Free Allegiance Forums

Can't wait. I've been trying to get the kids into star wars for a while now, but the prequels were such crap they never went for it. But now that Disney will be adding Leia to the princess line up, and retooling "let it go" with Yoda's voice into "let go it", christmas 2015 is gonna ROCK!!!

Seriously, it's been a long time since ive looked forward to any movie, i think lotr was the last one. I didn't even see the hobbit yet. This ones got potential!

Malicious Wraith wrote:QUOTE (Malicious Wraith @ Nov 30 2014, 06:44 AM) I just hope they try to grab a good story and develop it.

Less creating "hollywood franchise characters" down a boring path helped along by dubious plot devices.

Star Wars has always been about awe and the wonder of discovering an alien universe to me.
Woe if everything becomes a familiar re-skin of tropes and archetypes.

Star Wars, being based heavily on Lucas' reading of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, could be said to be a re-skin of familiar tropes and archetypes by design

Would you say the prequels stuck to the hero with a thousand faces story fairly well Rav?

I think a good barometer of the series is how much more princessish Natalie Portman was when compared to Carrie Fisher. I mean seriously, firing blasters and riding speeders?....Hello?! she's a girl? Not to mention the reality disconnect required to believe she would have climbed into a garbage compactor.

I have heard of a red-headed lady, who went from East Anglia to London, and she had no fear of trash compactors.
Although she was a queen and not a princess.

and I recommend plinkett's reviews for prequel postmortems

I can't anti-recommend that review enough. It's not accurate, it's not intelligent, and it's not funny. It's mostly just obnoxious droning that doesn't even get to the heart of why Episode 1 failed so hard.

The prequels sucked because they were boring and Anakin was an annoying @#(! who endlessly blabbed on about sand who couldn't possibly have been the kick-ass Darth Vader when he was young.
...And midichlorians were a @#(! idea, making it so the force can only be used by 'special people' and not by anyone who walked the path, whatever..!



QUOTE It is a time of uncertainty. The empire's ambiguous tariff statutes mandate close reexamination of galactic export quotas. Interim Princess Agoomba has co-chaired a subcommittee to draft amendments to existing trade policies. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies are being heavily lobbied by a consortium of mercantile interest groups and their suppliers to streamline loading restrictions for class-C cargo vessels. The shipping unions have remained conspicuously silent.[/quote]

The prequels sucked for the following reasons:

1) The first episode failed to be about the political intrigue that was being used by Sidius to, well, seize power. No one had any suspicion towards the actual villain of the story which meant, basically, that without the screen time available to the villain himself (taken up by pod races and CGI action) no one understood his masterful plan. And it was masterful: one hand guides the Trade Federation into testing the strength of the Republic while the other hand stands himself up as "the one honest politician" who can and will combat the corruption. Either the Trade Federation earns de-facto unchecked power (and he controls the Trade Federation) or he gets promoted to Chancellor. After that he incites a war, uses republic money to buy himself an army, declares a state of emergency, and voila. Military coup where the only blood spilled was of the people who followed his orders to start the war which gave the emperor control.

2) Jar Jar Binks failed utterly to be the naive do-gooder, the person who struggles to always do the right thing but whose lack of worldly knowledge gets him into more trouble than it's worth. Instead he was the slapstick bit of comedy. What's particularly frustrating about this is that Jar Jar absolutely could have kept the slapstick comedy in the series.

3) The acting was awful. Ewan McGregor was pretty much the only main character who was competent.

4) Annakin's angst came from nowhere and was entirely unrelated to the fact that he was a slave. More should have been made of the fact that his time as a slave left him wholly unprepared for being a Jedi. There should have been incidents where illegal slavers were caught and Annakin went over the line in bringing them to justice. Maybe he's too bloodthirsty when it comes to hunting slavers. Maybe Obi-Wan is trying to do right by Annakin and turning a blind eye. Maybe Annakin's getting some "you did the right thing old boy" back pats from Palpatine.

4.a) The whole "observing member of the Jedi Council" subplot was $#@!ing ridiculous. He's like, a year out of being knighted... why the $#@! would he ever in a million years honestly think to himself, "man I should be on the council."

... those are the big ones. Oh, aside from the writing which got pretty lame.

I rather like the prequels but I think P1 has hit the nail on the head.

George Lucas has many good qualities but I don't think he's a good director of actors. He's great at action but unless you're a great actor in your own right you're not going to come over well.

P1 nailed it, and I would make his point #4 the #1 on the list.

The story line should have been on one of the best villains of all time, and instead devolves into a bunch of light saber waving with little actual impact.

Imagine if they would have made PM Anikin the kind of boy who gets beat by a cruel slave master, who goes back to his one room shack, and tortures animals with a growing telekinesis power? Who blames his mother for the situation, and powers himself out bondage to run wild in the desert for the mega "I'm free" ending.

In ATC, he achieves a solo survival scene, until the Jedi show up to stop him from terrorizing the small town, and end up rehabbing him... or do they just make it worse? (see any parallels with any current interventionist actions going on in our wonderful world today? Hey, who ever does the bankroll on my pics gets to put any ol' moral spin on it they want... just leave me the residuals!)

In RoS, well... you know, Vader's gotta do what a Vader's gotta do. But, hey, at least I'll buy that the guy is legitimately able to pull off killing a classroom of padewans... ya know, cuz he proved in from the first and second movies with that whole character development thing? Palpatine makes the discovery of the self-dark side trained Anikin in reel 1, and knows if he doesn't co-opt it quick, this is the one and only in the galaxy that could shut him down... A great setup into the big end in RoJ.

Well sprinkle all that political crap in there if you like, but those 3 movies air balled the main character story that they were supposed to build. At the end I wanted to see a Palpatine who was afraid of a growing power, successfully diverted. Not one that just easily handled an opportunity and saw no danger. I wanted to see a mastermind at work.

You can have big battle scenes and pod races, and all that... but don't forget to tell the damn story!!

Hell he could turn against the Jedi by rationalizing that their treatment of him was no better than Watto's treatment of him: he can only move and breathe by the guidelines of the Jedi Council which, he feels, arbitrarily applies the Jedi Code to control its erstwhile "slaves." Killing the kids could have been some super perverse form of "freeing" them from their bonds of slavery since he rationalized that by actually freeing them (like the Jedi "freed" him from Watto) would simply be condemning them to a different kind of slavery.

Or pretty much anything aside from the ending we got which is "Oh yeah, btw you're evil now, so go commit some murders." "Sure, why the $#@! not?"