f13.net

I've never been a huge Star Wars fan, though I found the original series fun at times, and so I never really got why people hated the prequals so much when they came out. I remember them being a bit cheesy and silly at times, and Hayden Christensen being a horrible actor, but otherwise I didn't get it.

The other day I watched 1-3 again because my brother had them about and the same things came to mind. They aren't great films, but they aren't that bad either.

The acting in the films, with the notable excpetion of Hayden and the Jar Jar VA, is to my mind better than the acting in 4-6. The first film only has Jar Jar as a blight (it should be noted that the toad king dude I actually thought did ok, so I place a bit of the blame at Jar Jar not just for his existence, but the moronic VA work/direction), and he's not in it as much as I remembered, while everyone else acts pretty well. What I remembered as somewhat racist alien stereotypes actually wasn't as bad as I had thought, though it was still there.

The second film wasn't as great, mostly because the plot seemed pretty meh and Hayden's bad acting completely destroyed the scenes with Portman (which were poorly written enough as it was), but it was still entertaining at times.

And the third film is actually a pretty good film.

So when watching it I was wondering about all those die hard Star Wars fans who really hated these movies and wondering why. As someone who only watched the originla ones once or twice (likely under duress) when I was younger I can't really see what makes 1-3 bad and 4-6 good. They all have silly characters, bad acting, and unbelievable plots and they all have moments where they're fun and entertaining too.

Is it the age difference and the expectations that made people dislike them so much, or are there other reasons that people might like to mention as to why they think the other films are better. Would be interested to hear what people think.

Oh dear...

It's hard for a non Star Wars fan to understand what kind of damage they can do when mentioning such things. I hope I haven't made a terrible mistake...

1. They aren't films, they're movies.
2. None of them are very good, they're just terribly nostalgic for all sorts of people. This includes the original series.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/f13/flame_on.jpg)

 :oh_i_see:

They weren't all that bad.

They were merely boring when they shouldn't have been, silly when it wasn't appropriate and, well, frankly took the lore (if you like) of the first/last set of films and shat on them horribly.

The Sabre Fight at the end is the best bit of the first.
The Imperial March at the end is the best of the second.
The, er, sabre fight at the end was the best of the third.

See a pattern ?  There's not much actually in the films to remember.  Then you start thinking about how they tried (badly) to tie into the other films in the last five minutes of the third one and your mind just wanders.

In short, if there had been NO other Star Wars films, these 3 would have been recieved in much the same way as, say, Transformers or The Bourne Stuff.  Lightweight silliness that has moments of cool but not much else.  Put them against the Massive Groaning Weight of the Nostalgia and Pack-Leading that was the original Star Wars and, well, they reek.

Anyway.

As WUA said  :oh_i_see:

They made money, I guess...

I actually like the clone wars cartoon better then I did SW 1-3. 

I don't find them horrible, they were just flat.  Could have been better. 

What is the difference?

/me puts on his pompous elitist ass hat

Films have some sort of artistic value.

Movies don't.

Bring It On is a Movie.
Being John Malkovich is a film.

Star Wars 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are movies.

I can not think of a single series that qualifies as a film.

I suppose Silence of the Lambs could be considered a film. But Hannibal and Red Dragon most certainly aren't.

Nerds being obsessed with Star Wars does not make the series a bunch of films. It just means their standards for action, dialogue, drama, and cinematography are super low. :awesome_for_real: There's nothing wrong with that, but let's not make them out to be more than they are. That charade has gone on long enough.

Edit: I suppose I should add, Hidden Fortress is a film. Just because Star Wars was partially inspired by it doesn't make it better. I'm sure Uwe Boll and such can come up with some pretty compelling inspirations at the top of a hat, but it doesn't make his movies better.

OED says:

Film


Movie


Guess the odd one out!

So yeah, ok, but you can't really correct me on it.

The Godfather movies if you give the third one the benefit of the doubt.

Yes, I'm sure there's a million words that OED has as synonyms that are two entirely different things in the world of academia. I'm not saying it's fair or right, I'm just answering his question. Also, OED has American and British colloquialisms. Surely we don't want to look to a book that has "bridge-and-tunnel" and some obscure shit like "bumsters" as the epitome of intelligent thought. There's a reason I put on my pompous, elitist ass hat.

Here's a better example: The difference between a movie and film is why gaming journalism sucks. :drill:

Fake Edit:
The Godfather 1 & 2 are one movie and the third one does NOT get the benefit of the doubt. Ever.

I find this distinction between films and movies interesting. It doesn't exist in German. Movies are movies, they are either good or bad, and they either have artistic value or not.

Is a bad movie with artistic value better than a good movie that just wants to entertain?

It might not exist in Germany but there are entire sections of cinematic study that in fact completely draw a line straight through German Film. It's HUGE topic in most Srs Bsns college courses.

Not at all. The discussion has nothing to do with that. Both films and movies can entertain. My collection of DVDs probably consists of more movies than films if we wanted to take an inventory of it. Calling something a movie or a film isn't meant to disparage it, you need actual adjectives to do that. The former is just used to define.

It generally only exists here among people who study film.  It's not any sort of technical distinction obviously, since any movie that's on film is technically a film.  You say the word film though when describing a movie and people will generally get what you mean.

To be honest, if Lucas could get a "redo" on Star Wars 2 people probably wouldn't be quite so negative about them.  2 is a putrid pile of steaming crappy goodness.  Star Wars 1 could have done without Jar Jar Binks, but otherwise was pretty good.  I like the third installment a lot. 

It is interesting to note how many people who are fans of the series think back on 4-6 as great movies.  They weren't that great, we were just young and they had great special effects.  Mark Hammill makes Jar Jar Binks look like Kenneth Branagh with his acting in Empire, particularly the big fight scene.  To be honest, if Ford wasn't in the originals they probably wouldn't have done as well.

Say hello to the only reason their watchable today.

But all of that seems redundant to me. Film is a medium, whatever you do with that medium makes it either art or entertainment (ideally both). You can then rate and categorize this movie, but that doesn't change the medium. Just like a book doesn't cease to be a book just because it is a pulp novel instead of poetry.

We have the subcategory of Kunstfilme (Art movies) as well, but as a subspecies. Not something to differentiate on such a basic level.

Edit: Overlap with Veloraths posting

Thats what I suspected. In that case it sounds a bit pretentious if you try to enforce that distinction on non-students, though.

Like I said, it's not a term that's used because it's technically accurate.  If I had to guess, I'd say it gets used in this manner because the word film just has an old, classic resonance to it that movie, show, or flick don't.

Mostly it's used because well, academics needed a word. Film and movie worked just fine. I'd wager the original usage of it in this capacity was because film sounded more classic. But mostly, at this point, it's purely a masturbatory practice. Like I said, it's not disparaging to either thing - yea, obviously, everything is cinema. But under cinema we have film and movies.

As for your book comparison, you're right. But book woulds be cinema here. Literature/Classics would be films and everything else would be well, labeled as per their genre. But yea, they're all still books.

And then there's Oscar Bait, which are movies trying to be films.

Thanks for clearing that up. Didn't want to derail the thread, but its something Schild got agitated more than once about, and I didn't get where it comes from.

Its like all these people running around talking about their "CPUs acting up" when they in fact mean their Computers, and everybody who knows ANYTHING about that stuff realizes how retarded that saying is. Morons!  :awesome_for_real:

Derailing this thread is the best thing that could have happened to it.

I'm looking at you, Crash.

Crash also gets the lucky branding as a band-aid movie where there's an ensemble trash of actors who have fallen from grace.

You didn't think I'd let this be about Star Wars, did you?

One of my favorite distinctions between a movie and a film is the pairing of Tombstone and Unforgiven.  Both are top-notch classics in their respective genre, both have fantastic performances from the primary cast, and both have that special sauce that allows them to resonate with people who might not care about westerns.  While Tombstone is very entertaining, and it easily has one of, if not the, defining Doc Hollywood performances in cinema, it isn't really saying anything on the level that Unforgiven says something, depending on the viewer.

Pairing the two also highlights how nebulous the distinction between a movie and film can be, because both types can affect you and stick in your thoughts for the rest of your life.

Jar Jar Binks didn't irritate me in Ep 1 as much as Anakin's mother did. She must be the wettest and least effective individual in the entire galaxy.

Films 4-6 were pretty terrible (4 especially), even Ford is visibly cringing as he delivers some of his lines but in general they tell a mostly consistent story that's entertaining and resonates with the audience. 1-3 just didn't have the same cohesiveness and were more about showing off the setting than about telling a story. You can pretty much chart the points in every one of the prequel movies where a scene only exists to sell toys.

Yea, an audience of 8 year olds. Poop jokes would work too.

HAHA.

I'm here all week, folks.

The Peter Jackson LOTR are films. Not movies, well at least the expanded versions.

This is a good example of a trilogy of films. Well played. I tend to block it out because of all the walking.

And walking.

And walking.

I dunno if LOTR raises to the level of films. I'd say that its very rare that a cinematic event straddles both genres, as defined by schild. Laurence of Arabia might, although it still somehow stays kinda movie-ish. Some Hitchcock does both the best of what movies are meant to do while having the deeper inflection of films.

Along with Hitchcock:

Fukusaku (Battle Royale), Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, etc), Lars von Trier, Kurosawa, the Cohen Bros., Soderbergh, Miyazaki (Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies, etc), Cronenberg, Woo, Paul Thomas Anderson, Boyle, etc. etc. etc.

There's a shitload of directors capable of making movies that can be intelligently discussed and studied. They don't always nail it and a lot of them are past their prime (Woo and Soderbergh most definitely). It's not as rare as you state, but it's certainly not common.

I found the biggest difference between 4-6 and 1-3 to be the pacing.  4-6 had a much better flow.  2 also had the big problem of Obi Wan spending too much time alone.  3 was way too rushed as Lucas realized 'Hey, I left 75% of the story for the last movie.'  Plus he screwed up the end where Anakin becomes Vader. 

1-3 had its share of problems too, of course (I'm looking at you, Ewoks).  But they were just put together better so they're more watchable.

Nitpick: Isao Takahata wrote and directed Grave of the Fireflies, though he hired Studio Ghibli to do the animation for it.

Anakin's mother was terrible, too.  That scene in their house during the sandstorm was one of the more awkward scenes in the series.  

My favorite scene in the whole movie is in the cantina where Ford says that the Falcon can "make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs" and Guinness smirks at him because he actually fucked up the line.  He was supposed to say something besides "parsecs" but it stuck throughout the series.  

Bottom line:  Lucas got lucky with 4-6.  The timing was great, he surrounded himself with good people and he had a simple, yet effective story line.  He got derailed in 1-3.  The story was there, he just surrounded himself with idiots.  

As an aside, how do you fuck up with Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor?  Also, Ian McDermid is very, very good.  It was easy to fuck it up in 3 fell swoops.  1.  Insert yourself as director (cough, cough), 2. Jar Jar Binks and 3. Hayden Christenson

The difference between the two trilogies is almost entirely nostalgia.  No movie(s) could have lived up to the expectations we had going in, especially when the bulk of the movies are genuinely bad.  Just to make things clear, I feel Sith is actually a good movie that was shackled by a shitty backstory combined with sub-par direction.

1 had some great parts to it (and how none of you mention Darth Maul is beyond me), and a lot of terrible parts.

2...you had to dig a little deeper for the good stuff.  It was sort of a necessary filler movie that could certainly have been made better.  If ever there was proof that George needed someone else doing his directing and screenplay, this was it.  

3 had parts in it that were horribly acted and directed, but overall I thought it was a pretty good movie.  Some parts were really quite good.

What sinks the series as a whole for most people is, as most have stated already, nostalgia leading to unreasonable expectations.  And George Lucas not knowing when to step back and let more talented people execute his vision.

I didn't watch the original trilogy until I was at least 15-16 and even then I thought they were ok movies and a bit dated looking, not fantastic.

That said, EP1-3 were steaming piles of shit.  One thing above all else though, beyond acting or racist aliens or whatever lore bashing took place....was lucas' hardon for greenscreen and CGI.

"oh look, this is cutting edge tech, let's use it for everything!" the movies just looked plastic and fake and so did nearly all the creatures as well.  People need to realize that sometimes still having people in costumes and the occasional muppet looks better than doing everything on your pc.(ironman is a good example of blending)

In all fairness the english language is replete with words that are essentially synonyms, but can be taken to mean slightly different things depending on context; or words that can be used interchangably despite having slightly different meanings. I can't think of many off the top of my head, 'dinner' and 'supper' might come close as another example.

You're dead to me.

lamaros' taste in films is a bit unpredictable based on what I have read.

This. This times fifty.

Ok, so 4-6 were space opera pulp, essentially war movies mixed with dimestore philosophy. Luke was a whiny twat, and there were Ewoks. But the effects had a solidity, a weight to them that no one else matched. They were for lack of a better term, immersive. Eps 1 and 2 were AWFUL, SHITTASTIC examples of the worst use of CGI, not because they were particularly terrible (though some scenes were so badly shot and lit they WERE that bad). There was just no excuse for a special effects director like Lucas with the massive budget he had to have scenes that looked on the level of a Sci-Fi original movie. As a technical exercise, 2 and 3 were abject failures of overreach and under execution and a guy with the history that Lucas has should have NO FUCKING EXCUSES for some of those scenes. And unfortunately, he's infected the Indiana Jones trilogy with the same plastic-looking bullshit in Crystal Skull.

Empire stands out as the only thing close to a FILM in the whole series. It has an artistry to the direction, a completeness and a vibe that none of the other movies matched. It even ends on a cliffhanger, yet it feels complete. It's a closed circle. Meanwhile, even after watching all 3 goddamn original movies, none of them feels complete either on their own or as part of a larger narrative. Watching Ep 3 by itself is impossible because it doesn't even tell its particular part of the story well enough to give you all you need to enjoy it. It's just BAD. Anakin's transformation to evil makes no sense because it hasn't been set up at all - he just comes off as a whiny twat. His movement from hero in Ep1 to ultimate bad guy in Ep 3 feels like it has about as much basis as Luke's whining about having to wait a year to go to the Academy in Ep 4.

I could write all day on just how fucking bad 1-3 were, by themselves and in comparison to 4-6 and none of the criticisms would need to have anything to do with nostalgia. That's because 1-3 aren't shitty movies because of rose-colored nostalgia glasses, they are JUST SHITTY MOVIES.

True, but the more commonplace words you learn when you learn the language. Jargon is usually not known by teachers, but by the professional group using the Jargon. Maybe a German film buff could have told me, but I went straight for the source instead.  :wink:

Reading.  Not just a place in England.

 :oh_i_see:

I can at least respect an opinion like Schild's for being consistent. If you tell me you think they were all pretty much childish and shitty from 1977 onwards, then I know you're not inventing distinctions between them that don't exist. On the other hand I don't pretend they're universally of precisely the same quality, so if someone downrates a particular movie in relation to the others because of ewoks or Jar Jar or lolsand then fair enough. Personally I rate them thusly, based on nothing but how much enjoyment I derive from them:

1) Sith
2) Empire
3) Jedi
4) New Hope
5) Phantom Menace
6) Clones

Hey look, the bottom two slots are occupied by prequels. Thing is, I don't view the differences between 3 through 6 as being particularly huge. I love Sith and Empire, the other four are all various shades of a good fun time. But pretending the old three were all masterworks and the new three are all vastly horribly different? Bullshit. When the Rotten Tomatoes guys went out a few years ago and looked up quarter-century old print reviews of the original trilogy, they found the same bunch of negative reviews and "WOODEN ACTING HAHA" criticisms you'd see for the prequels. Hell, the original trilogy actually got slagged worse when they crunched the numbers.

And I have to tell you, I've really had enough of overly-opinionated thirtysomething fanboys and their constant teary-eyed bleating in general. OH NOES MY CHILDHOOD HAS BEEN RAPED. Fuck off, crybaby. Phantom Menace sold almost a billion dollars worth of tickets worldwide, somebody liked it. I'm tired of their screaming about "respect for the source material" everytime some bullshit movie comes out. If some guy in a beret wants to tell me the Transformers movie is bullshit, fine. If some manchild with an action-figure collection wants to tell me the Transformers movie was a desecration of a classic, they can fuck right off.

Just what in the holy monkey fuck was there to like about Sith? Seriously, tell me what was so ZOMGAWESOMECOOL. Because frankly, I'd rather watch 12 hours of Ewoks fucking than 2 hours of Revenge of the Sith.

Hey look, it's the guy I was thinking of as I typed that last paragraph.

So that's an "I won't answer the question then?" Or "My last 2 posts were just trolls because LOLZNERDRAGE?"

The first two prequels were bad enough that I didn't see the third. I just didn't want to give the guy anymore money. This isn't the first place I've seen a general sentiment that it was better than Jedi, though, so maybe I'll get around to it eventually.

To me the worst element in the first movie was not Jar-Jar or Anakin's mom or even the weak dialogue, it was Anakin himself and all the stupid DERP DERP DERP I AM FLYING A FIGHTER LOL stuff, combined with the fact that they failed to really set up anything in his character to lead to his face/douche turn in the 2nd movie.

While it's Star Trek (I know! verboten in a Star Wars thread! I'm a rebel!) I can't get this song out of my head while reading the comments in this thread:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyhhFzE5O5U

And Star Wars Episode III sucked and especially for these two reasons:

"NOOOOOOOOoOoOOoOoOooOoOOO!"

 And emo Anakin one day trying to be Mr. Good Guy, the next killing children to possibly maybe kinda sorta he's not real sure save his own. That leap from good guy to murderer of children overnight is some of the shittiest writing in the history of cinema. Seriously. I was insulted.

I generally just fast forward through the talking and whining in the prequels until I get to the lightsaber duels.  That's where the good shit is at.

Otherwise, the prequels didn't offend me much and Empire is still the best of them.  

It's more "Why would I possibly care to have any sort of debate or exchange of ideas with a walking caricature of 'NOTHING IS AS GOOD AS IT WAS WHEN I WAS SIX! NO IT'S NOT ME!!!' fanboy rage?" Sit around all you want, howling at the moon about a three-second shot of some groundhogs in Indy 4, or whatever the latest inconceivable travesty is.

WUA is why you never go full retard.

Epic burn. Really.

You're trying to defend revenge of the sith, anything wittier would be a waste.

'
So you really don't want to actually discuss and debate the movies then? Right-o. You'll notice that I did mention in my post above yours that I could debate the shittiness of Sith without ever reverting to nostalgia, purely on the merits or lack thereof for that one movie. The prequels don't suck because they can't hold a candle to the first 3 movies, they suck because they are poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed and poorly conceived on their own.

But you don't actually want to discuss the merits of the movies, you want to troll with LOLZNERDRAGESTARWARSSHEETS!

I just don't find your whole "I AM OUTRAGED OVER POP CULTURE! INSERT CLUMSILY-CONSTRUCTED COMPOUND OBSCENITY HERE!" schtick particularly amusing or worth engaging. Sorry. I don't really care whether you think the Star Wars prequels were awesome or total bullshit, but pretending the originals were something vastly different is just plain Not Correct.

No, I don't want to have some giant boring nerd debate over it. That shit is more tired than Trammel threads. Adios.

Bollocks.

The original Star Wars was different, right from the opening sequence, I felt the later efforts mostly failed at recapturing some of that magic.  1977 was a pretty good year overall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cross of Iron, Demon Seed, The Duellists & Slap Shot.

Bullshit.  What sinks the prequels are some of the worst CG special effects ever done, Jar Jar, the Trade Federation aliens' Chinese accents, horrible pacing, and all around worse acting and dialogue than the originals.  I don't think the originals are amazing classics (in fact I could go the rest of my life without ever watching them again), but as a whole, the prequels are worse on every level.

There's links all over this page to other threads that could have used instead of being subjecting to a "boring nerd debate" that is "more tired than Trammel threads." Since you knew exactly what kind of thread you'd be entering when you posted, you were being a trolling turd burglar. So fuck right off.

I haven't watched any of the prequels in a few years (my one viewing of Sith was my only, despite not totally hating it). I haven't even had a slightest desire to.  Velorath touched upon most of the reasons for this.  They're just bad.

Guys, can we not do this ?

Maybe Margalis can post about how much he hates the LOTRO triology or someone could post a negative BIIF of Portal.  That would distract people.

Wasn't there an MMO based on Star Wars a few years ago? Does anyone here know how that went?

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kessel_Run

wat

Yeah, it's all retconning 15-20 years later. I'm more inclined to believe Lucas used "parsecs" without knowing wtf it was, only that it sounded 'spacy.'

Yes, guys, 4-6 are on the same quality as 1-3 and target the same audience.  The biggest saving grace of the originals was that Lucas didn't have enough money to do way too much shit, as shown by the results of his fiddling in '97.  His original "it's the story not the effects" mantra obviously was just the sour grapes rationalization of a guy who DIDN'T have money, given his work after he had a shitload of it.   

As for the "but my dad/ uncle/ grandpa like the originals" arguments.  Yeah, same for the prequels.. some 3 year old's dad/ uncle/ grandpa enjoyed them as well.. so in 20 years when YOUR kids are bitching about Lucas Jr. raping their childhood with the film adaptation of that Dark Horse Comic series with the stripper Twilek this whole debate can happen again. Glee.

My stance as well.  I saw the first prequel in the theatre, and while I didn't outright hate it, I sure had some issues with questionable script, over the top obvious special effects and just wasn't impressed.  I saw the 2nd one a few months after it came out... and I just wanted to smack the hell out of the 2 lead actors for being so whiny and crazy.  I almost turned it off right in the middle of it, that was how annoyed I was.  I refused to see the 3rd one because of the first 2.  I figure Lucas had his chance to win me over and hadn't done so.  And this is from someone who wasn't around for the first trilogy and was only relatively amused by them.

None of them are great films, but I find the old ones more humorous than the new ones. I agree with the sentiments about too much CGI actually detracting from the newer movies.

Yes that stuff was likely a retconn. However what I was really responding to was ghost's incorrect statement that Harrison Ford made a mistake in his line. The novelization does use different wording but in the script it was always "12 parsecs". Guinness' reaction is cause he knew Han was bullshitting, as was written in the script.

WE MUST DEFEND OUR HONOUR!  :oh_i_see:

My biggest complaint about the prequels (script issues aside) is that they turned the Jedi from a group of 'good', enlightened warriors into a group who deserved to have their asses kicked because they were all jackasses. Yoda especially.

Return of the Jedi was just as poorly paced and had just as many shitty toy tie-ins as any prequel.  All I can remember is people wandering around in a forest for roughly half the movie.  Empire is good, the first 30 minutes or so of ANH (until the end of the cantina scene) is good.  

I just rewatched the prequels, and with the distance of a little time, Phantom Menace is actually the BEST of the three (editor's note:  this isn't the same thing as saying it was good  :grin:).  Partly because of no Hayden Christiansen, but mostly because it had the most coherent story- having the best lightsaber duel also helped).  Anakin's fall in Sith made no fucking sense and was horribly acted, and I've blocked out Clones entirely for some reason (thank you brain).  

Despite all that, I still will watch the TV show.  Yeah, I know, I'm part of the problem.  

Well I just watched 4-6 to see how things stack up. I can certainly agree that 4-6 has a more connected storyline and some likable characters (Ford, really), but the silliness is still there too. If I had to watch them again now I'd probably go something like

Sith
Empire
Phantom/New Hope/Jedi
Clones

In order of preference. (Though I'm not keen on watching any of them again anytime soon). Clones is far and away the worst. Take Jar Jar out of Phantom and replace the big boring CGI battle with something that's actually fun to watch and I'd probably have it up near the top, though...


I found the idiocy of every single character bar the Emperor in 1-3 very hard to believe. I can understand the pompous passivity of a few of them, after all they've been making time for a 1000 years of so, supposedly?, but it's still a stretch to believe everyone in the galaxy just twiddles their thumbs and lets Palpatine manipulate them at will.

But again, no point getting into plot flaws with the series, we'd be here all year.

What, exactly....made revenge of the sith a good movie?

It had that Hayden Christensen in it.  He's dreamy!   :drillf:

The prequels just felt like they had no soul to me.  The original trilogy are not the most awesome movies ever, but they're fun to watch, and are pretty amazing (technically) given their age.  I much prefer the somewhat sparse and simple settings of the originals to the plasticy and cold "look it's all 3d sets" of the new. 

Hell, I'm bitter that the DVD release of the originals ended up as the special edition crap with more 3d critters edited in, etc.  Would have been perfectly fine with as reasonably restored transfers as was possible, without mucking with what worked fine.

I think most movies would benefit from having imperial walkers edited into the background.  It would have improved the latest Indy movie. 

I feel sorry for Lamaros after reading his post above. Having his taste in movies must be like going through life tone-deaf or without taste buds.


It wasn't the plot, the writing or the acting, that's for sure.

Who said anything about any of them being good? Or were you asking WUA?

I saw it in one of the interviews with Alec Guinness.  Guess he didn't have your little linky.

EDIT:  I thought this was common knowledge and was something that I (and everyone I know on this side of the internet) always believed was true.  It appears that Google doesn't have my answer, so I'll go home and watch what I've got at home. 

I wonder how they are going to go back and "erase" Chewbacca dying many years from now?  Hmmmm.  Lucas' problem has always been trying to go back and create a plausible beginning to his story........and there are too many little loopholes like this one that he has to close up. 

Its simple.  They say "fuck the EU" and make Chewie a cybernetic Jedi that teams up with Boba Fett for sexy and dangerous detective adventures across the galaxy. 

Star Wars was a near perfect movie because it was what it was. It delivered on that and it never tried to be more. It was a very well done tribute to space opera with just the right blend of seriousness and occasional dorkiness and for the time it stretched the boundaries for both special effects and sound.

It was so simple. And a lot of things just clicked at the right time.

Star Wars was not, however, a chapter in some grand pre-planned epic about the universe. It was a one off action adventure picture. As his ego inflated while chewing peyote with crazy Joe Campbell, the real world mythology of Star Wars as a phenomenon got retconned by Lucas worse than the plotlines did. Empire took some of the same characters and themes and made it more serious, but still kept to the action adventure genre. After that it was all junk. Lucas' ego was too big and he was too interested in trying to mine The Power of Myth for ideas rather than 1930s-50s pulp cinema. This ends up like John Wayne doing Hamlet. It's not the right match and it showed.

You and WUA are claiming that sith is the best of all the movies, it's not.  Sith is a festering piece of shit and while I will agree none of the star wars movies were 'great' 4,5,6 could certainly be considered good.  Sith was not.  The acting was terrible, the special effects weren't even campy, they were just bad and they ruined all the action scenes.

Even if you don't like star wars how can you objectively say sith was the best? It's like saying "I'm no fan of video game movies but I think dead or alive was the best translation to film"  No, just no.  I appreciate WUA is probably trolling...or at least that's the only explanation that makes sense because the alternatives just boggle my mind.

It got the best at-release reviews (http://web.archive.org/web/20051223055919/http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/comments/?entryid=197859) of the entire series and made a hojillion bucks besides. Neither of those metrics neccessarily indicate whether a movie was good or bad, but they do nicely refute the disgruntled internet nerdrage axiom that "everyone" hated it. So sit around and "boggle" at the world, you crybaby cunt. I feel no need to defend my taste or opinions to the likes of you.

Translation: Got nothin.

Translation: I'm past humoring the Internet Faggot Inquisition.

See, the thing is, my attitude has nothing to do with what anyone thought of any particular movie. I liked Sith. You didn't? Okay. I can't really think of any movie that at least some people aren't willing to call bullshit. What has me hanging around in this thread is this overentitled self-important notion on the part of some people that their opinion is meaningful to anyone but themselves and more widely-shared than it is.

Or to attach this conversation to a completely different movie, I don't give a shit if someone goes "Pitch Black totally sucked ass!" because why the hell would I? But that isn't what we have here. Here we have you twats going "Pitch Black was shit and everyone in the world thinks so! What, you think it was better than Chronicles of Riddick? FUCKING FUCK FUCK GET IN HERE AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF IN DETAIL ASSHOLE, YOU OWE US THAT!!1!"

When in fact, nobody owes you twats shit.

Translation: Got nothin except a sandy vagina.

By the way, I know it's fun to paint me as the crazy Star Wars fanboy who defends any besmirchment with flamethrower in hand, but I'd just like interweb history to record who wanted to have an in-detail debate over the specifics and nature of Revenge of the Sith, and who thought that was a stupid idea and that they should just get over themselves.

 :oh_i_see:

For someone who disclaims a desire to defend the honor of St. Lucas you sure rush in like a mama bear protecting her cub at every mere hint of criticism. Me thinks you doth protest too much.

Nope. I used to bother debating this shit, but anymore I realize there's neither need nor reason to. In this thread you'll find me listing the movies in order of "nothing but how much enjoyment I derive from them" and slagging the antifanboys who started jumping around in little bareknuckle boxing stances wanting to e-fight about it.

Go on, read it.

The derived score of WUA's "Star Wars Enjoyment Scale" is actually used in the Crueller-Hockins Fun Inversion Ratio. Whereby anything WUA likes and compares to Star Wars is inversely proportionate to how much someone else would like said thing depending where on his scale it falls. For example, if WUA said he liked The Rock as much as Episode 2, there's a fair chance other people would like The Rock far more than him. But if he said he liked Shoot'em Up as much as Empire, odds are no one would like Shoot'em up.

Don't question it. It's science!

Damn you Schild! I challenge you to e-battle over this! You cannot merely state your opinion and then fail to debate me over it! This is serious internet business! Debate, lest I harry you with "translation: <stuff>" posts!

Your antics go far beyond this thread and span a time frame of years.

That post was nothing but cold, hard fact.

Go ahead, look up "Crueller-Hockins Fun Inversion Ratio" in wikipedia. Though, it might not be there, there's been a battle over some of the numbers and some troll keeps deleting it, so you might have to dig through some history.

Look it up? Who do you think keeps deleting it?!

That bastard Crueller. You were just an amendment. You see, it's actually based on Cruellers ranking of the Matrix trilogy, but it was amended with your ranking of Star Wars because a six point scale is better than a three point scale. Also, no one liked the top score of "I Know Kung-Fu." Hockins thought it would be funny to use terrible lines from the movies to describe the possible inversion of said movies - unfortunately, after about 2 years, Crueller just couldn't take it anymore. He moved to Nairobi, opened a hut where he sells chicken entrails, and spends all his money on a satellite connection to the web just so he can vandalize the wikipedia entry.

He's a dick.

I often like to think of myself as a man of science, even though I have no particular knowledge or qualification that would possibly justify such an opinion. I'm glad I could do my part.

I look forward to providing more data when those Riddick sequels come out.

I could wax lyrical on the terrible piles of shit that the LotR movies are, how they only work as films when they stick very closely to Tolkien (and that is tragically infrequent, rendering 99% of the viewing time wasted) and how the extended cuts only shovel more shite on the pile with their ludicrous liberties (the confrontation between the Witchking of Angmar and Gandalf the White should be rammed frame by frame up Jackson's arse and fat bitch Boyens should be forced to eat the bloody awful "How to Write a Screenplay in Fifteen Minutes" books she presumably learned and from which she appears to quote from in her idiotic commenaries).

However I wont, as this thread is about Star Wars...  

Edited for rage-blind typos.

You stated your opinion. When asked to elaborate, you shifted into "Internet Cool Guy Who Is Above the Fray" cliche and said you wouldn't talk about it. You've spent more posts in this thread talking about how you don't want to talk about it than it would have taken to just offer up why you liked it. It's the fucking Internet, you trolling douche. Who said it had to matter for anything? I personally would have liked to hear what about the movie you enjoyed. Maybe I missed that part, or I'd just like to know what anyone sees in that movie that's positive. I'm perfectly willing to give some things a second chance. Fuck, I gave Lucas more than enough chances with Attack of the Clones even after Ewoks and a little kid destroying a star ship by accident in Phantom Menace.

For the record, I actually put Phantom Menace second on my list of Star Wars movies, above Ep 4 and below Empire. I didn't mind Jar Jar or the Gungan version of Braveheart when the movie came out. My biggest problem with Menace was the kid accidentally blowing up the Federation base at the end. The lightsaber action in Menace beat everything else in the entire series, including the set pieces in Empire. So when I say that Sith is a piece of shit and you say it was your favorite, it's not because I automatically hate all things Lucas, or because I'm holding some candle for the prequels. Jedi was a decent movie ruined by the fucking Ewoks, but it was still a better movie than Clones or Sith.

We're in this thread to discuss things for no other reason than we have time to waste and an Internet connection. You are obviously not above the nerdraging debate, you just happen to like poking the nerds and then acting like you are "cooler" for having done so than for showing yourself to be just as big a nerd as the rest of us.

I still don't care. I'm an internet cool guy who is above the fray.

What the fuck are you on ?

As to Star Wars ;  Can we please NOT do this ?  It's utterly pointless.

Here's the best bit about all 3 of the prequels :  You're Welcome. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npYSZ3IvUBs)

I like this guy.  He's my kind of frothing nutjob.

I think it's all a matter of perspective. My last girlfriend thought all the Star Wars movies were equally stupid, and her opinion is more important than anybody here because 1. She was hot, and 2. She let me do naughty things to her.

I've been reading a compilation of selected interviews with Lucas from 1973-1999. I have tremendous respect for the guy. Lucas found a way to work outside the studio system and not have to deal with the "sleazy used-car salesmen" of Los Angeles in order to get his work done the way he wanted it, without tampering. Having said that...

The prequels have some lame scenes and some fantastic ones. Lucas would have been wise to hire screenwriters and directors for the prequels but part of his problem is that he only hires people who share his vision to the 't', which means he ended up doing the projects himself. He has admitted on numerous occasions to hating writing and not being able to work well with actors. All that translates clearly into the new Star Wars movies.


A couple side notes: Lucas said back in 1990 that he expected each prequel to cost about $35mil. A couple years before that he said Luke would be 4 years old by the end of Ep. 3.

A link to the compilation book if anyone is interested. (http://www.amazon.com/George-Lucas-Interviews-Conversations-Filmmakers/dp/1578061253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245883169&sr=8-1)

Firstly I am not making objective statements. I'm saying if I had to watch them all again I'd probably look forward to Sith the most of the lot.

Reasons?
I dislike The first 45 mins of Jedi as I find all the Jabba scenes painful and then just when I'm getting over it you get Ewoks. Funny for about 5 mins but I don't really care to watch it again anytime soon. Luke's 'acting' is by far the worst in Jedi, which has no really good scenes to my mind and a plot that I don't really get. The final space battle is insipid and takes up far to much time, and the Ewok cheese as I have said is just ugh. Also sappy hooray endings don't really light my fire.
New Hope I also dislike for far too much Luke screen time and the fact I'm sick of the stupid hero tropes it sets up. The fighter battles at the end of New Hope are probably the most boring thing ever put to film, and there is way to much "use the force" voice-over throughout the movie. Also the rescue Princess scenes shit me to tears. The garbage unit schick? Ugh.
Empire is ok for the most part but it's a bit boring at the same time, and it was second in preference. I like snow, so a snow planet is fun, I like cloud city, and I think Ford is pretty amusing in his rom with Leia.
Clones I don't have to talk about, everyone knows why it is so bad.
Phantom is ok for some of the early and later scenes (I much prefer the extended Pod race to the space battles of 4-6, for example) and only CGI Jar Jar is really unwatchable.

But Sith is first in preference because it's pretty consistent throughout with not as many "ugh, fuck that" moments as the others. I don't mind the action--most of the fights are ok or even fun (Obi vs Grevious is a bit meh), there isn't a whole lot of Aniken romance action which cuts down on the cringe, and Hayden actually does a good job of playing a petulant dick you can't stand, even if he doesn't make the character believable. I also like the 'republic falling apart' aspect of it, and find the scope just general and bland enough to entertain without causing me to think "what the fuck, how does that make sense" as often as the other films.

So yeah, that's why Sith was preferred to the others. I'm not sure if you really cared, but that's how I felt about them in general.

edit for typos etc.

Ah! My personal windmill!


http://starwarz.com/starkiller/scripts/thestarwars_revised_fourth_draft_jan.htm

Somewhere between here and there EU writers with no wit and little imagination tried to explain an error that didn't exist, and Lucas, being old and dodgery probably doesn't even remember it anymore. Hell, his ex-wife probably threw that line in there.

I wouldn't trust that script as being what they actually used and suspect that there's a certain amount of revisionism going on. It's apparently the revised fourth draft from Jan 1976 but was publicly published in 1979. That site also links another revised fourth draft dated March 16 1976 which still refers to Greedo as "Alien", refers to Han Solo's ship as "Pirate Ship" in the sluglines rather than "Millennium Falcon", has a lot of lines that never made it into the film and and some slight differences in dialogue that was in the film.  The supposed Jan 16 draft is pretty much exactly as the movie.  Bearing in mind that they started shooting at the end of March 1976, I suspect that the March 16th draft was the actual shooting script and that the line regarding Ben's reaction to Solo's claim was added subsequently.

Not that I'm saying Lucas was wrong or that there actually was an error - it's a fucking fantasy sci-fi film with lots of "made-up" words that were borrowed from other languages or created to suit his world.  Any quibbling over the meaning of a particular word in the script by nerds and geeks is just ridiculous self aggrandizement and mental masturbation.

They are so exotic that they measure time with parsecs! Oh what a fictiony world!

You guys and your crazy lack of SW geek knowledge.  It has thoroughly been retconned explained in the EU that doing the run in 12 parsecs is a result of Han going closer to the event horizon of the Maw (blackhole) cluster than anyone had ever successfully done before.  He wasn't flying faster, he was shaving off the corners.  It's like saying I ran the 400 meters in 350 meters.

Sadly, I know this so well that I even struggled to remember what you guys were what the original argument was about.  And to be honest, of all the shit in the SW universe that requires retconning, this is one of the better jobs they did.  There's better shit for you to pick on.

Like the fucking Midichlorians ???

Finally! Something mentioned in this thread that truly pisses me off. Midichlorians? REALLY? W.T.F. Lucas?!?!?! That, out of everything, is what sends me into major nerdrage. Fucking goddamn midichlorians.

One review of Phantom said Midichlorians were like watching an Autopsy of Santa Claus.

I had to agree...

Yes that was the retcon we were referring to (as explained in the above Wikia link).

I'd like to add some more nerdrage topics to this thread. What shall it be? Anime? Star Trek? Doctor Who & Torchwood?

I refuse to read this thread on account that someone said the first two movies "weren't that bad."  This is a clever troll, right?  RIGHT?!

 :why_so_serious:

I vote for Dr. Who nerdrage.  Its fun to read British swear words.

If you hate the Lord of the Rings movies you should be killed. Look, I can understand someone not being as forgiving of gungans and lolsand as I am, but if you hated the LOTR movies then I just have to ask WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT?

Tom Bombadil, obviously.

The first two movies were awesome.  As to ROTK, I could have done without the slow motion bed-jumping scene, and the roughly 15 other times in ROTK that Merry and Pippin cast longing looks into each others' eyes. 

I can understand why between 3-10% of men would've liked ROTK, though. 

Sometimes it's better not to try explain things.  Let the force be the force and don't worry about what exactly it is.  Ah well, Lucas...

The third LOTR movie was awful and boring.


Recently I've been on a Cronenberg kick. So I guess my answer is "movies that aren't for 12-year-olds." Or maybe "movies that are at least slightly challenging and/or interesting." Or "movies that contain a single original thought." Something like that.

I recommend the following http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805648/ (A review here: http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/heart-beating-in-the-dark-new-version.shtml as the imdb page lists hardly anything).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0sc-gS9AqM

Oh the hell with Bombadil. Some things just don't work on film.

I could have done with exactly one less "Legolas does something ridiculous" scene in each movie.

Actually, fanboy tho I am, I'll second that.

Tom Bombadil was pointless selfindulgent asswankery at best, and allegory at worst, it should have been cut from the book, never mind the film.


Thirded.

Also, I could have done without the 'Faramir is a retard' revisionism.

Yeah, I suppose.  I see WHY they did that one though (to make Aragorn 'unique') but the whole fucking point of the parralel in the books was that Faramir, like Aragorn, had 'proper' blood in him.

It's just one of those things you need to take a pinch of salt with.

Like Cate Blanchett chewing scenery and totally fucking up Galadriel.

Yuck.

I'm not a LoTR fan, books or films, but I did find the way they screwed about the Ent bit stupid and annoying.

Thanks, I had almost forgotten about her little CGI moment in Fellowship. 

Sorry about that.

In honesty, you could nitpick the three films all day long, but considering what was attempted (translation of Tolkien to screen) I was amazed at the end result.  In a good way.

I really don't get all the LotR love. They used lots of slow motion, and big operatic music. Other than that, it's just another popcorn flick (or three popcorn flicks, as the case may be).

Reading the Star Wars EU thread, I get the feeling that a lot of prequel hate is because Lucas shat all over the EU, sometimes purposefully. He joked that among the EU fans, "there'll be hell to pay" before the release of Episode 1. I was honestly surprised in Ep 3 that he didn't debunk the "Han Solo saved Chewbacca from slavery" thing.

Retconning is fine. His IP and all. But tell a better story, or heck, at least tell a good one. And it wasn't so much about the EU stuff as much as it was the first three (good) movies.

When I went to see LOTR I nerdraged out. It was a summer popcorn flick, with lots of special defects to cover the shitty acting (which I blame on the shitty director) and some stuff that just made me facepalm. Like Gandalf and Saruman's fight at Orthanc, which was just painful to watch.

I've since gotten over it, and even watch them on DVD every now and then. But while they're ok, they are Nothing Special.

How could you tell? If I hadn't read the books, I wouldn't have understood WTF she was saying, or why.

It's a retarted retcon, and the EU writers should feel bad for making that shit up. It's exactly the kind of nitpicking mindset that got us Midichlorians in Ep1. (Everything must be spelled out for the audience)

Three seperate replies in a row. Now I feel bad.  :oh_i_see:

A friend of mine literally didn't understand at all. All she heard was "VVR DZZ VRR ZZVZZRDR VZZRR I pass the test."

Oh dear god, I think that was the point of the prequels. He purposefully made crappy movies that contradicted the EU, to show everybody how much he really hated them.

As somebody who has paid pretty much zero attention to the SW EU stuff (I enjoyed the original movies, but never got into all the random books and whatnot), I still think the prequels were awful.

Wuh? Nobody sets out to make a bad movie with that kind of budget. Shitting on the EU is fine. But he didn't wake up each day trying to figure out how to get the worst from everyone involved.

It may have only looked that way  :oh_i_see:


It's fine if you want to replace the loosely-defined rarely-read origin story for Boba Fett with some father/son clone thing, don't specifically show that Mandalorian armor deflects lightsabers, or create a new Master for Obi Wan. But midichlorians? Come on. It went against the mysticism from canon, and were a one-time throwaway we've never heard of again on purpose.

Also see: youngling, padawan.

Maybe padawan was widely used in the EU, but I rolled my eyes the first 50 times I heard it. Youngling was worse - it made me laugh.

Midichlorians weren't just a dumb throwaway, though. They were an actively offensive assault on an important element of what made Star Wars an attractive if derivative setting. The Force as mystical 'life-essence' manipulated by seers, monks, wise men (Jedi)? Fun, has a lot of fantasy and fictional precedents that you can invoke! The Force as microscopic organisms that are implicitly heritable, genetic superpowers? Different fucking mythology, dude: you just switched channels to the X-Men crossed with medieval nobility. Not so much fun, or at least a really different kind of mythological foundation.

Bill Moyers deserves to be kicked in the nuts for sucking up to Lucas' belief that he'd created some kind of great Joseph Campbellian deep story. (Frankly, Joseph Campbell deserves to be kicked in the posthumous nuts for writing relatively simple-minded stuff on comparative mythology that invited a dumbass like Lucas to read it and think it was profound.) But with the midichlorians stuff, Lucas basically showed that he didn't even understand Joseph Campbell, which is roughly like struggling with the Cliff's Notes to Goodnight, Moon.

Let it all out, there there.

Be fair.  Microscopic lifeforms in the blood.

That kind of thing really makes you mad.

I never got the impression that midichlorians caused Force sensitivity- I think its more a result of Force sensitivity.  In other words, within the Star Wars universe, you couldn't just drain Jedi blood and inject yourself with it.  If it was that easy to gain force powers, every non-Force-using villain in every EU book would be doing it.  Viewed in that way, I don't have a problem with midichlorians.   

Excellent.  I eagerly await the rationalisation story for when your wife is caught with two blokes in her bed, one in her ass.

Seriously, it's pretty much explicit that it's a bonded symbiote in the blood that causes 'The Force'.  I suspect that we can rationalise all day about that bonding process and how it can't be exploited, but the fact is WE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

STOP ANSWERING QUESTIONS NO-ONE ASKED LUCAS, YOU BIG TUB OF LARD.

Was it explicit?  I don't actually remember how Qui-Gon explained it, other than that Anakin's "count" was even higher than Yoda's.

Not that it really matters, as it's still a bad idea.

Qui-Gonn goes on about how you need the midichlorines to be "in tune" with the Force, and kinda more interesting, that without them, there would be no life.

All something that could have been covered by Qui-Gonn saying "The Force is strong wtih this one" like every other character does.

Makes you wonder if Midiclhorians were an eccentricity of Qui-Gonn, and Obi-Wan just was humoring him. (That's a joke theory a friend of mine made up.)

Leaving aside the EU, all we really know is that everyone has midichlorians and that people with the Force have more of them. I don't really know WHAT the fuck to make of Qui-Gon's statement that without them "life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force" since... uh... if LIFE DID NOT EXIST nobody would have knowledge of anything. So I just shrug, and remember that the rest of the Jedi considered him to be basically a crank anyway.

I don't really have a hard time with taking Qui-Gon's "cause rather than effect" belief on the issue with a grain of salt given that, again, he was regarded as a bit of a kook. Certainly his "be mindful of the Living Force" comment was an odd turn of a phrase that we never heard from anyone else. Again I'm sure the EU has lots to say on this, but I just don't care or pay attention to it. It was like a thirty second scene.

I think George Lucas just can't spell 'mitochondrion'.

That's one possible explanation. A more plausible one: shitty writing in a shitty movie.

Here's the thing: I don't really care. What midichlorians are and what they do is of just about the same interest to me as why only a Furyan can kill the Lord Marshal or exactly WTF that big ball of "evil" in Fifth Element is supposed to be. As in, maybe enough for a post, but still not much. Han Solo and his parsecs? Obvious vocabulary failure, don't care, don't need some rambling explanation.

There are movies where I care about scrupulously logical writing, and then there are big dumb space epics.

Don't drag the Riddick or Fifth Element into a Star Wars discussion.

If you want to tell me you think that Riddick and Element were much better movies than Sith, well then okay, whatever. I like all of those movies and it's not the argument I'm having. But let's not pretend any of them made, you know, sense.

Looking at it solely from that point of view, I have to agree with WUA.

The other two were McGuffinesque but at least advanced the plot.  The midiclorian nonsense was both superfluous and somewhat contradictory to prior explanations.  So I don't put them all in the same category.

Not to mention they were lame.  Giant ball of fiery evil death incarnate?  Not lame.

What prior explanation? It was two or three lines of superfluous dialogue. A handful of lines across the entire series. Nobody gave a shit except for nerds upset to see their own made-up ideas about the Force contradicted.

I'm always entertained when WUA mocks Star Wars nerds for taking it too seriously.

That is simply untrue.  Midiclorians were reductivist compared to the exapansive construction of the force throughout the first three movies.  It isn't a direct contradiction (as I indicated) because it is mechanistic and that was never explained previously but it was certainly different in tone and nature compared to the established narrative.

Nerds may have had a  :ye_gods: reaction to midochlorians but my reaction was more  :uhrr: The fact is it's just a stupid and unncessary explanation.  You don't need a scientific explanation for what amounts to 'magic' in a what was really more a fantasy story than a sci-fi one.  The whole midochlorian thing was switching genres mid-swing and it showed.  It may have been symptomatic of the whole prequels really as so much of the mystery and magic was turned into shitty dime store sci-fi.

                                     ANAKIN

                         Master, sir... I've been wondering...

                         what are midi-chlorians?



                                     QUI-GON

                         Midi-chlorians are a microscopic

                         lifeform that reside within all living

                         cells and communicates with the Force.



                                     ANAKIN

                         They live inside of me?



                                     QUI-GON

                         In your cells. We are symbionts with

                         the midi-chlorians.



                                     ANAKIN

                         Symbionts?



                                     QUI-GON

                         Life forms living together for mutual

                         advantage. Without the midi-chlorians,

                         life could not exist, and we would

                         have no knowledge of the Force. They

                         continually speak to you, telling

                         you the will of the Force.



                                     ANAKIN

                         They do??



                                     QUI-GON

                         When you learn to quiet your mind,

                         you will hear them speaking to you.



                                     ANAKIN

                         I don't understand.



                                     QUI-GON

                         With time and training, Annie...you will




Yes it was that stupid, stop trying to remember it as correlation rather than cause.

That fucking hurt to read. I remembered it as being bad but... wow...

 :facepalm:

I think you guys have had a jedi mind trick played on you because that wasn't as bad as it got:

Heh.  I had forgotten about the whole virgin-birth nonsense.

 :awesome_for_real:

I love the irony of being tagged derisively as a SW nerd (hint: my comment is film criticism not nerdrage but you can never tell the difference) by a guy who posts incessently on the topic and speaks authoritatively about message board spats by obscure EU authors.

Yeah, I had a geek epiphany around here about a year and half ago when someone in some SWG thread was nerdraging about the term "laser sword" being used in the prequels. I was like... uh... that phrase was spoken once. By a little kid. They responded with a bunch of references to stage directions from the Phantom Menace script and quotes from years-old Lucas interviews that I'd never heard of where he used the term. I was just like... wow.

I know I'm "the Star Wars guy" around here because I liked the prequels and don't mind saying so, but don't go thinking I top the f13 "Guys Who Know the Most About Star Wars" or "Guys Who've Given the Most Money to George Lucas" lists. I don't even crack the top ten on that second one.

That's only because numbers 1-9 are all Jain Zar

You'd have to throw Darniaq and I under the bus on that list, too. We just keep our mouths shut.

If that's the metric, the money I've given to Lucas in the last 25 years amounts to whatever royalties he managed to get off of: The three Zahn Thrawn books, 5 movie tickets (two of the re-releases and the prequals each once), the Ultimate Collection Laserdisc set, SWG, KOTOR, and the SW Lego Saga.  I don't even own any of the movies on DVD.

For a Star Wars nerd I'm a pretty lousy one.

I'm pretty close to the top of that list, more than likely.  I won't defend any of it too hard though.  I could care less about George Lucas' canon, because quite frankly...I think I know SW canon better than he does.  Millions of people probably do at this point, including many people on this very board.  It helps that I am a master at suspending disbelief (you have to be with this stuff) and can fill in all the logical gaps in my head.  The best parts of Star Wars, for me, have little to do with whatever George did.

The virgin birth thing is pretty low on my totem pole of issues with the prequels. It's not like Jesus came up with it first.  :awesome_for_real:

Are we talking about the EU? Because I like my Zahn and my KOTOR as much as any good nerd, but let's not act like there isn't plenty of utterly preposterous shit in there, even if you discount kiddie-book insanity like Triclops and little Kenny Palpatine.

I agree with Ab. As far as the plot went he could have just said "woah, I sense massive force in this little kid" and "woah, I get a strange feeling that he is important when about him, maybe it's to do with that hokey prophecy yanno?", which makes it pretty  :awesome_for_real:.

But at the same time, after that scene was finished I was over caring that it sucked and just laughing at the next stupid thing that the movie doled out.

Another view: I've always thought that the original series borrowed heavily from Dune, including the force, and the introduction of midi-chlorians actually brings it closer to the biological aspect of that series. Maybe Lucas was just trying to clear up a misconception that popped up when he borrowed ideas from Herbert without being explicit.

As an aside... it's pretty clear there's a hereditary connection with the force in the originals ("the force is strong in my family") so it's silly for people to assume that only the midi-chlorians added that...

But that gets right back to the shifting genres that were discussed some posts ago :

The Original Star Wars was pretty much a packaged Swords and Sorcery thing.  It was a fantasy.  Less to do with Sci Fi than you might otherwise have thought.  Having a family 'strong in the force' was simply a way of saying 'Voldemort comes from a long line of Wizards'.  It means less than nothing and is entirely mystical.

Having 'My Father has a huge, long and throbbing biology, which makes him strong in the force' just opens it up to Triforcer saying 'hey, wait, why aren't the Southern States harvesting Force using a team of deep south gungans who can sing 'I get No Kick from Champagne' ?

It matters.

I guess I am talking ALSO about the EU.  Everything, really.  Of course much of it is utterly preposterous....it's all preposterous, some bits moreso than others.  I suppose I am just good at ignoring the worst parts.  For example, arguing that Midichlorians is a retarded concept is valid.  It was a seriously big mistake, but I look past it without giving it a second thought.

The biggest problem with the prequel series is that the 1st movie (which was the best of the 3) did not add anything to the narrative that couldn't have been taken care of better in the first fifteen minutes of the second one. Virgin birth? Midichlorians? Not only were they retarded concepts as presented, they weren't necessary. But that entire lost narrative time in the first movie could have been used to add more clone wars stuff, and more time to the whole transformation of Anakin from an innocent who wants to do good to ultimate bad guy. Not having that breathing room to show the transformation is what really sunk the 3rd movie, because Anakin's switch flip from earnest to asshole felt so forced and rushed.

It should have been Qui-Gon chooses a new apprentice who is very strong with the Force (no midis, no virgin birth, no useless mommy character) despite already having a padawan in Obi-Won. There, BAM, we're done with the setup. He could fall in love with Amidala while being assigned to protect her. First movie's idiotic kid saves planet shit could have been completely removed, and now we have 3 whole movies to set up and show the Clone Wars and the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker.

But then I'm just spewing nerdrage.

Anakin never should have been a kid in the first movie. Lucas just wanted a youngster for the amg cute/innocent vibe but I think it hurt more than it helped.  First of all the whole too young to train thing that yoda spouted....wtf? do jedi need to be taken out of the womb?  If anakin had just started around 15-16 and been in his angsty teen years to begin with the whole transition would have made a LOT more sense.  It would have also given the second two movies more time to work on explaining things. 

Well, they are taken as toddlers at the latest, so 10 year-old Anakin (or whatever) was a pretty unusual case.  Too much time to develop attachment, and whatnot.  And that's where I stop, before I begin spouting too much nerditude.

Lucas needs to go back and edit the soundtrack for the Trench run scen in IV to have Vader going, "His Midichlorian levels are OVER 9000!!"

The Empire Strikes Back made Star wars legend. Everyone went "WOW" with the first star wars, but Empire introduced a lot of Zen Mystical stuff that resonated with the audience and made the thing a lot deeper. It was fast passed, it was dark, and the good guys got their ass kicked hard. If you yanked out Empire then the regard for the films would be incomprehensible, but it includes the parts that made it a ledgend. It was also the one that Lucas had the least to do with, which makes me think the guy was a fat idiot that got lucky. Also, the third one proved that he should not be let near a script.

The interesting thing about the more recent films is he had total control. Christopher Lee in his autobiography states that he directed it tightly and that "he knew what he wanted" (i.e. the wooden acting was the way he wanted everyone to act) and he talked about a scene where he left his face totally blank as there was a lot of wind blowing in his face and he could not do any expressions, and Ron Howard, who was on set, started raving that he had everything in his expression. The implication was he didn't think much of the film, to put it mildly.

I thought the recent 3 films were piles of dung. And apparently the clown that played Anakin was in a film previously where he put in a good performance, but he acted the way he did in the film because Lucas wanted him to act like that. Think about that for a while.

If you look at some of the other films the actors on the prequels were in, they can be quite good. But they weren't in Star Wars. I always took that Lucas was a bad director of people from the way he ended up making Ewan MacGregor look bored rather than any other emotion.

Tha acting in the movies was terrible across the board so pinning it on the actors seems unfair. Liam Neeson was ok I guess, but that's literally it in 3 movies. For fuck's sake they even turned Yoda into a bad actor.

The three movies were supposed to be about Anakin's turn to the dark side but as Haemish points out that felt rushed, which is a pretty amazing feat. (3 movies!) If you have 6 hours and the best you can do to communicate the turn is a bad dream montage you've failed in spectacular fashion.

In the end the reason Anakin turned evil is finally revealed as "just because." I wonder if the script reads something like "flash forward 2 more weeks, now he's all evil and shit for some reason TBD later."

Episode 1 was entirely about selling toys and getting kids excited over the new franchise. That's it, if you think it was about advancing the story of Darth Vader or even the downfall of the Old Republic you'd be wrong because all that fucking happens in the whole two hours as far as that goes is the introduction of characters.

I'm still bitter that the "more civilized age" was about 30 years before Luke met Obi Wan.

Thats what destroyed the magic of 4-6 for me. Even more than the Midichlorians. Those mystical Jedi knights and that famed Force that might or might not exist? 18 years ago they were commonplace. Now nobody knows about them anymore? Bullshit.

Indeed.  I was expecting that the prequels would go a bit further back -- instead they're close enough that we get younger versions of some of the players from 4-6 and R2 and C3PO.  It just feels kinda lazy to me.

Which was my problem with it.  Shoehorning old chars in there.  Especially the two fucking droids.

You know, the ones Obi Wan didn't know in the future films. 

 :uhrr:

Perhaps Lucas will assemble an Extra-Special-Mega-Edition of the original trilogy, to adjust them further to fit with the sequels.  Greedo shooting first and random CGI critters inserted into the original films piss you off?  You ain't seen nothing yet!

I'm still angry he couldn't just do a nice DVD transfer without fucking with the originals.  grr.

The thing that annoys me here is that I feel like I could take the isolated interesting elements of the prequels and make them a great story.

1. Arrogant powerful youngster who thinks he knows best, easily seduced into evil, too proud to admit that he's on the wrong side once he ends up there. Fine. Can be done well in 2 movies.
2. Complacent, overcomplicated, overbureaucratic democracy unready to defend itself against a Napoleonic plotter; the few people aware of the danger can't get everyone else to pay attention. Fine. Could be interesting even as pulp fiction: plots within plots, the decent people don't know who to trust, etc.
3. Zen buddhist monks who are too fucking detached and too arrogant about their own nobility, too used to winning, unaware of how isolated and ethereal they've become, how dogmatic their beliefs about love and life are. Think of the subplot in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with Yun-Fat Chow and Michelle Yeoh: two Jedi-like people who are getting old and realizing that their dogmatic views about their spiritual obligations have kept them from finding the love they were meant to love. Do some of that shit, it's a classic. Think Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory--the drunken priest who realizes that being a holy person is not the opposite of being a fallen person, but that doing good only matters when you're alive like everyone else is alive, not off in some isolated monastery. This could have been fucking perfect, and added a whole new subtext to the original trilogy: Obi-Wan gives the future over to Luke because it's time for a new kind of Jedi, because the Jedi were played out.

Just make Lucas the art director: he's not half-bad when it comes to visual styling. Keep him away from the script, the actors, everything else, and let someone else play out those themes with a big heaping injection of pulpy action, and you've got some decent shit brewing.

There is an alternate universe somewhere where these didn't suck.

This is weird. Even as a seven year old boy I could see past the incredibly obvious recognization between R2 and Obi-Wan. I was literally wondering for decades why he lied about not knowing R2, all because of the OMG SKYWALKER THEME BLARING when Obi-Wan said hello to R2.

And we've come full circle. Anyone who thinks this is nerdraging about not properly respecting EU material is missing the point. They could shit all over that as long as they told a good story and made a good movie. A better story permits retconning. Yea, there'd still be pissed people, but it's a much smaller group which cares about the nuance even convention-goers would miss.

But we didn't get that here. I love SW. I'm on that Top 10 list of giving money to the franchise. I also have a very high tolerance for things that would piss off other people (I loved Transformers and enjoyed the sequel). But when you have a franchise this old, you look for respect for the prior material, which I can easily narrow to just the first three movies (regardless of their original, redub1 or redub2 state). I found that respect lacking.

And that is why I was disappointed.

This part bugged me a lot. It's the literalism of the prequels that galls my nerdbone. I felt like Yoda in Empire was just reluctant and a bit stubborn to train Luke. The "Too old" was a lame excuse and he knew it. He was caving in finally. Then Lucas years later reveals that it's literal truth, and Jedi start their training as fetuses, which sucks for the mother. Lightsaber training in the womb gives some fierce gas.

I wish I could quit you.

If there was ever any doubt that George Lucas hates every fucking one of you little bastards, I give you Dancing with the Star Wars 2008 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkTQwP2gFxU).

I cannot look away.

lol omg...that is seriously messed up. 

I need to go find a carwreck where someone is bleeding out their life on a lonely highway so I can watch that for a couple of minutes, to have a wholesome experience by comparison with looking at that.

Don't we ban grief linkers?

 :ye_gods:

Better than the prequels :awesome_for_real:

Also, the future of the franchise! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQpwEo77VHI)

"Utter Trash: 4th Best in Series!"
 :awesome_for_real:

Nor could I. Especially when it turns out there's Dancing with the Star Wars Stars 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wfiEi_ywj8) doing it 90s style.

Ossum. Onna stick.

As far as I am concerned This is the only Star wars prequel worth anything (Was made before the official prequels so quit with the nerdrage)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7a_RelkS8

 :awesome_for_real:

Do you ever think that those dancers have to medicate themselves heavily to be able to go home and sleep at night with that horror weighing on their minds every day? At least most of the dancers are wearing masks so the shame on their faces is hidden. But the MC's? They are just marking time until the day they swallow the barrel.

Why.. .why do you all link these horrible horrible things in attempts to hurt our fragile minds.  The horror.  The horror.

Wha... I don't... who goes to that? What do they do when they're not watching failed actors humiliate themselves? What the fuck? Anymore I think we should nerve gas pretty much everyone who's worn a costume outside of Halloween.

I'm guessing the answer to those questions and more is 'kids' and 'Disneyworld'(/Universal Pictures, whaterver it is). Kids love horrible, horrible things for the most part plus combining star wars and dancing is probably one of the few things that you can get young boys and young girls to want to watch.

He warned us, though.

I'm not sure If I'd want to lose the hawt cosplayers in the nerdocaust.  :oh_i_see:

I had the same thought, but then realized they're such a very small subset of the over-all total I was ok with it.

Yaay yaay! ^_^ Go Chewie, go Chewie! Those videos make me happy! How can anyone doubt SWG's emphasis on entertainers? EVERYBODY in Star Wars can rock out!

Star Wars Uncut (http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/)

Someone has split A New Hope into 472 15 second long clips. You pick a clip, re-film it, and they will stitch all the clips back together to re-make the film.

Moved all of the most recent LotR stuff to here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=17513.0

Why the fuck did I click? Why??? Even worse, I had to watch the whole thing. That may be the ultimate grief link.


How the FUCK did you stumble onto that?

Someone at work sent that to me in email. What's worse is that apparently, it's a yearly thing.

From the STO thread...


Am I really the only one who remembers Obi-Wan going "Gee Anakin sure is arrogant lately!" followed by Yoda explicitly blurting out that it's a problem among lots of older Jedi as well? Or the Emperor going "Your arrogance has blinded you!" shortly after seizing power and immediately before blasting Yoda into a wall?

It's not only intentional, it's not even the least bit subtle. That's even if you leave out things like Windu's smug "Dooku can't possibly be a badguy, he used to be a Jedi!" speech. Or Anakin, on the brink of turning to the dark side, going to Yoda for advice and getting some rote "Just don't be attached!" dogma thrown in his direction while he sits there with a visible "WELL THIS ISN'T HELPING!" look on his face.

A big part of the whole thrust of the third movie was that the Jedi were aloof and unrelatable. Anakin could talk to Palpatine about his marriage, but the Jedi would throw him out if they even knew about it. When Anakin obliquely asks for advice on the impending death of his wife, the Jedi line amounts to saying fuck it and letting her die. Palpatine, on the other hand, is sympathetic and offers a concrete course of action.

Of course Palpatine's advice was all evil and manipulative, but that's the point. The Jedi were so far stuck up their own ass that they weren't even on the scoreboard.

Lucas tries but all of his attempts at nuance seem to be half-assed or poorly implemented. I don't doubt that he was trying to convey that the jedi were guilty of their own arrogance but alternates between ham-fisted and boring while doing so.

I think it's a theme that emerges a bit by accident out of the ashes of Lucas' own ham-fisted storytelling, and only becomes a really clear (and interesting) take on the Jedi through the hard work of geek interpretation. Lucas kind of wants to tell a fall-of-Rome story and he kind of wants to tell a story about the Jedi as heroes with a tragic collective flaw. If he'd really worked towards that, the films could have been pretty durn good (and still had rollicking good action), because they could have had the same basic hook that most tragedies do: the hope that somehow the protagonist will see before it's too late what a mistake he's making, the recognition that the villain couldn't succeed were it not for the flaw in the hero, and the sick, melancholy knowledge that the hero is going to fall.

But if that's the story you want to tell, then Anakin can't be the protagonist unless he's written and played completely differently. Imagine if the story had gone something like this:

Act I: Qui-Gon Jinn, dissenting Jedi who is on the verge of getting booted from the Order because he's had it with the passivity and arrogance of his colleagues defies an instruction from the Council and goes to help with a situation on Naboo. He thinks he sees the involvement of the Sith, his colleagues say "Wolf-crying by a dude who we don't trust". Worse, he meets a teenager who is really strong in the Force and gets him involved in the situation on Naboo, partly because he needs the extra help. (Obi-Wan ends up feeling a little jealous/competitive of the new protege.) Qui-Gon gets killed by a Sith, Obi-Wan takes care of that with Anakin's help, Council feels guilty because they didn't believe, agrees out of guilt to let Anakin be Obi-Wan's padawan.

Act II: Clone Wars start at the beginning (still due to Palpatine's Wag the Dog plan), Obi-Wan and Anakin get involved in lots of battles, Anakin saves the Republic's ass by acting more and more forcefully and with more and more skill, Obi-Wan starts letting Anakin take the lead because his way works, but there's that tension as well as friendship in their relationship--they're almost peers, kind of rivals. Council just keeps sniping and bitching and talking about detachment. Anakin falls in love and has to hide that, too. Starts to really hate the Jedi while he really loves the Force.

Act III: Palpatine moves in on Anakin, seeing he's ready to reject the Jedi because they deserve to be rejected. Jedi are overthrown, Republic goes plotz, Anakin makes an even bigger mess because he's not come up with a more balanced way to wield the Force, just substituting aggression and anger and runaway passion for detachment and head-up-the-assery. Everything proceeds as previously foreseen.

Yep.  Pretty clear to you and me, but we are among the biggest SW geeks around here.  Many of the posters here have stated that Anakin's fall doesn't even make sense, that he just turns from good to bad with little compelling reason.  Truth is, the reasons are compelling enough, but much of it is covered in the books (even in the ROTS book), and what little that is done in the movies are overshadowed by poor screenplay and acting.  It's hard to believe a story when you don't even believe the actors attempting to convey it.

Another little nugget:  Anakin's whiny tirade about not being allowed to be a Master is more than just him being a big fat crybaby.  Though part of his reaction is indeed a result of his own simple arrogance, it is actually largely because he wanted access to certain parts of the Jedi archive that only Masters are allowed access to.  Because he wasn't able to ask for real advice from the Jedi, he hoped he could get something to save Padme through some of the more...forbidden knowledge buried in the archives.  So he understandably freaked when told he wasn't going to be given access.

I really don't want to have the traditional "Here's what Lucas should have done, let me get my notes!" Star Wars geek debate we've surely all been a party to in the past, but saying that theme is an accident or played too low-key doesn't wash with me. Lucas is not particularly subtle, and pretty much slapped the audience in the face with that one.

Anakin: My wif-- er-- someone might die, and I need to know what to do!
Yoda: Eh, just don't give a shit, then you got nothing to worry about. Bla bla attachment.
Anakin: I think you're pretty useless. Just look at my scowl and the SHADOW over my face. Dun dun dun.

Followed by...

Palpatine: Hey, I know you're worried that your wife is gonna die!
Anakin: Er.. wha... well yeah!
Palpatine: Well we can't just let that shit happen! Here's my plan! Bla bla evil evil fuck the Jedi.
Anakin: But you're a Sith. Gosh I am so conflicted. Wonder which way I will go. Dun dun dun.

Whatever else you might say about it, it doesn't require Sherlock Holmes to decipher. Part of the problem is that Lucas is SO lacking subtlety that if he merely slaps the audience in the face with something, instead of writing it on the head of a hammer and beating it into their skulls, they assume it wasn't important or he didn't mean it.

Interesting.  I didn't read any of the novel stuff, so this makes it seem a little more sense.  In the film it just comes off as emo Anakin being emo Anakin.

I essentially agree.  Ultimately, other people in his own universe made it far more believable than he did, even if it was ultimately the same message.  Let's just leave it at that.


See above.  The books, and not just the ROTS book, do a better job of making the "fall" believable and even tragic.  Of course, it's inherently and easier medium to do that with. 

The thing I love, and reflects on the Jedi's arrogance, is that Anakin is to bring "balance to the Force."  The Jedi assume that's good for them, but guess what assholes; there are hundreds if not thousands of Jedi and TWO Sith.  Now you tell me how Anakin's gonna 'balance' things.

Hint:  It involves massive bloodshed.

Pretty clear here too. And I'm probably the furthest thing from a SW geek on this board.

But poorly written and acted nonetheless. Seeing what they were going for and believing they did job of communicating it are two different things.

Right. That's my thing. I get it. It was just done poorly.

Lucas put all the character development in the time between the films.

Even in RotS, Anakin barely changes from the start to the finish.

The reason people don't spot the arrogance thing is because it barely affects either the characters or the storyline. Everyone just says 'hmm yes arrogance' from time to time and it just gets lost in the rest of the dross.


Thing you notice in Khaldun's version of SW1-3 is that real shit happens to the characters. In the actual films they just sit on a theme-park ride commenting on why events are happening around them, and on all the interesting stuff that happened in the years not shown on film.

Yes, the acting in all three films was fucking terrible and not helped by Lucas' insistence that Anakin be 6 years old when they first find him. Children can do nuanced acting and Lucas has no hope in hell of directing any child to produce anything that conveys exactly what a director should want it to.

You are making a very big assumption that the wooden acting was not exactly what Lucas wanted. That he directed it that way for reasons best known to the gods of overhyped idiocy

It's nice to have sophistication on the levels you guys want, and I understand that things are done poorly or superficially here, but bottom line is that they are movies for stupid people. Or people who want to be stupid. Oh, and kids.

It's easy to drive points home this way. Like slogans in a way (also meant for stupid people). Most action movies do it actually, even though Lucas is a bit more transparent.

edit: OK, my post is probably vague.. I'm just skimming around here. I just mean that these movies aren't supposed to be all that nuanced. Just like the original trilogy, it's still an ode to schlock. Lucas has a schlock mentality. He never was sophisticated, nor was the general idea of Star Wars. The problem with the second trilogy is that it simply isn't as fun and enjoyable as the first. Not that it's less sophisticated. But I do think it's entertaining at times.. Enough that have gotten through them.

I counter your lack of sophistication argument with Empire Strikes Back. That movie is an example of almost cinematic perfection. What's different? It wasn't directed by Lucas, the dialogue was written by a real screenwriter and Star Wars, while successful, wasn't so mind-blowingly successful that Lucas had carte blance to ignore everyone else to do what he wanted to do.

Also, and I offer this simply as a point of trivia, the most critically reviled of all six movies when you leave aside the "twenty years later I decided that popular thing was good" reviews and stick to what was in the papers when each one came out. Go figure.

Empire was the most critically reviled at the time?

Um, no. It was received quite positively on the whole. I realize we'll have to actually do real research to adjudicate that, but I remember positive reviews in Time, Newsweek, the LA Times, Chicago Sun-Times, and NY Times. Maslin normally hated this kind of movie but she qiute liked Empire.

When I saw the 2 first movies, the one thing that struck me was just how mindnumbingly insulting they were to me as a viewer, and that came (for me) completely from the fact jar-jar was such a complete fuckwad who should've just been taken out back and shot, not given multiple lines. And least of all be involved in a battle  in any way, shape or form (hi big blue balls that somehow hit just what needed to be hit etc). And I really thought it would've been insulting even if I had been just a kid.

The whole visit-to-clones-of-bobba-fett deal didn't help much, of course.

Having said that, there's been a remake where someone tried their best to remove jar-jar from the movie, and also try to imply things in a more subtle way. I thought that changed the movies from incredibly fucking bad (well, to be fair, the third wasn't /too/ bad) to not too bad, although I must admit I would've liked to see a few of the suggestions from earlier in the thread on how the pre-trilogy could've been done.

Actually I was wrong, the most critically reviled was ROTJ by a longshot. But ESB still took it from critics worse than Phantom Menace did. Link (http://web.archive.org/web/20051223055919/http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/comments/?entryid=197859).

I would argue that a lot of people went in to phantom menace with all their nostalgia attached, especially movie critics.

Never could figure out how they missed this one as well.

Well clearly he'd rebalance it all by just showing them the right path, instead of the one that was making them all arrogant douches.  Evening things out along the way, not necessarily wiping out the ones causing the imbalance.

I always interpreted as just that.. bringing power to the Sith. I thought it was meant to be a sort of joke on the Jedi.

If I were to take it further, I'd say that Luke was the eventual byproduct of all of it. Seemed like an all around more flawed, human type of Jedi (compared to Jin or Mace, etc). His pals too (Han) were kind of antiheros. Not righteous and detached. Then again, that's probably reading too much into it.

It's never really made clear what "bringing balance to the force" means.  It doesn't automatically mean "Team Sith must have equal numbers to Team Jedi."  They could be operating under the assumption that "balance" is something a Jedi works towards, and something a Sith (or whatever evil they feel is threatening the galaxy since they think the Sith are extinct) works against, so the way to "balance" the force would be to kill all the Sith.

I don't think the Sith are evil.. Err, or maybe they don't start off that way. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", etc.. Seems to be what Anakin's deal was, or that Sith Lord that Sidius was talking about, who wanted to prevent death. Sidius himself was ultimately just concerned with order. If anything, what defines the Sith is the need to control everything. To have power over the universe. Later on, Vader doesn't exactly come off evil either.. but a bit of a foreboding, self righteous prick in a way..Not exactly "evil". He thinks he has the moral highground in his dealings. "I find your lack of faith disturbing..." And he does have the moral highground probably. The Death Star generals seemed worse and more emptyheaded. Obi-Wan would also find their lack of faith disturbing. The difference between him and Vader is that Vader will choke a bitch. Luke otoh was balanced... and the prophecy was probably fulfilled about Anakin. Just in his offspring.

[edited] some shit

I believe that Anakin believed that if the Jedi found out, he'd be toast, but we're never told this, and even Padme told Anakin that Obi-Wan wanted to help him. He probably would have been given a harsh choice, to divorce Padme and not assoicate with her, or give up the Jedi, but we'll never know what Yoda's advice would have been, because Anakin continually lied about his relationship.

Maybe the Jedi had sticks up their asses, but Anakin was a mistrustful dick who wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

No, but Lucas has said that the imbalance is the Sith, who take from the Force without giving anything in return.
 
http://boards.theforce.net/The_Star_Wars_Saga/b10456/12176359/?154

Damn, all of my Taoist takes on it are completely dispensed.  :awesome_for_real: Well, that's boring. I figured both the Jedi and Sith were part of the problem.

edit: The reason being is that in Luke's story, he kind of goes against both Vader's wish of "we'll control the universe together" as well as Yoda's urging to not concern himself with his father too. Luke seemed to have an inbetween path.. i.e. "balance".

Also, whether Lucas thinks the Jedi are already "balanced" with the absense of Sith, I don't really like them. I think Jedi suck. You can't even get laid as a Jedi. Anakin got shit for it. It was right that they got destroyed. They didn't really give a shit about being personally involved with humans.. but merely being monk-ish peacekeepers. Not good at all. I'd like to think that in the post-Luke Jedi world, you were allowed to care about your parents (unlike Anakin could) and that you could get laid (unlike Anakin could).  :grin:

Where do they say that Jedi can't get laid, or that they can't have friends? It's unhealthy attachment (where you can't let go) that they advise against. Anakin in the 3rd movie becomes the archtypical wife beater, only with magical force powers.
Look at Clieg Lars. He was sad that Shmi died, but he didn't swear some nutty blood oath on her grave because he could let her go. In the end, Anakin didn't care about other people beyond what they meant to him. He thought he possesed people like things. That's what led him to the Dark Side.

What lead him to the darkside was "oh shit, we have 20 minutes left in the third movie and we still have no explanation for why he's turning to the darkside - cue montage!"

Your main point makes sense.. But as for getting laid, I think there was a scene in Ep 2 where Anakin first took Natalie Portman as a bodyguard..? He said something to that effect.. That he (and was forbidden to) didn't have relationships. Umm except that's what he did in the end. He never said anything about friends. I think it was just marriage. I think they even had to hide their marriage, right? Only Obi-Wan knew.. Then later, Yoda.

Wow, I remember too much about these fucking movies.  :grin:

For what it's worth, the first Kotor game made a deal about Jedi not being able to have relationships.

Since when are relationships required for having sex?


I'd think marriage would be forbidden, since it's a form of attachement to another. Still not 100% sure, since you don't even need to like another person to be married to them.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm pretty sure he was referring to the whole shebang.. I doubt I can find like a youtube clip of that specific scene, but it seemed like it was alluding to real life religious orders and their restrictions.. Like it came off like Jedi had a Buddhist/Catholic monk lifestyle.

Ah. And I see Obi-Wan having a drink at the bar in Ep. 2 and that leads me to believe that Jedi are allowed to partake in 'little sins'. Or at least, it's not the end of their careers.

If attachement is forbidden, it means Jedi make perfect FWB.  :drill:

Hey, even as an older man, he clearly brainwashes some guards, lies and bullshits.. all so he can get into a bar.. have a drink..chops a dude's arm off.. and then proceeds to make a bullshit deal with a Wookie and his shady co-pilot. So yeah, he's not really a good "monk" per se. He doesn't get laid much though, I imagine. :grin:

Now that I think about it, I think I can guess what Yoda's advice to Anakin would be, if he'd confessed his infatuation with Padme.

"A playa, a Jedi must be. Spread the love, my young Padawan, and you will see that she's not that special after all."

More likely something along the lines of 'Put Bro's before Ho's, you must.'

What gets me is when people blame the Jedi for Anakin's fall because their rules sucked. If you ask me, the mistake was made by Qui-Gon. Anakin should never have been trained as a Jedi. If he had a destiny, then Qui-Gon should have trusted in the Force instead of meddling with Anakin's fate.

Wasn't it Qui-Gon's trust in the Force that led him to recruit Anakin rather than leave him there? Besides, once the kid was found, Palpatine would have caught wind of it and Vader would have ended up raping Padme rather than just giving her a gentle caress in Ep. 2. as an even more hateful Sith Lord.

Anakin's deceit and Yoda's inability to stymie the corruption eating away at the Republic destroyed the Order. Yoda had been building an army for the next Jedi-Sith War while one of his top lieutenants was laying the groundwork for the Order's collapse. Obi-Wan may be partly to blame. He knew about Anakin and Padme but never confronted his buddy about it.

I call bullshit on this, the jedi were douchebags towards anakin from the start. Maybe in some magical fantasy EU they were wise teachers but every scene in the movies they treated anakin like an outcast and a renegade from the start. Honestly if your whole life is people shutting you down, how do you think you'll turn out?

Like me.

They shut him out because they knew he was a dickhead who got in through a loophole. And Anakin proved them right by whining and bitching whenever things didn't go his way. So they didn't make him a master when he wanted it. Wah. So they forbid exclusive relationships, and he goes behind their backs. And he even admitted to Padme that he was being a little shit. He chose to be a smark, and got his ass lit on fire for it.

That's a little hyperbole there,  :why_so_serious:. But I honestly think Anakin was as much at fault as the Jedi were.

Anakin was as much to blame as the council.

Ratman summed it up pretty well. He was saved from a life of slavery on a shitty little backwater and all he could do after that was whine about how much he was suffering. Seriously dude? You're a fucking jedi, badass of all badasses in the galaxy and you're bitching. Wanna go back to fixing fucking droids for a Toydarian cheeseball that'll eventually sell you and your mom to some random moisture farmer that'll get the shit kicked out of him by tuskens. Tuskens who would, by the way, not be as easy a bunch of targets if the council hadn't, y'know, let you join the fucking club.

The Jedi are pretty fucked up regardless. Recruiting young children, training them for combat from practically the time they're out of diapers, then telling them "Oh yeah no marriage/love/family/whatever for you!" when they get older? Heh, yeah, I guess those five-year olds should have considered whether they ever wanted to get married before they... signed up... er... were taken.

I mean Palpatine may have fucked over apprentices like Dooku and Anakin, but at least they were full-grown and powerful men when he recruited them. Not, you know, toddlers.

Yeah, but he pretty much fucked up Maul from go.

That said, yeah the order was quite broken, but there's plenty of blame to go around.

Eh, plenty of religious institutions recruit children at a very young age. When you're talking about a life that's so radically different from the mainstream in many ways the only chance you have that someone will cope with it is to ensure that they're brought up in such an environment. When they've grown up not really knowing any attachments except to their teachers and masters they aren't so tempted to run off and get married the first time they act as a bodyguard to some foreign princess.

He was 10....and a slave, yoda seriously can't cut him a little slack? 

I'm not talking about grown up anakin here...if they had found him in his early/late teens this would have made sense.  We're led to believe that he was treated like dirt from the beginning, at the end we're talking 10+ years with the jedi yet through no fault of the jedi's treatment he turns to the darkside? Again, bullshit.

How much younger do you really need to take in jedi? I mean you can just start recruiting from the womb if you want...

I don't believe that a good order of knights could not turn around one angry little kid. Supposedly jedi are raising children left and right but as soon as one comes in with a little baggage they freak and start treating him like the black sheep? It all rings of bad writing, poor understanding of human behaviour and a script that was meant for a young adult anakin from the get go.

It's pretty much canon from Old Republic until Palpatine came about.  People do stupid shit when their loved ones or favorite toys get kidnapped or killed, so the Jedi just said 'fuck it. no relationships.'  It's brought up a couple of times in the expanded universe.  The general idea is you can have friends, but if push comes to shove, you follow the Jedi teachings over saving a friend.

The last few years worth of novels (the Skywalker/Solo clan) has pretty much prove that the old school Jedi council might've been right. 

The Jedi were fucked up anyways.  The main line of succession Master-Padawan went...

Yoda > Dooku (became Sith) > Qui-Gon > Obi-Wan > Anakin (became Sith)

Why?  Because the fuckers trusted the Force so much that couldn't be bothered to have a damn psych evaluation.


They try.  They have a list of force-sensitive children, that they come and take around 4-5 years old.

Order 66 is still the most badass plot ever.  Stone cold, Palpatine.

Yeah, I thought the order 66 part was well done. Then again, like I said, I hate the Jedi.  :grin:

Don't forget that most of the previous Jedi were snatched at a young age and grew up in a somewhat emotion-free environment.

Of course they didn't know how to handle an emo kid. How should they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W45HCyvY-Gg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W45HCyvY-Gg)

"In the name of the Galactic Senate, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!"

Good god, am I the only one that actually remembers that Yopa's big objection to Anakin was that he forsaw massive danger in training him as a Jedi. He said it straight out. He was following his guiding principles but Gui-don said "nope, I know better" When you have a big red alert sign screaming over your head about training you, you cant complain when people start getting pissy when you are bieng, you know, trained. And you certainly cant complain when the person who gave the goddam prophecy acts like a bit of an ass when he sees a trainwreck coming straight for him due to people not doing what the fuck he told them.

I hate the film, and I don't obsess of this film (who's only purpose was to market toys) nor try to geek over the cracks in the so called plot, but even I remember that from the fandom penance

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The whole no-attachment thing is complete fucking retardery though in two important respects (here I'm not talking Lucas, I'm going deep-geek inside the mythos and talking about it on its own terms).

First, we're told on a number of occasions that the Force, the Living Force at any rate, is the energy of all living things, that flows through all life, connecting everything that lives. Fine. Life is about attachment, it's about passion, it's about engagement. How can you possibly understand the Force by taking yourself out of life, by being detached from how almost all living beings exist? I can buy detachment as a mental skill, just as I argue to students that you make much better arguments for your own position by learning how to argue for positions other than your own. But detachment as an all-consuming way of life, as a permanent commandment?

It makes me wish that the EU would introduce a third class of Force users, neither Sith nor Jedi--basically sensualists. Force-users who drink and fuck and eat and love, who immerse themselves in life. I dunno, I haven't read many of the books, maybe there's something like that already?

Second, the Jedi have their position in the Republic because they're incorruptible cops, judges and soldiers combined into one. For that, I get the value of detachment: you wouldn't trust anyone else with that kind of authority if you thought they had strong interests in political outcomes, or self-interests in terms of getting rich. But, on the other hand, this is one reason that it's laughable when a celibate priest (of which there are obviously fewer than the Catholic Church would like to pretend) talks to Catholic couples about marriage. What does he know about it? Similarly, are you really going to accept the judgment of a Jedi cop when he or she knows shit-all about life the way that ordinary folks experience it? If you're a soldier or an ordinary policeman, you're obviously going to respect the badassery of the Jedi, but are you going to trust them, follow them with a whole heart? The detachment thing might work if the Jedi lived up in a bunch of caves somewhere far away from other beings, and wandered rootlessly from place to place. It doesn't work if they're sitting up in a giant fucking temple right near the heart of political power, noisily intervening in everything they take a fancy to intervening in. Naturally almost everyone hates and mistrusts them, because they don't know word one about real life and yet insist they should get to tell everybody else what to do.

Zorba the Jedi?

In a way, that's kind of a general fiction archetype, I would say. And one of my favorites. The whoremongering, drunk, yet wise, badass. It would be interesting seeing a Jedi character like that.. I'm trying to think of someone similar in science fiction.. Not really sure. Kind of a staple of warrior literature/history though. Including Asian literature, who Lucas tries to borrow from with the Buddhist detachement thing.

All correct.  The other thing about not allowing attachment is that it simply won't happen.  They get attached anyway.  Whatever evils they thing they are preventing by condemning attachment end up, in every case, paling in comparison to the evils committed by Jedi trying to cover up their attachments.  This is a constant theme.  Even in small ways it manifests itself.  People scratch their heads about why Kenobi never intervened, but it's for the same exact reason.  He becomes attached to Anakin, becomes blind to his sins and ultimately has no idea what to do about it.  So he does nothing.  Yoda?  Same thing, the old hypocrite.  Windu is so afraid of becoming attached that he goes to the opposite extreme (blind devotion) and it's just as costly.

Actually, Zhan's 'Outbound Flight' deals with this dilemma also.  Jorus C'Boath basically decides 'fuck you lot, I'm taking your kids', no matter what age.

I was shocked when he turned to the Dark Side.

SHOCKED.

No, seriously, STOP.

Eh, I think it'd be a funny storyline. Kind of like those trek episodes where you find the occassional vulcan who embraced his emotions.

Tag & Bink were Force Sensitive. Yeah, I guess it doesn't count.

I always thought the entire Anakin/Padme thing made perfect sense, so long as one took it as the relationship between a clingy obsessive violent-tempered manchild with mommy issues and a lonely personally-unfulfilled woman who had spent her entire post-puberty life up to that point fucking around in politics instead of dating and learning how to spot and avoid that guy who seems really into her but is probably a fucking psycho.

The entire point of the no attachments/ no emotions and only take them early thing is the POWER the Jedi wield.   

The whole thing was inspired by legends of the Shaolin Monks.  Sure, they could fuck you up a thousand ways from Sunday but they had the lifelong training, willpower and self-discipline to avoid doing so.  I have no idea why Shaolin live a life of poverty, but I expect the primal human desire to protect and obsess over our possessions has something to do with it.

Now imagine a guy with all the mytical badass power who's simply born with it.  He'll come into the power and be able to manipulate it on a subconscious level (as QuiGon mentions Anakin already doing) and may even be able to learn to control it on his own.  Do you want to take the chance he'll turn out to be Ted Bundy, or would you rather catch him young and try to raise him in an environment that will at least let other folks of similar power deal with him should he flip out?

None of this explains why the Council would turn away kids, particularly one as strong as Anakin was going to be.  It's a Kid's mythology so there's not going to be a dark "You're too dangerous to live, kid" subplot, but there should at least be a "well we're going to lock you up over here now.."

  I suppose some will chalk it up as another part of the Jedis' arrogance.  "Meh, they're not REALLY a danger, we can handle them if they ever do anything bad, we're the Jedi!"

I like to rail against "The Jedi were the fuckups", but if you catch me on a good day, I'll agree and say "Shit happens." All roads can go ill, and any good intention can go bad. A person can be attached and not go apeshit and blow people away if, say, his wife cheats on him. Or another person might. Add in a mystic prophecy that no one really understood, and I personally don't blame any of the characters. In the end, maybe it was all fated to happen that way.  :awesome_for_real:

But it's not about that. It's about unhealthy attachment. Where you beat the fuck out of some guy for stepping on your expensive shoes that you saved for months to buy, and that represent some sentimental hoobajoo, but in the end you just beat some guy over shoes.

As has been said, the Jedi have the added responsibility of having all kinds of crazy powers. You step on a Jedi's shoes, and he cuts you in half with a lightsaber. A Jedi's wife cheats on him, and he uses force lightning to fry their asses. A Jedi gets in debt gambling on the podraces, and he uses his mind powers to convince the galactic mobsters that that other guy owes them the money.

So the Jedi take attachment very seriously. They know it can lead to desperate places where the *bum bum bum* Dark Side can grab ahold of you.

That way lies Sith.  We had a small taste of grey in New Jedi Order, but that was retconned as Sith hiding really well.  One of the Solo kids learns of a Sith who at the height of his awesome Sith power, was nothing more than a glorified middle manager.

It's all in the codes:
There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no chaos; there is harmony. There is no death; there is the Force.
and
Peace is a lie; there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force will set me free.

They'd be Sith.

The current series is essentially about this problem.  As far as the average person is concerned, the difference between a Jedi and a Sith is almost immaterial.  And since the Jedi aren't directly under the control of the government it becomes a question of 'when is that cult of telekinetic warriors training in the middle of our biggest city going to snap and kill us all?  Maybe we should get those fuckers to toe the line.'

Just because a greeting card says something doesn't make it true.  Life is a biological process.  Life isn't about passion; life sometimes contains passion, but it doesn't make much sense to say they're inextricably linked.  There's plenty of life without passion.  Plants don't form attachments.  Microbes don't lust after their neighbor's flagella.  Most animals don't have stable social relationships the way people do.  Hell, a lot of people (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml) don't have much social contact, that doesn't make them honorary undead.

And even if it did, I don't see how the only way to learn about something is to express those traits yourself.  The field of psychology would fold up overnight if the only way to understand the mentally deranged was to be mentally deranged yourself.  There's no prerequisite for aspiring cardiac surgeons to undergo a triple bypass to reeeeeeally understand it, nor do we require our automotive engineers to weigh three tons and be able to pull a trailer for ten miles.

Sorry but EU means fuckall when it comes to the movies.

But the EU has Plaid Jedi! You can't deny the Flannel!

Coruscant.

That is all.

The EU has it's good points, but on the whole I just pretend it doesn't exist. As far as I'm concerned, after Vader threw Palpatine down that pit there was a thousand years of peace. Maybe Thrawn, then a thousand years of peace after he was dead. Certainly not an endless procession of half-baked warlords and superweapons and wacky alien species and more Sith and oops Palpatine came back as a clone again yadda yadda yadda.

Lucas would agree with you. I like the part where the EU describes C3PO as over 100 years old, then Lucas came along and said "Nah, Anakin built him." That was awesome! Best thing about the prequels? Lucas shitting all over the EU, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because he admits he's never read any of it.

I love Star Wars. ^_^

I agree...Emperor dies and everyone lives happily ever after. The End.
Anyway why would the European Union want to create a stupid after wards storyline? Why does the EU care what happens in Star Wars? Fuck those frenchies!

But then I was excited the European Union had Jedi, I felt more save all of a sudden!

I should know better than to necro this thread, but I don't.  Prospero pointed me at this in-depth review of Phantom Menace and it's fucking awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1AWVLnl48&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1AWVLnl48&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdQwKPVGQsY&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdQwKPVGQsY&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOlG4T1S2lU&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOlG4T1S2lU&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBvp1r2UpiQ&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBvp1r2UpiQ&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORWPCCzSgu0&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORWPCCzSgu0&feature=channel)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIWKMgJs_Gs&feature=channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIWKMgJs_Gs&feature=channel)

Happy Festivus, everyone!   :drill:

Posted this in useless videos. I knew I should have posted this here :D

So, so awesome.

I just spent three hours of my life watching his "Phantom Menace" review and his Star Trek film ones. Apart from the last 2 minutes of TPM, it was fantastic. Plus his "ST: Insurrection" review is even more awesome in referring to an episode where Picard followed orders to yank a bunch of Native Americans off a planet, but completely reversed opinion when it came to attractive white people.

Yes, yes, you should have.  Good work nonetheless.   :grin:

Don't forget the MILF.

Oh man, don't get me started on Insurrection. These nauseatingly quaint folks that the movie clubs us over the head and tells us to love for no good reason have magic particles on their planet that can eliminate disease and double the lifespan of countless billions of people, but Picard doesn't want them relocated because apparently the immortality of a few hundred selfish pricks outweighs all that.

If word of that ever got out, I wonder how long it would be before there were "I wanna live 200 years!" riots in the streets of Federation cities. Screw that, I wonder how long it would be before all the Klingons and Romulans and shit banded together to invade the Federation and strip that planet of it's magic particles for themselves.

WUA - if that is how you feel, watch his review of it (http://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia#p/u/2/qlV3bsafkq0).

Apparently, according to the EU, Obi-Wan had a secret wife, too!

In here, somewhere:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi

 :awesome_for_real:

It just reminds you that it's all utter pish.


What that means is 'Ooops'.  Don't be so Fucking Lame.

The 4th film is now FULL of that shite.  No-one recognises each other, despite having met multiple times for long periods previously.

It's like a fucking Frasier episode.

Tachyons did it.   Mindwipes via time travel.

Wait.. wrong series.

This, but without Thrawn. Who I simply know as "that blue guy in the white suit that people spooge about for some reason."

If you read the books back in High School you'd include Thrawn, too.  Being older now, I'm sure they don't stand up but I haven't read them since.  He was pretty bad ass, in that he was an effective villain instead of just your usual mustache-twirling douche.  He was winning until the moment he died, and he died only because of a very stupid MacGuffin.

High school? Nope, I was well out of High School when Thrawn made his first appearace in some kind of roleplaying supplement (according to wookiepedia). So I was therefore in my twenties when I first saw the character, and he looks like some kind of reject retard GI-Joe villan with the blue skin and white uniform. He could have been the most well-written EU character even, but I wasn't (and sorry, I'm still not) getting past the fact that he looks like a giant reject douchebag saturday morning kids cartoon character villan.

Seriously. The guy makes Star Trek races look legit.

Also. This Link.
http://www.darkhorse.com/Press-Releases/1440/Pictures-and-video-from-Star-Wars-Celebration-IV-6-4-07

 :facepalm:

I watched all of those, best review of SWI ever.  That guy knows WTF he's talking about and funny as hell!

(http://images.darkhorse.com/darkhorse/index_images/news/sw30/29.jpg)
Maul Stanley

Ok, I smiled.

Oh man, that was great. I might watch his First Contact one, just because I'm curious as to what there is to pick on in it. I thought it was pretty solid overall.

Anyway, Thrawn was cool because he was so totally unlike Palpatine or Vader. Thrawn could solicit input from his subordinates, didn't have a hissyfit when questioned, and could do things like retreat from a losing battle without having an egomaniacal meltdown. He came off more like... you know...a professional military officer rather than a strutting megalomaniac.

I don't have a problem with the idea of someone competent rising from the upper ranks to grab the reins of the crumbling and decapitated Empire, making a run of things as the good guys struggle with the transition from rebellion to government. But god damn did they ever beat it to fucking death.

Sure, and if he didn't look like a Saturday morning cartoon reject, I might be able to kind of care in a "some parts of the EU aren't total garbage" way, as I do with the Republic Commandoes. Bue he does, so I don't.

Yea, I'm shallow that way.

Actually, the only thing that didn't work for me was the way Thrawn treated the Noghri.

The very fact that it sealed his fate just made it even worse.  If you read the rest of the Stuff written about Thrawn thereafter, it made even LESS sense.

I agree, though I did enjoy the fall of Jacen Solo.

I always wondered about that too.  It didn't make much sense for him to treat them the way he did, particularly because he himself was the alien outcast in the Imperial ranks.  I suppose the implication was that he could then treat someone else the way he felt treated, but that didn't really fit well with his character.  Ultimately, his level of ruthlessness was just inconsistant.

Brilliant.

It also made me incredibly sad again after I've managed to erase the complete travesty that happened to Star Wars.

*twitch*

Soo, soo good.

That review slowed down a bit towards the end, but it was definitely fun.


Anakin's "secret" wife. Obi Wan never married. Just to clear that up.

Yoda woulda told Anakin to make the same choice Obi Wan would have. Yoda was hard core about the rules, having basically created and effectively run the Jedi Order for a few centuries, only realizing in the end he was training Jedi for the last war.


Everything after that period of time was retcon bullshit*. Thrawn recognized why he was exiled to the outer rim (for not being human), and the Noghri to him were tools more than people. He had an appreciation for cultures (his main weapon), but it's not like he respected them as equals. Even as a non-human, he was as much a racist as the rest of the imperial leadership of the time.

* Which of course is the real fun part of all the EU stuff  :awesome_for_real:

IIRC he saw them as tools because he perceived them as having no real cutlure.  They were primitives who didn't even have "art" which was why it was such a big shocking reveal when they showed Leia what their art actually was.  I don't remember what it was, just that it was a "Oh, hell, Thrawn's wrong here" moment.

Harry Plinkett's Ep. II episode is up (http://www.youtube.com/user/RedLetterMedia#p/u/14/CfBhi6qqFLA)

Awesome.

The creepy new Ep. III Plinkett review is up.  :lol:

http://www.redlettermedia.com/sith.html

Thanks for the heads up. Something to watch tonight after I am into my cups a bit.

The recent one on Trek 2009 is pretty good too if anyone is interested.

I think I feel asleep during one of the new 3 movies, but the first 60 seconds of this review cracked me up.  Batman and Robin, only other movie I ever feel asleep in.

Watching these is the only way to make these movies actually enjoyable to watch.

Gah! His PM rantview was spot on, but his Ep2 and 3 stuff has to scrape the bottom of the barrel for material.

Everything in those movies is the bottom of the barrel.

But they gave net nerds decades worth of material to bitch about.  :awesome_for_real:

Watched this in its entirety this morning. I had to watch the Robot Chicken parody of E III to get the sour taste out of my mouth. The whole thing is depressing. It should be studied in film school the same way the WACO Texas massacre is probably studied at the ATF academy.

Sitting on a couch!

Really enjoyed this, dude made some GREAT points.  Having said that, I wish I had created something that folks would talk about for over thirty years.

I like Plinkett. I enjoyed Revenge of the Sith, but then again I enjoy nitpicking even more.

Wow, totally didn't notice that about Episode 1 - 3. Good watch (as well as Star Trek).

I appreciate his sharpness in looking at the films, but think the misogynist comedy gets in the way. Will watch it later though.

It's more anti-feline than misogynist this time around.

Shot, reverse-shot.

What the fuck is wrong with that person? I mean the review is funny, but the person is seriously deranged if he thinks the surrounding bits add anything at all besides a sour taste for watching it.

He could have cut out the filmed bits with the chick trying to kill him, limited himself to his better criticisms, and trimmed half an hour off the the total running time. Yes Harry, everyone was totally fooled by Palpatine's ascent to power, including "super genius" Padme. She didn't spit out a scornful "So this is how liberty dies!" comment right in that scene, and Palaptine wasn't eventually overthrown and killed in a massive civil war.

Most of it was funny, but occasionally it felt like he was just filling time for some reason.

The misogynist stuff was to build on the Plinkett character. Film reviewing, psychotic, Tony Clifton. He knew he wanted to do a funny voice to make people pay attention more, and maybe wanted to create a juxtaposition from the hyper-intelligent film reviewer and story telling critic with about the worst, unimaginable human being on the planet.

The dude knows what the hell he's doing by his logical arguments and accurate critiques. I'd rather analyze why he did what he did than to say "he should have cut that stuff or done it differently." That's pretty much what he is saying about Star Wars prequels the entire time, and in perhaps the best fashion possible with regards to respect for the material and movie-making and story-telling techniques.

Okay fine, Padme was totally fooled and the "Liberty dies, argh!" line was all in my head, etcetera, and the critique is totally spot-on in every way. Just don't hit me with any more italics. They hurt me so.

Padme's comment needed to be made on a couch or while walking down a fake corridor for it to have any resonance.

Plinkett mentioned this and I have seen it somewhere before;  They have a camera on Lucas and his Yes-Men as they finish watching Phantom Menace.  The look on their faces, as they realize what a turd they just cranked out, was fucking priceless.  You can see Lucas realize, for a brief shining second, that he has raped his own childhood.  Then he starts spinning the movie right there to cover up his fuck up.

I love that scene, because I had always thought that Lucas thought his movies were amazing.  That showed me that Lucas, even in his secluded ranch of yes men, realized he blew it.

I think he put in the chick wanting to kill him bits to show how the hell you actually do filmmaking.

One of my favorite things is that in Lucas's office there appears to be a very large set of Cliff Notes.

Really liked his observation that folks remember IG-88 and other obscure names/things from the first three films and not the recent three.  Took me 30 seconds to dredge up Dexter Jettster again, thus proving Plinkett's point.

Who was the Gungan Boss?  Boss...Natt?  Honestly can't remember.

Once more unto the breach!
(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:TUTHOpTYFJYLMM:http://chanisoft.com/images/ComicBookGuy5.gif&t=1)


This right here is pretty much the most pervasive fantasy of the hardcore Star Wars anti-fanboy: The notion that despite getting better reviews than he's used to and making another eleventy-billion dollars, George Lucas on some level cares about or even shares their opinion. He got off light with the critics and got his new moneyhat, but damn it the internet is outraged and he will acknowledge that, even if that acknowledgement consists of me analyzing his facial expressions!

If we're going to play "Read the Mind of George Lucas!" then I'm taking that picture of him running around in a "Han Shot First" t-shirt as evidence that he considers the "Baww my childhood raped!" crowd amusing at best.


Fixed. Also, was the name IG-88 even spoken in a Star Wars movie? Did he even move or speak? I took him for being Darth Vader's coffee machine or something. Yeah if you remember IG-88 it's all because he was a great character.

Seriously, I don't care whether someone hates Star Wars, or certain parts of Star Wars, or all of it, or whatever. I just don't have any stomach for the perpetually butthurt anti-fanboy who haunts the internet, eternally seeking some validation of said butthurt from George Lucas so that he can finally have closure.

I hated the shit out of Transformers 2 and it staggers me that it managed to make a million-zillion dollars. Nevertheless, you're not going to fucking catch me on the internet five years from now analyzing Michael Bay's facial expressions because I can't have peace until he tells me it was okay to hate his movie.

The other thing that amused me in this one was that Plinkett addressed specifically the two arguments WUA uses constantly.

I think it was during the last Celebration interview with Stewart that Lucas used "amusing" to describe what he thinks about people who delve deeply into Star Wars. He's an independent guy and probably doesn't consider what he's doing to be contempt for long-time fans.

The Cliff Notes on the desk was my favorite part of the review, but Lucas claims to only have time to read comics anyways, so whatevs.

Michael Chabon did an essay about how more children's entertainment needs to have children as it's central characters. He felt that comics in particular are too often about teens and adults. Lucas addressed this, in his own way, and that's great. Good for him. The problem was that he changed the formula halfway through the series. Lucas took a risk trying to be inventive while pulling in the youngsters and made a mistake.

Which are what?

I was too busy being crushed by Plinkett's insightful revelation that most of the dialogue is delivered by characters who are either sitting, standing, or sometimes walking to catch much else. Now all I can think about is how everyone should have been reciting their lines while hanging from trapezes.

That and how that silent motionless pile of tin cans next to Boba Fett in one scene in Empire Strikes Back was a great and memorable character, and how nothing in the prequels could possibly be as memorable as... good old... tin can robot guy.

EDIT: Actually, we have to be getting trolled. Nobody thinks IG-88 was a memorable character. It was a fucking prop.

And yet he's the guy trying to swing some really poorly told epic tragedy about Anakin's fall.

I think people need to take a minute to read some of IG-88's backstory. (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/IG-88)  It's the stuff of neckbeard nightmares.  He was leading a droid uprising to eliminate all biological life, and to this end, controlled the factory that manufactured most of the droids in the galaxy, into which he inserted code which would allow him to control them all.  Also, he uploaded his "consciousness" to the second Death Star and took it over, locking the Emperor in his throne room prior to the last fight.  IG-88 was moments away from the grand reveal (presumably some kind of "EX-TER-MI-NATE" to everyone in the system) when the station was destroyed, thus accidentally saving the galaxy from a threat nobody knew existed.

This is supposed to be an awesome character?  It reads like middle school fan fiction.

The funny thing is, in the context of the first 3 movies, Boba Fett was just as emotionally invested a character as IG-88.

What's my line in this scene ?  Oh, right, I just stand here ?  Ok.  And, in this first film, you're sure I'll be in this scene ?  I won't be cut out ?  I won't be rendered obsolete and then reimposed with CGI tech in a decades time ?  You're sure now ?  Ok.  What was the line ?  'Put Him in the Cargo Hold'.  As opposed to where ?  I mean, I'm not gonna put him in the bedroom, no matter what Robot Chicken thinks.

All the bounty hunters sucked.  What was important was how much fans would wank over them.  Boba Fett just won the Jizz contest, is all.

Boba Fett had some pretty bitchin' armour, and that's probably the biggest lesson to be taken away from Star Wars.

In the immortal worlds of Spike TV: if a guy looks dangerous, he probably is. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riGe6BqyiHA)

So, it's OK for you to nitpick me but I can't nitpick Lucas.  Got it.  Get off your hipster high-horse and watch the clip I said, it's all over their faces when they see the final cut.

As for IG-88, I was reinforcing the point Plinkett makes: If you are emotionally invested in the movie you remember the characters, (even ones only shown in my case).

Finally, if you bother to go upthread, you'll see that I had admiration for Lucas putting out something that we still talk about 30+ years later. 

Bollocks - mostly.

Boba Fett had an impact because of his actions, not his lines. He outsmarts Han Solo at hiding in trash, beats him to Cloud City and totally comes across as Vader's go-to man - and we're left thinking "Who the hell is this guy who says nothing, has fucking cool armour and catches Han and the gang without breaking a sweat?" John Williams even wrote a small leitmotif for Fett - not bad for an insignificant character and far more than any other bounty hunter got. I was 7 years old when I saw Empire first time around and I still remember wondering who Fett was*

It also didn't hurt that Fett got a good share of marketing - the Boba Fett 12" doll was quite a popular toy iirc. Certainly most kids I knew back in the early 80s who liked Star Wars had one. 

Of course, he died like a bitch in ROTJ, was pointlessly CGI'd into the Spec Eds and then there was that Epsiode 2 shit about Fett being a clone and all his mystique and coolness evaporates in a flash.


* I admit - for a while I thought he was Darth Vader's real son as I misheard the line "He's no use to me dead" as "He's no use to me, dad". I was just as slow and stupid then as I am now.

Also, an EU book series about how he shot his way out of the Sarlacc and kept on being badass for a good long time.

The reactions of the yes-men are the best parts of these things, it's plain as day they are trying to feign enthusiasm.

I'm hunting out this facial reaction thing now just to see it.  My initial reaction to each of the new movies was generally "wow, that was shit", with the "wow" having less emphasis each time.  Some geeky guy pointing out exactly how shit they are, is surprisingly entertaining.  Am I allowed to laugh at both camps?

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

 :awesome_for_real:

You're out of your element. The Bounty Hunter is not the issue here!

 :grin:

Not really.  I just don't do this kinda thing anymore, mostly due to agreeing with WUA.  That's a harsh position for a bloke to take.

I'm sad enough that I genuinely thought you were going for the Big Lebowski quote angle. More fool me.

My condolences on finding yourself agreeing with WUA though - that's a bad place to find yourself.

Thing about it is that I was probably one of the first chaps in the UK to read the Thrawn stuff and I ate through every Star Wars EU book and comic EVER, only stopping at the Vong shit that made me realise I was indulging myself in what had become CHRONIC writing.  (Hell, the Tales Books are fanwank of the HIGHEST order, beating any Star Trek Book ever, including Imzadi).

I think the last three films were unmitigated Shite in every respect, but I've also grown up enough to realise that, frankly, the first three weren't really much better and, more importantly, no-one gives a ratass fuck for my opinion, especially some bloated turd swimming in the money bin. 

This is why I only prolapse once while watching Crystal Skull because, really, why bother ? 

But WUA is right in one sense - All that matters is the bank - and wrong in another - He geniunely thinks that the last three films had SOME hidden merit.

They really didn't.

It's glib, but I care and I still constantly get in these discussions because it's about film. The fact that I've been a fan of Star Wars fan since '78 makes it difficult to discuss Star Wars without being accused of being a rabid fanboy (even though I largely don't give a shit about the EU or what's canon or whatever although, yeah, I can and have had those discussions too even if I do try to avoid them these days)  but I'll do it about any film.  That thing about Boba Fett? Yeah, I genuinely am interested in why a minor character with two lines of dialogue and a couple of minutes of screen time had such a big cultural impact and the last time I had a similar conversation was down the pub with a bunch of filmmakers.

That's a lot of what I like about Plinkett's reviews - he's a filmmaker and amongst the geeky, fanboy "Why did Han shoot first?" criticism of the film is a lot of  useful critique of poor filmmaking and screenwriting.  But, it's about Star Wars - therefore whatever he says is obviously a rant by a butthurt, childhood raped fanboi.

WUA's constant refrain about box office and reviews is too simplistic despite whatever verbal haranguing he brings to bear on whoever says otherwise.  I'm having that debate elsewhere and I'm not going to fag up this thread even more by having it here again.

Or maybe it's the internet and we can all nitpick the shit out of each other. Wash out your sandy little vagoo, because the only thing worse than you staring at George Lucas watching his face and trying to read his mind would be BOTH of us staring at his face and ARGUING over what's in his mind.

There's a very stark, obvious, and ironclad difference between a butthurt anti-fanboy and someone who just plain thought those new Star Wars movies sucked. The BHAF community wants to know that Lucas feels bad for disappointing them, sees him walking cheerfully off into the sunset wearing his moneyhat, and it pisses them off. Meanwhile, rational people who just hated the prequels have probably also hated a dozen different otherwise successful movies over the last few years and don't especially give a shit about those crappy Star Wars ones in particular, or what any of their producers think.

Ironwood is a regular person who thought those new Star Wars movies were shit. Schild is a regular person (well sort of) who thought they were shit. Good for them, I guess. I don't think either of them has ever attempted to advance their opinion with insights gleaned from reading first-draft screenplays, or essays upon how they would have rewritten them, or lengthy discussions about the nature of the force, or any of this other "ARRGH! GET BACK HERE LUCAS THIS ISN'T OVERRR!" bullshit.

At least I'm a fanboy of things I actually like.

Is there a link to the facial thing?  I couldn't find it.

The only reason anyone remembers IG-88's name is it was printed right there on the package his action figure came in. And I say this as a reformed Star Wars fanboy.

By all means WuA, keep making strawmen and knocking them down, it's your specialty.

I think the 'facial thing' was on Plinkett's Phantom Menace review.  

Yup, it was on his phantom menace review.

But hey, most films don't suck so badly as to cause one of the leads to quit staring in movies for a while out of disgust (Liam Neeson). And you should read comments on Christoher lee's autobiography (Lord of Misrule) on working with George Lucas. Most intriguing.

But hey lets focus on the one halfway decent and profound line in 7 hours of film to prove the whole thing was decent.  :grin:

I think SW was really great for what it was. A pulp space opera adventure with a bit of a fairy tale morality to it. After the divorce, Lucas lost his only really powerful No woman, and the movies started going down the tubes. Yeah, Lucas doesn't have to care what Johnny Neckbeard thinks, and the big loss is that he doesn't have to care about moviemaking as a job either. It's become his hobby, and he's not really that good at it anymore, if he ever was.

I think the first star wars was a pretty good pulp science fiction movie, and the Empire Strikes Back still stands on its own as a terrific film, dark, spiritual and emotional, and the good guys got their ass kicked hard. Of course Empire was the one that Lucas had the least to do with. The rot pretty much started with Return of the Jedi though.

Thinking about it, the moment of the 3rd Plinket review was when he showed a bunch of people and Lucas walks in and announces that he has just written the first draft of Revenge of the Sith and everyone in the room immediately bursts into a round of applause. I mean hello?

"They're already building sets... I better start writing the script!"

It's very difficult for me to put into words all the things wrong *at the very core* with Star Wars (prequels), and Red Letter attacks the prequels on many, many different angles, from story to craftsmanship to nit-picking and respect for the material.

I just read this essay about "Art vs. Trash" movies (http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/trashartandthemovies.html) (Or, as  I like to call it, Art vs. Entertainment) that might give an idea of what Lucas represents: the very antithesis of an artist.


(The article is pretty brutal with regards to the masses and "fans.")

Copolla had something nice to say that could be applied to Lucas and Star Wars. (http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-On-Risk-Money-Craft-Collaboration?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=ALL&utm_campaign=MIH+Jan+5+2011)


Red Letter applied a critic's and film artist's view on Star Wars, amongst other things. The original trilogy held up a bit better, but the prequels were soulless entertainment meant to cash in.

This coupled with my grandfather making a big stink about wanting to know why my toy carried a Nazi machine gun.

Thanks for that link, Lorekeep. Another article on that site is "Why are movies so bad? (http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/whymoviesbad.html)" which is vaguely relevant as it was written in 1980 and suggests that Empire Strikes Back was one of the few films worth seeing that year.  The rest of it is a rant about how the maxim "All that matters is the bank" is dragging movies down.  It's a 30 year old article and it's never been more true than it is today.

I wish the material was a little easier to read from a formatting perspective. I'll check that article out.

Or, perhaps, it's that tastes change over time combined with the movies being complained about aren't aimed at you or the original author.   There's always the segment who says "Everything today is crap, it used to be better back when!"

Yeah found it thanks, meh, I agree with WUA on that point.

Watching all three of those reviews, I just feel really sorry for Ewan McGregor, he signs up to be Obi-Wan Kenobi and then gets held captive in a blue room for weeks on end.

Actually, I always felt sorry for Brian Blessed.

"Hi, Brian, can you do Vultan, except, you know, retarded ?  Give it a go."

I don't feel sorry for Ewan.  I thought he stood out as a shining beacon amidst very sub-standard performances.  He rose above the shittiness around him and made Obi-Wan completely awesome as far as I am concerned. 

And somehow, I don't get the feeling it type-casted him.

Finally watched the latest Plinkett review.  Awesome as always IMO, but it's a little sad that the saga is over.

Is your avatar the look of dread on Lucas's face after reviewing his creation?  :awesome_for_real:

All the actors did the best with the material given to them, and have all gone on to great careers afterwards. Ewan and Natalie Portman are both intact (Ewan had a career before going in, Natalie did Black Swan...), Hayden's just starting out but moving on from it better than Hamill did, and Sam Jackson is still Sam Jackson. Liam's still doing movies that are high-brow entertainment where he collects a paycheck because there's nothing else out there to stretch his acting muscles and he needs to work. (A-Team, Clash of the Titans, Taken, Unknown).

As far as actor reputation, everyone walked out of this unscathed, collected their paycheck, and probably learned a lesson never to work for George Lucas ever again if they cared at all about their art.

I'll be honest.  I was hoping I could entice WUA into doing some Lie to Me expression analysis shit and then putting the results on a chart of some sort.

I'm sure Brian laughed his way to the bank for some easy voiceover work, he seems willing to do just about anything.

My favorite part of those behind the scenes videos isn't George Lucas, but the forced smiles and awkward poses of just about every one around him every time he makes one of his anouncements.

It kind of reminds me of this guy.

There will always be more movies for Plinkett to rake over the coals. I'd love to watch a series about M Night Shamwow's movies.

The only vibe I really got from the office footage with Lucas was that of a bunch of grunts in an office awkwardly trying to look excited about work because the boss was there with a camera. The girl in charge of budget dispensation toward fake hair for wookiee costumes just wants to finish up so she can go flirt with the ILM guy down the hall modeling bantha nostrils, but hey here's Lucas and they're shooting some kind of behind the scenes thing so try to look really enthusiastic.

She's not sitting there thinking "Oh god what have we done, the internet will be so disappointed! I hate myself! But I hope people will see our demoralized faces and be comforted by the fact that we're not thinking we got away with it!"

Oh, also, the idea that Liam Neeson didn't turn up as a ghost in the later movies because he was just so horrified at the cinematic fast-food shittiness of Phantom Menace strikes me as more BHAF fantasizing. He probably thought George Lucas was an asshole and wasn't offered enough money to put up with him. I'll buy that. But I just don't see him going "This is a travesty! I am an artist! TIME TO DO MASTERPIECES LIKE CLASH OF THE TITANS AND A-TEAM!"

I didn't say that. o_o; In fact, nobody did.  :uhrr:

Gee, it's a good thing I wasn't responding to you then.

Edit: Also, yes someone did.

How far back am I looking to verify that?

Yeah, Plinket himself said the guy is a fine actor, just saddled with a totally shit director.

In his favour, the movies will have him as such a bland ashole non character that people will struggle to even remember him in the films anyway, so it probably won't harm his career once he has a few meaty roles under his belt.

I hate to be dragged back into this, but :

I've seen a few more Haydn movies since and, frankly, No, he's NOT a fine actor.  He's a SHIT actor.  Please for the love of God, can someone tell me a movie he was decent in ?  Because I'd like to verify this fact that people keep throwing about.

"Life as a House" and "Shattered Glass"

I think we need a new term for "fine actor" in that type of movie, Laurence Olivier might have been crap in a blue box.  Ok, maybe not, but it's not normal acting if you can't see what you are acting with.

(http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/news/comic-news/harryhausen.jpg)

Lawrence Olivier out acted Jude Law in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and he was dead at the time.

I was complaining more about the backgrounds than the imaginary aliens whatever, that's difficult yeah but not new, most of the backgrounds in the new star wars movies looked fake to me. 

Edit, watch Plinkett's review of Star Trek 2009 to see the difference.

Really ?  You thought he was good in Shattered Glass ?

I'm starting to wonder if it's just me that's crazy.

In honesty, haven't seen "Shattered Glass" and I didn't really rate "Life as a House" as a film either so don't recall his performance. Those are just the two films that got him awards and SAG/Golden Globe nominations.

And to be fair I haven't seen him in anything else. I was giving the guy the benefit of the doubt.

According to that logic Gabourey Sidibe is a good actress.

 :facepalm:

Straw man.

There's an ILM special playing on one of the movie channels right now. (Showtime I think.)  They're interviewing Samuel Jacking and he has this to say on the matter; "I was working with some of these guys and they were complaining they didn't have anything to act to. I just looked at them funny and said, "Man, what did you do as a kid? Don't you have any imagination!?" 

From my view of things that's all they do is get played to make-believe. It's their job and if they can't summon up the same inner emotions staring at a guy holing a pencil to a point of focus as an actor standing at that same point, aren't they just bad at it?

This. He was NOT fine in Shattered Glass, he was whiny Anakin all over again. Jumper suffered from his mere presence. He's not a good actor.

Don't talk about Jumper.  Jumper was awful. 

I thought he was ok in Shattered Glass: he was supposed to play a callow young asshole trying desperately to suck up to easily flattered editors. May not have been a big reach for him.

This. Quit bawwing about the bluescreen, you're an actor, you're supposed to be able to stand by yourself on a wooden stage with a few shitty props and make me think you're in bustling Ancient Rome or something.

Well it was only an idea, it was the only thing I could think of to in some way explain why the acting in the three new films was so wooden.  But you're right, acting is one of the oldest professions there is, there really is no excuse for shitty acting.

Shitty directing. Lucas' sad little mantra "It's good enough" when it's really not. Sometimes an actor can overcome a shitty director (Ian McDiarmond as Palpatine) but it can drag down less experienced actors.

Liam Neeson did a fairly good job in the Fandom Menace too.

Things like that are why I like the prequels even though I know they're crap. I can glimpse what could have been if Lucas had pulled his head out of his ass and put a little more effort in.

I don't blame the crappy acting on bluescreens.

I do blame the plasticy look of the new trilogy on it -- there's something about practical sets that still looks a bit more real to me.

Light and dirt. They still can't make the light look completely realistic, and computer models just don't have the number of flaws that real sets do. Everything looks completely planned because it is. Also computer sets tend to be very large... much larger than real spaces. It makes them look empty.

The irony here being that one of the amazing visual aspects of the original Star Wars that it made a space-fantasy world look used and lived in rather than the shiny "futuristic" look most of us had previously been accustomed to in visual SF. But arguably the prequels, whatever their other many flaws, ought to have had a more "flawless" look as this is the good old days before the Empire etc.

Well sure, but there's a fine line between "the good old days" and "flawless". Compare the palace on Naboo to, say, the palace at Versailles. Flaws are part of the essence of beauty. Perfection is boring.

Unfortunately Lucas is not alone in his love for computer generated imaginery. Only yesterday I read an interview James Cameron gave to a German magazine where he promoted his own technology that he last used for Avatar (which basically was filmed entirely in front of green screens) and he got really pissed when the interviewer suggested that actors complained about the lack of immersion having a negative influence on their performances (because of the missing set). Basically going so far as to suggesting that a set is exactly as fake as a room full of green screens, that it therefore makes no difference for an actor if he's on a set or in a green room, that all his actors really liked the experience and that everybody who says otherwise must be an incompetent actor because a good one should be able to work entirely from his imagination.

Unfortunately the interviewer never got into the argument about realism or naturalistic looks which might have been a better angle.

It might be that a set placed somewhere in the general area of L.A. is not that much better than a sound stage full of green screens. I happen to remember however that every actor involved in episode 1 criticized the green screen experience because they had problems acting with subjects that might not even be there. Jar Jar Binks for example was just a plastic stand in, basically a pole with plastic eyes so that the actors at least knew which way they'd needed to face.

But I am positive that the better you are able to emulate the setting the better the actors will be (either consciously or unconsciously) and that it will create a more believable experience for the viewers. There's a difference between actually filming in the Moroccan desert with 'real' buildings or pretending to be there on a hollywood soundstage. We are also deep in the uncanny valley with all of the CGI, it just looks too bright, too clean, too aseptic, subconsciously at least we notice the difference between pure CGI and models and sets and it will stay that way for quite some time.

[edit] edited for spelling

I can totally see where greenscreen being annoying to work in or not would depend on what you're shooting.

Interacting with characters that you can't see at all or that are being represented with some static placeholder sounds like a pain.

Having the background not exist off behind you would seem less problematic.

I'd imagine you'd miss having sets more for interior scenes than exterior, and you'd miss having sets for locations where you're supposed to be interacting with the scenery.

I'd say for me its very conscious.  I'd say that it does look "clean" but even dirty things have that "clean" look to them, so I'm not sure clean is really the right word.  Its like things lack realistic wear/use or something.   One of the reasons Lord of the Rings worked for me better than Star Wars, I think, was the extensive use of modeling and other traditional forms of special effects in combination with CGI.

I realize that the Lord of the Rings movies were newer and probably had a bit better CGI tech on their side, but I don't think thats it.

Plastic. Plastic is the word you're looking for. The models in Lord of the Rings worked very well. The CGI in the prequel movies were absolutely unconvincing. There were way too many scenes of people walking 10 feet down these immense hallways that looked so fake, it took you right out of the movie. Imagine the interiors of Cloud City done like the Coruscant scenes in the prequels. It would have looked horrible.

It's amazing that movies using ILM for their effects that aren't directed by Lucas look better than the movies Lucas himself directed.

It's not. The tech is pretty much the same; what LotR brought to the table graphics wise was a new suite of tools/plugins to create armies of people with slight but definite variances in things like limb size and gait. That's pretty much the only technical advantage; they were both done in maya/lightwave, albeit by different studios with different individual modelers.

How Much for Just the Planet and Final Reflection wants to have a word with you, out back. :) The former might not be to your humor, but the latter is so well written that I keep thinking someone made a crappy Sci-Fi show off a great book.

Also, if you watch the making of material, the effects team for LotR built some enormous models, enormous sets, and found epic locations. Basically the way Lucas had to do his original trilogy. The number of "everything is computer generated except actors in front of a green screen" scenes in all three LotR moves could probably be counted on two hands.

I liked the Stanger Vampire books.  Security Chief on the Enterprise and clear wankathon for the author.

Yeah, How Much was good.  In honesty, the first 30 were ok - except Spocks Son, which made sense, but was again clearly an author doing Gusset Typing - so don't think I'm not aware of where you're coming from.

Shorthand - I've read every bit of trash ever.  :D

BUT IMZADI WAS SOOoooOoOOoOooOo BAD !!!

My reads on the Star Trek novels were...spotty, mostly due to a very boring summer and access to someone else's collection. I'd run out of my books already....

Final Reflections was just insanely good, though I thought the Duane and Hambly books were also good. I think the break down was about 60% pulpy, acceptable mindless crap, about 30% "Jesus Christ, how did this even get past the editor" and about 10% "Shit, this is why people watched Star Trek despite the crap set, actors, and effects".

If you watch the extensive making of footage for the LotR trilogy you notice a completely different way of making the movie vs. the Star Wars prequels.

They even had Andy Serkis actually swimming in a freezing cold river in a motion capture suit (it took them several hours and a lot of industrial fans to remove the snow and ice), to make Gollum more believable. (btw. worst Oscar snub ever, refusing him a best actor nomination because the character he played was animated).

But I don't care. I'll vote with my wallet and since I don't like the plasticky look I'll simply not spend money watching that stuff. I don't care if some director thinks it to be the best invention since sliced bread.

Lucas' tampering with the original trilogy and the utter crap that was the prequel trilogy have completely turned me off Star Wars. I'll always remember the pre special edition original trilogy (without all off the useless CGI crap and where Han shot before Greedo did) but I'll simply not buy the special edition or any of the prequel movies or grace Lucas with my money.

Maybe someday they'll release the unedited original trilogy (the digitally cleaned up version that was released on VHS for the 20th(?) anniversary in the silver and golden boxes) and not the laserdisc transfers (all current releases of the original non-special edition trilogy are transfers of the criterion collection laserdisc which is unfortunately not in HD and also letterboxed).

If they won't however it's no big deal anymore I've seen it the way it was supposed to be and today there is plenty of other great stuff to watch instead.

It's sad though how many stories Lucas already invented to justify not releasing the unedited trilogy. At first he told the press that the original masters were destroyed while making the special edition because of the reediting, now he claims that re-releasing the unedited trilogy would simple be too expensive. Yeah too expensive for a guy who has made liberally billions of dollars from the movies and merchandise.

Someone on another forum I frequent (no not me you chucklefucks) wrote a 108-page rebuttal of RLM's Phantom Menace review. Here's the link if anyone's crazy enough to want to look.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IFA1O2BI

 :awesome_for_real:

Sorry, i'm not interested in anything written by George Lucas  :grin:

I made it as far as the first page before I started reading it like an elaborate troll rather than a serious rebuttal. He has some fair points about Obi-wan and Qui-gon though.

I mostly just skimmed through it and stopped to read the screenshot comic strips and the little bit above them for context. Yeah look, not that the guy isn't a huge dork for writing a hundred page rebuttal of an internet Star Wars review, but the stuff he's saying isn't incorrect. Nobody watched Phantom Menace, then came home and said "Gee you know, when the two Jedi were in that hangar overlooking an army of thousands of battle droids, why DIDN'T they just jump down and start fighting them all?"

I wondered about it for a second, then said "Well because they'd be blown to smears, of course."  They ran from 2 destroyer droids, I figure there's more than 2 in that hangar.