Episode 3

[WindupAtheist]

Obi: So then, how the hell are you getting off this rock to train her? I sure as hell can't, being dead and all.  It's been 22 years, does your ship even work now?

Yoda:  Brought Luke to me you did, despite being dead.  An asshat quit being, Obi-Wan.
Obi:  STFU, muppet.

I think the scene with Yoda teaching the younglings was supposed to be the gloss-over for Obi's "Was I any different when you taught me?" line.

Yoda:  Just like this brat you were when I taught you, yes.  Of course, eight years old you were at the time.  Idiot.

It's a bad cop-out but it's better than "omg I'm a single mother of twins to an evil bastard, I must die now so he can be fuxored in his choice to be evil!"

Yeah, what was with that 'dying of a broken heart' business?  Shoulda just had Anakin crunch her trachea and bounce her off a wall.

The one that's not resolved for me is Luke asking Leia about memories of her "real mother."  It suggests Leia knew she was adopted and knew her mother briefly as a child. Whoopsie there.

Eh, can be taken to mean that she didn't know, and was referring to her adoptive mother.

[Samwise]

That or it could be that her innate Force-sensitivity or whatever allowed her to remember being born.

[Furiously]

How about just admitting the prequels created a ton of plot holes, and be done with it?

Well see, I don't flip out everytime someone says something which, when taken a certain way, conflicts with something they did or said twenty years prior.  I mean, let's take the "There is another" conversation and extrapolate it beyond the end of the scene.

Obi: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No, there is another.
Obi: Hmm.  Do you think she has it in her?
Yoda: That we shall see.

I mean, I'm perfectly willing to buy the notion that Obi-Wan was simply thinking of the boy he'd quiety watched over for decades, and that the girl he saw as an infant and then again briefly as an adult wasn't foremost in his mind.  Now one Yoda/Obi bit that DID get pissed on with the prequels came in ESB.

Yoda:  Impatient he is, headstrong.  (Or something to this effect.)
Obi:  Was I any different, when you taught me?

How the hell do you extrapolate or rationalize THAT?

Yoda:  Dude, I didn't teach you.  Qui-Gon Jinn did, remember?
Obi:  Er... yeah...  I meant was I any different when Qui-Gon taught me?
Yoda:  Yeah, actually, you were calm and patient!  Your master was the headstrong one!
Obi:  I'll just fuck off now.

Didn't Yoda teach all the children at the academy? I figured Obi-wan was one of his students at some point.

[stray]

Could it be that Obi just said that because he was the "inferior" and "younger" one? I mean, geez, at some point in time every Jedi in the Republic times probably looked to Yoda as their "Teacher", in one way or another. Yoda and Mace were like the "Deans" or the "Principals" of the Academy. They were familiar with the faults of all the students.

This is silly. It doesn't have to mean some kind of "Master/Apprentice" relationship specifically.

[Samprimary]

Old: Plot holes

New: Sucking plot wounds

[WindupAtheist]

Blow me, asshat.  I am flush with fanboy victory.  Even Schild has quit coming around to troll and talk about movies nobody has seen.

[Samwise]

I am flush with fanboy victory.

If "not suck as badly as previous sucky movies" was your bar for victory, then yes, I'd say you are victorious.

[Shockeye]

Blow me, asshat.  I am flush with fanboy victory.  Even Schild has quit coming around to troll and talk about movies nobody has seen.

Don't be an assweasel.

[Litigator]

For all the criticism of George Lucas that's come up, seeing the full scope of this thing, I think his main downfall hasn't been hubris, and certainly hasn't been greed. He's simply bought into this thing completely, genuinely loves it, and his infatuation with this universe and with realizing all of the cool things in it he wants to show the fans has gotten in the way of the story.  We looked at all the weird-ass bug people he crammed into every scene, and all the changes he kept making to the movies, and we lambasted him for trying to sell more toys, and more video games, and more videocassettes and more movie tickets.  But the truth was that George simply loved it so much he couldn't keep it out, couldn't stop messing with it.  He's the biggest Star Wars geek of them all, completely bought into the obsession.  

It's kind of a shame that a thing with this much love poured into it turned out so bad.  But Lucas created the legendary original trilogy, and when he came back to do it again, nobody could possibly tell the auteur how to realize his creation. There was nobody to impose discipline.  The emotional crux of this trilogy needed to be Anakin having to choose between the woman he loves and everything else he believes in, his falling out with the Jedi, and his seduction by the dark side.  Actually, that right there sounds like a one-sentence synopsis of a really compelling story, but it doesn't play out that way on the screen. This happens partly because the dialog was ridiculous, but also because all the character development was pushed to the side in favor of a cavalcade of geeky shit that was completely extraneous to the story. Padme never really manages to establish herself as anything beyond a girl Anakin is in love with, and Anakin is never much more than a jedi who stomps around and frowns a lot.   I guess you have to assume that Anakin loves Padme enough to overthrow society for her because she's Natalie Portman, in the same way that the only thing you need to know about Mace Windu is that he's Sam Jackson with a purple lightsaber.

Maybe if Lucas hadn't wasted so much time on pod racers and Darth Maul and the creation of the clone army and Yango Fett and Jar Jar and that Jew-bug guy on Tattooine and the droid factory, and General Grievous, he would have been able to fill out the story in a way that gave the characters room to establish themselves in a way that's believable.  

[stray]

Lol, you're speaking as if nobody likes this or the othe prequels.

[Jayce]

Lol, you're speaking as if nobody likes this or the othe prequels.

Maybe, but he sure nailed it for those of us who wanted to like them, but don't.

[stray]

Fair enough.

I guess it's had an odd effect on me. I haven't cared much for the original movies since I was a kid, and was pretty "meh" about the prequels. I didn't even bother with those until much later (KoToR finally got me interested somewhat). RotS though, has somehow gotten me to really appreciate SW all over again. Even the prequels.

The only thing that really grates on me about the new trilogy now is that Qui Gon is barely in it. As far as I'm concerned, he's the coolest character out of all six films.

[schild]

Blow me, asshat.  I am flush with fanboy victory.  Even Schild has quit coming around to troll and talk about movies nobody has seen.

That's cute.

As far as what litigator said, calling Lucas an auteur is giving him WAY too much credit. Even putting his name in a paragraph with that word is too much credit. The man can't direct. That's all there is to it. He's relied on models, puppets and now CGI to give him all of his badassitude. And it's fairly apparent now. If Harrison Ford hadn't have been Han Solo and made that character the god of heroes it turned out to be, no one would have given a shit. Well, maybe some people would have (like Windup), but it would have been a geek/cult classic. The guy set a low bar for the rest of sci-fi and it's even lower after the last trilogy. If it weren't for a select few movies raising that bar, the Sci-Fi channel would be BELOW the Oxygen Network on things I'd ever watch.

Spielberg is 100x the director Lucas could ever be, and even he's become a pompous douche. Nowadays, people like Lucas, Spielberg, Scorcese, Coppola, etc. just reminds me how the mighty have fallen.

Instead of whatever footer comes after the movie, they should have a huge slab of granite appear on the screen with this scrawled at the bottom:
"And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

[stray]

Spielberg is 100x the director Lucas could ever be, and even he's become a pompous douche. Nowadays, people like Lucas, Spielberg, Scorcese, Coppola, etc. just reminds me how the mighty have fallen.

So they've made some dog turds here and there. They've also made films like Schindler's List, the Aviator, Dracula.......Not complete piles of shit. And if it wasn't for these guys, dozens of movies wouldn't even have the cash to be made. They've not only done quite well for themselves, they also help a lot of people.

Ozymandias? Give me a break. Really man, where do you get off? I like you, but your hate is just...well...Shit, I don't know what it is. It's a black hole. It's so comical I almost want to believe that you've been trolling all this time.

[schild]

It's not trolling, it's that these people didn't stop when they were ahead. Spielberg probably should have stopped after Schindler's List.

Lucas never really started.

Ts'all I'm saying. A world without Star Wars would be fine by me, and it would results in A TON LESS SHITTY VIDEO GAMES.

Edit: Btw, the world would be fine without the Aviator. "I'M HOWARD HUGGGHHHHEEEESSSS, THE AVIATOR." Meh. The only recent movie that comes to mind from that group that I might miss is Catch Me If You Can. I wouldn't even miss Jurassic Park that much. I mean, I'm a huge Sam Neill fan (and Jeff Goldblum for that matter). It resulted in The Lost World. For fucking shame. But anyway, there's other movies I'd rather watch on a rainy day.

[schild]

One of my other big gripes is that when your layman discusses movies, he talks about the names I tossed around above. He'll normally forget people like Gilliam, Kubrick (ok, well, Eyes Wide Shut screwed that pooch), Wes Anderson, The Spike Jonze crew (Kaufman, Gondry, Jonze himself), Verbinski.

Sure, some of those people haven't made as many movies as the latter crowd, but all of the Jonze stuff is heads above any of the Star Wars/post Apocalypse Now/post Back to the Future-Indiana Jones stuff. Verbinski gets automatic inclusion for Pirates - AKA the best movie ever made, Gilliam's Sci-fi is better than ANY of the latter, and Kubrick was a far more proficient director. Also, a lot of time the layman will forget Hitchcock but remember Lucas and the rest of those fuckers. Fuck that noise.

[ahoythematey]

I don't take up issue with Wes Anderson and the "Spike Jonez" crew themselves, as I generally enjoyed their movies, but I do tire quickly of how their fanbase behaves, because, almost without exception, anytime I speak to or read comments by die-hard fans of them I get the impression of a self-important, beret-wearing jackass that is choleric with rage because some truly talented filmmakers dare to let their movies become mainstream popular instead of remaining "inside" favorites of the clique-ish film-snob community.

Pound for pound, Spielberg is still a better filmmaker in every sense of the term than all those "forgotten others" you mentioned, except for Kubrick.

[stray]

Silly as it sounds, I almost think Wes Anderson could do a good Star Wars movie. Heh, he's already got the 70's vibe going on, seems to have a thing for funny hats, has experience with ensemble flicks, has an imaginative use of digital effects, the jokes would be better...Hmm, what else?

Seriously though, nothing wrong with liking all of these lesser known guys more. It is an injustice that they aren't as recognized, I'll give you that. I like a lot of shit most people would never give the time of day, and it is frustrating --- but fuck 'em. I just don't think these other directors, like Lucas, are to blame. And even if you may think their movies suck, you've got to admit that they've helped a lot of other projects get off the ground.

As far as them pulling out while they were on top: Who does that? I know I couldn't. People like to work, and try to remain creative. Not everyone can pull a Greta Garbo. Especially directors.

[schild]

No one can. Most should.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that if Fukusaku had pulled out or Kurosawa - some of the best films ever made might never have happened. Meh, it's a shoddy argument, but the louder you are the more you're heard, and the first group of people I mentioned yell the loudest.

[Litigator]

Blow me, asshat.  I am flush with fanboy victory.  Even Schild has quit coming around to troll and talk about movies nobody has seen.

That's cute.

As far as what litigator said, calling Lucas an auteur is giving him WAY too much credit. Even putting his name in a paragraph with that word is too much credit. The man can't direct. That's all there is to it. He's relied on models, puppets and now CGI to give him all of his badassitude. And it's fairly apparent now. If Harrison Ford hadn't have been Han Solo and made that character the god of heroes it turned out to be, no one would have given a shit. Well, maybe some people would have (like Windup), but it would have been a geek/cult classic. The guy set a low bar for the rest of sci-fi and it's even lower after the last trilogy. If it weren't for a select few movies raising that bar, the Sci-Fi channel would be BELOW the Oxygen Network on things I'd ever watch.

Spielberg is 100x the director Lucas could ever be, and even he's become a pompous douche. Nowadays, people like Lucas, Spielberg, Scorcese, Coppola, etc. just reminds me how the mighty have fallen.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=auteur

An auteur isn't a great director; it's someone who is able to exercise full creative control over his movies.  Lucas is one of an extremely small number of directors who is given that level of freedom with that kind of a budget. And the problem isn't that he can't direct, as a technical director he's one of the masters of the medium, and the advances in both model and CGI effects he has developed have blazed the path for a number of other films. 

Unfortunately, the Star Wars mythos has become incredibly detailed and baroque in the intervening decades since the first trilogy, and Lucas has doubtless been coming up with stuff he wanted to put on screen for years as well.  Then he decided to give us a story that needed to be heavily character driven, and he didn't have the discipline to cut out the other shit, I think Arwen was onscreen for more time in Return of the King than Padme was onscreen in Revenge of the Sith, and that's just ridiculous, considering Padme's import to the story. If you don't buy the relationship between those characters, you don't buy the movie.

[schild]

My point was that Lucas wasn't ever an auteur. He did not have full creative control. Harrison Ford took it away from him. The director of Empire Strikes back took it away from him. His kids took it away from him.

You know better than to do what you just did. I never once said an auteur was the director. But if you're going to call yourself or be labeled an auteur, you best damn well be the director as well.

[Lum]

EDIT/SPOILER: Oh, and in the end scene in Sith abord the Star Destroyer as they are looking at the proto-Death Star there is an Imperial Officer that is obviously a young Tarkin.

It's actually a CGI Peter Cushing, the flesh-and-blood version having been dead for some time.

Unlike Schild, I've actually seen the movie, so I'm not sure I'm really qualified to comment. That being said:

[SPOILERS, DUH]





The ugly:
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
"She's inexplicably lost her will to live, probably because the movie's ending in five minutes."
"I don't WANNA be a good jedi! I wanna rule the GAAAALAXY!"

The bad:
The initial space battle scene really lost the whole point of Star Wars for me. If you watch Ep 4, what made the starfighter scenes exhilrating was their whole World War Two fighter plane zeitgeist. Banking, turning, circle-strafing; not only was it dramatic, it was understandable dramatics. Sure it's hokey (in space no one actually needs wings, what with, you know, NO ATMOSPHERE AND NEWTONIAN THRUST) which is why it's space opera. Contrast that with Ep 3's opener, with a confused, look how much we can cram on screen overload. There's no sense of drama, save perhaps the missile scene. There's just random crap being thrown at Our Heroes and lots of things blowing up. It really made for a bad contrast with the Death Star run.

The movie was too dark. I know, this sounds stupid, considering the whole movie is about Darth Vader. But Vader is supposed to be a sympathetic character. He isn't seduced to the dark side so much as he blindly stumbles into it out of inertia. And then he does evil things for no other reason than to be eeeeeevil. The jedi child slaughter scene was especially gratuitous in this context. Literally a half hour he thinks he's defending the republic, now he's putting small boys to the sword? It only makes sense when you realize that Lucas made a conscious decision for this movie to be, well, brutal. So we have dead children and more severed limbs than a Saudi detention center.

There really should have been a bit more of Vader as opposed to Anakin, maybe with him suppressing some rebellion or something. Five minutes of Vader-in-the-suit felt cheap, considering it's the climax we all went in expecting.

The Wookie scene was a complete purposeless throwaway. Why was Yoda there? Why were the seperatists fighting Wookies? What happened later? It made very little sense and you got the distinct impression it was there for one shot of rampaging furballs.

And as everyone else noted, Natalie Portman really phoned her lines in on this one. In the first 2, she was really a proto-Leia, albeit with odd tastes in men. Very aggressive, very much wanting to be the action hero. Here's she's incredibly passive, spending almost the entire movie pining in her apartment for Anakin to pay attention to her and maybe buy her some chocolates or something.

And the good:

Hayden Christenson's acting really surprised me, because I expected it to be really bad. He actually almost appeared competent a few times, especially during the penultimate fight with Obi-Wan. Just the right amount of evil slash fear slash greed slash confusion you'd expect. He still whines, which is annoying as hell. But overall, much better.

I liked the sword fighting. It really was pretty well done, and far more energetic than in other movies; one thinks they looked at Ep 1's Qui-Gon/Maul fight and said "more like that, plz". General Grievous was great; I've never seen the cartoons so was caught by surprise with the whole Jedi-hunter thing.

The overall political metaplot actually worked well. I'm a conservative IRL and didn't see much hamfisted "OMG BUSH IS THE EMPIRE!" stuff that some blogs are ranting about. I mean, come on, the Empire is fascist - who knew? The seduction of Anakin worked well enough given the time constraints, and the collapse of the Republic felt about right. And of course, Executive Order 66 was, well, too cool for words. So THAT'S why those clones appeared from nowhere! And it explains the whole purpose of the Clone War; not only for a reason for Palpatine to assume power, but also to infiltrate and destroy the Jedi who came to rely on them. Very subtle and unusal subtext for Lucas.

Overall, it was a decent summer movie. It isn't going to cure cancer or anything, but like most in this thread, I'd rank it about equal to ROTJ.

[schild]

I think - I may be wrong, but probably not - everyone who went to see this movie on opening weekend helped personally fund the George Lucas Fucks You Consumer Whores In The Ass Again club, or GLFYCWAA. That includes Shockeye and most of my friends.

Weak, man, weak.

[Lum]

You know, we're allowed to go pay for movies we enjoy.

[schild]

You know, we're allowed to go pay for movies we enjoy.

Paying to see Star Wars is funding Terrorism.

[stray]

You know, we're allowed to go pay for movies we enjoy.

Paying to see Star Wars is funding Terrorism.

Ah, so you are trolling! 

[Margalis]

My point was that Lucas wasn't ever an auteur. He did not have full creative control. Harrison Ford took it away from him. The director of Empire Strikes back took it away from him. His kids took it away from him.

Reach much?

[Abagadro]

I couldn't tell if it was a CGI Cushing face or they rounded up some guy who looked like he looked when he was younger. Knowing Lucas it was a CGI overlay. I'll have to look closer next time as the first time it was a brief "Hey that dude is supposed to be Tarkin!" moment.

[stray]

I'm going to re-watch the prequel trilogy in order tonight. I've got 3 at my house now (I'm special...or...maybe I'm not?). I'll check on Tarkin.

Just finished "The Phantom Menace" though. I take back my comment on RotS "enhancing" it.

It still blows.

Your version would have been better, Abagadro.

[Abagadro]

George must have lost my phone number.

[schild]

My point was that Lucas wasn't ever an auteur. He did not have full creative control. Harrison Ford took it away from him. The director of Empire Strikes back took it away from him. His kids took it away from him.

Reach much?

Not particularly. You obviously didn't hear his comments on Jar-jar Binks and the Ewoks. One argument is that Star Wars is a kids movie. Maybe, but I don't buy it. Really it's HIS kids' movie(s).

[Abagadro]

Lucas had extraordinary control over everything.  These movies were self-financed, so he didn't even have studio suits to answer to. He was a one-man kingdom. Whether he did it well or let his impulses (often misguided) get the better of him (which is my opinion) is another topic, but they were clearly his decisions to make.

EDIT: I actually think that may have been the problem. He had no one to rein him in and tell him some of his ideas really sucked. If my memory serves, this kind of "fly to great heights or crash and burn" is key to the autuer theory as they have so much centralized control that they either kick ass or bring the whole thing down on top of them.

[Margalis]

Reach much?

Not particularly. You obviously didn't hear his comments on Jar-jar Binks and the Ewoks. One argument is that Star Wars is a kids movie. Maybe, but I don't buy it. Really it's HIS kids' movie(s).

Make up your mind, did he have control or didn't he? So, under your logic, if a producer hires a director he no longer has control. Or hires an actor. Or has kids. That's a pretty tight definition of creative control there. Does he have to do makeup himself also?

[Evil Elvis]

My point was that Lucas wasn't ever an auteur. He did not have full creative control. Harrison Ford took it away from him. The director of Empire Strikes back took it away from him. His kids took it away from him.

Reach much?

Not particularly. You obviously didn't hear his comments on Jar-jar Binks and the Ewoks. One argument is that Star Wars is a kids movie. Maybe, but I don't buy it. Really it's HIS kids' movie(s).

Wow.  Just... wow.

[Litigator]

My point was that Lucas wasn't ever an auteur. He did not have full creative control. Harrison Ford took it away from him. The director of Empire Strikes back took it away from him. His kids took it away from him.

You know better than to do what you just did. I never once said an auteur was the director. But if you're going to call yourself or be labeled an auteur, you best damn well be the director as well.

Being an auteur is a measure of freedom which a filmmaker has.  It means a lack of interference from studios, producers or investors, and a budget large enough that its constraints don't materially limit what you can put on the screen. The fact that Lucas decided to use Ford's ad libs, or that he let somebody else direct Empire.  By the time he was making the new trilogy, there was nobody at Fox or anywhere else who would question his "vision" or his decisions. And it's a shame, because if somebody had said "George, maybe we should lay a strong foundation for the stuff in Episode 3 by dedicating screen time to developing these characters and this romance in Episode 2, instead of an hour of extraneous shit about the origin of the bounty hunter who has four lines in the original trilogy," this whole failed three-film enterprise might have been salvaged.