s Morpheus, smiling wryly as he says “You think that’s air you’re breathing?” Come on! We all know that finding enlightenment plus knowing kung fu gives you a witty, laid-back sense of humor. These guys are acting like Catholic nuns (“I’m married to the Force now.”), when they should be more like hard-drinking Jesuits or Zen Buddhists.
As for “better visually”, Lucas has one movie left in which to explain to me how the state-of-the-art in fighters went from slick and shiny Naboo fighters to modified T-47 (X-Wing) spacecraft. All of the spacecraft in the new films are too clean and slick; the interiors more like Star Trek. Where’s are the YT-1300s? Where are the Millennium Falcon’s ancestor ships, either fresh out of production or already with a few years’ grime on them? Surely the Old Republic – as lumbering a bureaucracy as it is – already has a healthy smuggling trade!
So there’s my .02 credits: the Jedi and the ships are both too pristine for my tastes. I want ships that look lived-in, and Jedi who are used to living in the real world.
this all begs an even bigger question about sci-fi nerds. . .how does a grown man with any vicarious hero get a girl at all?
or is that the whole point of having a vicarious hero?
I don’t know if it’s possible to manipulate the situation completely, but surely it’s one of the factors that a director should be looking at while casting? Surely there must be some way to assemble an ensemble cast that works well together.
I’ll have to use the inevitable comparison with the LOTR trilogy. Yes, they were excellent movies in virtually every respect. But you also got the impression, from interviews, commentaries, and just the on-screen dynamic, that this was a group of people that actually liked what they were doing, and in some measure shared both the director’s and the fan’s vision of the film.
In contrast, the performances in eps 1-2 view like a collage of audition tapes. There is no ‘soul’ to them- and that brings us back to the OP’s point about Han Solo.
I also have a beef with slapstick humor, especially in ‘epic’ films. Give me witty diologue delivered in a real human way every time.
Master Wang-Ka, you are right on. Geeks wanna be Batman, which is why the guy’s had how many resurrections over the decades? Kill the 1930s comic strip, bring on the TV series. Kill the cheesy series, bring on the Dark Knight and (eventually) the movies. And the 1989 Batman was cool in an eighties cyberpunk way, no matter how godawful bad every one since it has been. The next Batman film will be a fresh take based on the comic books again, I think, but it will be hard-pressed to beat the 1989 film.
Batman has the skills. He can do anything he wants with his normal, human body and normal, human brain. He’s a martial arts geek, a weapons geek, a biochem geek, and a badass geek. He’s naturally cool and competent, whatever the situation, no matter who he’s facing.
Batman has the tools. He’s got gadgets beyond normal reason, that can do things that bend physics. But they aren’t magic, although that’s the only way some of them would work in the real world: He’s apparently cooked up or bought all of them. He and Alfred are an entire Q Division, and they operate out of a rich dude’s (cavernous) basement.
Batman has the wit. He gets the Joker’s jokes, and he has retorts for that awkward time right before you land a crippling punch. He’d be bored if he wasn’t fighting crime, and you get the impression that he was the kid who played elaborate pranks when he should have been studying.
I think Batman is pretty much the acme of a certain kind of SF hero.
[ul]
[li]He’s moral enough to avoid becoming an anti-hero: To make him less moral would turn him into a powerful villian, but to make him a Boy Scout would make it impossible for him to do what he needs to do in the plot. (He lacks respect for Gotham City’s written laws, for example.) [/li][li]He’s weak enough to be interesting: Make him Superman, and the drama is gone (if a prepared Batman can defeat Supes, what could stop a Super Bats?), but cripple him and he can’t plausibly function outside a group.[/li][li]He’s smart and witty enough to be interesting: Make him an ultra-genius and you can’t write his dialogue plausibly anymore, but give him a more normal intelligence and he’s just another goon with better guns.[/li][/ul]
Should they make clones of Batman? No, but it would beat another zombie flick (Resident Evil, anyone?) or boring psychotic (The Punisher only punished its audience).
Revtim I’ve been complaining about this same exact thing for years! I guess I haven’t been a SW fan all my life, I was a Han Solo fan…
This reminded me of a review of “X-Men” on AICN when the movie first came out. Harry loved the movie and pointed out the reason why the movie was succesful was because they made Han Soloesque character the hero.
Also in the book, The Fourth Turning there’s discussion of generational archetypes. Hero, Prophet, Nomad, & Artist. In the book, they pointed out Star Wars for it’s use of this archetype.
Ben Kenobi - Prophet (Boomers)
Han Solo - Nomad (Gen X)
Luke Skywalker - Hero (GI’s & 80’s kids)
Maybe that’s why Han appeals to so many of us. We can identify with him generationally. I’m an Xer (born 1962 - 1981).
In the first three movies (real-world chronology) everything down to the lightsabers looks like it’s cobbled together out of spare or salvaged parts. Nothing looks shiny or new and stuff breaks down a lot. Luke and Owen were reduced to constantly repairing the condensers and buying cybernetic assistance from itinerant junk dealers, the Millenium Falcon is repeatedly described as a flying collection of crap, and an awful lot of people seem to be relying on animals for transportation.
I think the idea is that under the Empire the Galaxy is in a serious state of decline.
The lack of a Han Solo-type character, IMHO, is not why the prequels are generally perceived as inferior. But it must be remembered that the Han/ Leia romance was not really any more competently scripted than the Anakin/ Amidala romance, but Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher actually had chemistry, whereas Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman just don’t. Ford/ Fisher made their version work despite the rather thin plotting; Christensen and Portman just can’t.
I do buy into the theory that the prequels are burdened by unreasonable expectations. I firmly believe that it is very difficult to inspire in 30 year old adults the same sense of wonder and excitement that the original films inspired in grade-school children. And today’s grade-school children have grown up in a world of filmmaking that the original trilogy completely transformed. As adults, we want that sense of wonder, but in the process of growing up, we’ve come to see movies as movies. And to be harsher about them.
Now, Lucas hasn’t helped himself out at all. I personally feel that he made a mistake starting the series at the point he did - with childlike, innocent Anakin. Not only does he now only have two movies to set up this character as evil, he also introduced an ick factor in the Anakin/ Amidala relationship. Yes, it’s legal, etc., but still, she basically hooks up with the kid she babysat as a teenager. Add to that the fact that the kid he chose just can’t act, and, well, you end up with a lot of pissed-off fans, who only get more pissed-off by the essentially sceen-wasting Jar Jar Binks. I personally hated the whole “midichlorians” angle (and I’m not alone in that) because it made scientific the one mystical and inexplicable thing about the Star Wars mythos. Star Wars depends on not asking too many questions about physics and technology. Once you start explaining stuff, Star Wars becomes Star Trek, where it’s all about the engineering.
Some have come down on Lucas for the complicated political intrigue and drama, but I actually think that’s the only part he’s doing well. Part of the story is how a generally good institution (the Republic) became an awfully evil one (the Empire), and he’s setting up that plot nicely. The board is set, the pieces are in position, and we’re now set up for the fall.
I personally view TPM as about 1/3 of a good movie (excise almost anything with young Anakin and Jar Jar, but keep in most of the other Jedi stuff), and AOTC as 1/2 of a good movie (excise the Anakin/ Amidala romance). On those odds, I’m hoping that the last one will be at least 3/4 of a good movie, though I’d settle for 2/3, which was about what “Return of the Jedi” clocked in at (if you got rid of the Ewoks).
Good stuff, jeevmon. I tend to be a rabid defender of TPM and AOTC if only because I’ve found the hatred undeservedly intense.
I probably still like them a bit more than you, but mainly because I’m less forgiving about the shortcomings of the first 3 (basically, I find every criticism levelled at Eps 1&2 can be equally applied to eps 4, 5, & 6, if not moreso).
IMO, I think TPM and AOTC are both better than ROTJ.
Exgineer: Interesting interpretation of the decline of things. What **Jurph ** outlined had always bothered me a little, too. It will be interesting to see if Lucas plays up what you said or just leaves it for us George2K apologists to accept gleefully.
As for the “engineering tech decline” side-topic, the original 3 movies had quite a large variety in the quality and newness, and felt like a self-consistent universe.
Tatooine was beat up, rusty, and makeshift, yeah. So was the Falcon. But recall also that Cloud City was contrastingly pristine, new, and bright. We even have a shot of C3PO double-taking at another shiny C3P droid walking in the hall. Additionally, in ROTJ the new death star looked quite modern and new, and the Mon Calamari flagship was very snazzy and Star Trek sleek. The original movies showed a great amount of thematic attention to detail and environment.
I can accept the uniform newness of the prequels as being pre-empire collapse. Where it falls apart though is in the special effects. When CG is used to try and make things look beat up and weathered, the effect fails for me. All I see is a smudgy texture layed on top of a pristine CG effect, and the realism suffers. I have yet to see anything beat up and weathered in the prequels that genuinely looks so.
I could agree that the prequels were kinda doomed, damned by expectation.
Experience has taught me that when a powerful franchise dies, the fanboys are left screaming for more. The longer you let them scream, the longer that desire builds up, the crazier it gets when you finally give them what they want. Man, I remember going to see *Star Trek: The Motion Picture * when it opened, and the people in that theatre were nuts!
I had those same expectations when *Phantom Menace * opened. It wasn’t BAD, certainly, but I did not like the orange duck monster that talked like Stepin Fetchit, and the idea that a Jedi would gamble everything on a small child being able to win a road rally struck me as insane.
If that ain’t bad enough, we later have the kid accidentally launch a fighter and singlehandedly win the big space battle at the end, despite the fact that he has no idea what he’s doing.
Yeah, he had the Force all right. Force = George Lucas Said So, And That Settles It.
Batman, too, is cool, though he ties into a different vibe. Han Solo wins as often as he loses, but you can always count on him to escape, to somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat; he’s that kind of character. This is what made the Carbonite Freezing scene so dramatic – no escape. He’s froze up in there, and now he’s Jabba’s wall ornament…
Batman’s zeitgeist is different; he ties into the part of us that pretty much wishes we could not only kick EVERYONE’S ass, but that wishes we were so good at it that we could afford to be generous. Not everyone deserves an asskicking, you know. Simple acknowledgement of the fact that I could if I wanted to is sufficient, thank you.
True, he does sometimes get beat… and then, he’s placed in a cell, or a deathtrap, or some durn thing or other, which he then figures his way out of (or, failing that, pulls a deus ex machina out of his Utility Belt), escapes, and armed with his new knowledge about his foe, proceeds to go kick the bejesus out of him, just like in a million SDMB threads.
Yeah, that’ll get the fanboys a-droolin’, sure enough.
I do kind of wonder about the state of the art, though. For me, the Rubicon was Jurassic Park. I sat there in the theatre, mouth hanging open, looking at the dinosaurs, and thought to myself, “Jesus. That’s it. We have reached a point in cinema technology where we can literally CGI anything we can imagine, and make people believe it.”
At the time, I thought this was good. Why not? Instead of spending a fortune on models, sets, monsters, stop-motion puppets, and a buncha crap that may look fake anyway… we just do it all on computer, and it’s great, right?
What I never thought about was the audience.
CGI is still magical, for me. I grew up with stuff like The Valley Of Gwangi, with jerky stop-motion dinosaurs, and seventies vampire movies where red tempera paint would do for blood. I grew up in an era where you had to reach out a little… where putting dried Bisquick on an actor’s face was symbolic of his monsterness, you know? You had to WORK with some of these movies. They couldn’t do it alone.
Nowadays, though, the current generation just doesn’t feel that way. I was amazed at the first *Spider-Man * movie. I thought the character moved exactly like he would in the comics. I was thrilled.
I thought the Hulk was pretty impressive, too, albeit a bit too big. I thought the scenes of him leaping across Arizona were quite good, very well done.
…and both times, I’ve heard people saying it looked fake. Too computer-generated. Not REAL enough.
Jeez, kid, you don’t think that’s REAL enough? Man, when I was your age, I had to settle for Lou Ferrigno in a frickin’ fright wig, punching his way through a sheet of drywall painted up like bricks! And we LIKED IT!!!
So, yeah, *Star Wars * may well be doomed. Assuming George doesn’t let anyone else write or direct any more…