Oh God, I can't tell you how terrified I am of point-by-point posts, given my propensity for explanation.
Originally posted by dadudemon
1.) Excellent Jedi, actually.2.) More intelligent than any on the council, actually. I'd say that if Qui Gon had lived, Anakin would not have fallen to the dark side.
3.) A leader who was wrong about...pretty much everything in the end. 🙂 Oh, and Qui Gon ended up being right, in the end. 🙂
4.) Well, since the story was already written in the precious OT, Lucas did not have much choice but to show Anakin fall to the darkside, now did he? 🙂
5.) Obviously, both Anakin and Kenobi care...as did the Jedi Council as well as the Grandmaster.
6.) "I will train him." in TPM and "I loved you like the a brother..." in RotS...yeah, he never liked him.
7.) Ohhhh...mysterious! We didn't even know that that would happen when we saw it! Oh, wait...we did. We know he falls to the dark side.
Alright, by your sentence-to-number here:
1.) and 2.) No, terrible. He made bad calls. He made nonsense calls. He completely lacked logic. He was just plain dumb. Poor Liam Neeson.
3.) Yoda was wrong about pretty much everything, you say? Glad you agree.
4.) Well, since Lucas wrote the screenplay, he actually did have a choice. He could have chosen not to have Yoda predicting "grave danger" in Anakin's training, seconds before giving the go-ahead for his training. It makes Yoda appear either stupid, or schizophrenic; something I doubt he's supposed to be. This is one of (many) reasons people say the writing/dialogue in these movies sucks.
5.) I meant from an audience perspective. Frankly, none of these characters are likable or relatable, so Obi-Wan (who is boring) making a promise to a dying Qui-Gon (who is boring and stupid) about training Anakin (who is insufferably annoying in that quasi-Leave it to Beaver way) to Yoda (who is stupid) is not something I care about--tugs on no heartstrings, and doesn't make Yoda's snap-haste decision to go against his own judgement believable as anything other than a plot contrivance.
6.) I was actually referring to Obi-Wan's attitude toward Anakin in TPM... but frankly he doesn't really seem to "like" Anakin in the other films either--more like annoyance, but fondness. I digress; for most of TPM, Obi-Wan didn't seem to care about Anakin--at least not until Qui-Gon guilted him in to a dying promise. "...another pathetic lifeform" for example, or "the boy is dangerous. They all sense it, why can't you?"--a line he spoke right next to Anakin BTW. Almost like he doesn't care if the kid overhears him badmouthing him.
7.) Not the point whether we know. It's that Yoda knew. Unless Yoda read the script, or was bribed by Palpatine or something, he had no good reason for allowing this kid to be trained. He's supposed to be wise and knowledgeable, but when it comes to heeding his own warning, he doesn't? And honestly, I would have been fine if he had changed his mind. But do a better scene! He literally goes from assured denial to acceptance in less than a minute. "Agree with (Anakin's training) I do not... grave danger I fear in his training!" But I guess since Obi-Wan just really wants to, it's okay. Gee Yoda, didn't take much convincing for you to do a complete 180, huh? The basic premise of refusal-to-acceptance is fine, but make the 900 year old Jedi Leader less susceptible to the equivalent of "Whatever, I do what I want!"
Originally posted by dadudemon
Except that it is not pointless, even slightly. The entire story is a story to which we already knew the result. Anyone who knew anything about Star Wars before the work on the PT even started knew several things, including the ending:1. Anakin was trained by Kenobi against Kenobi's better judgement.
2. Anakin fell to the dark side and become Vader.
3. Vader became the slave of the Emperor and did all sorts of bad things.
Why are you devastated that the PT covered those obvious facts? It is like...you're furious because someone said to go look at an orange picture and you're like, "WTF is this shit? This picture is orange! FFS! ORANGE! Well I never!"
You're not getting the difference between audience knowledge, and character knowledge. The characters in this prequel aren't supposed to know what going's happen. It's why the very nature of a prequel is a b*tch, because the audience already knows what's going to happen to many of the characters. But if a developer knows what they're doing, they can come up with really creative ways to advance the plot in the right direction while
simultaneously investing the audience's emotions. Lucas wrote the plot advances in this film (Yoda's acceptance of Anakin's training) in a sloppy, "get it out of the way" manner.
You are someone who doesn't give two shits about emotion, tone, or pacing--it's why you look at all these moments in the film as mere steps in the path... obstacles that need to be covered with no regard as to how you cover them, so long as it gets done.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Except for the following reasons which you obviously forgot about:1. Qui Gon made Obi Wan promise, in his last dying breath, to train Anakin.
2. Obi Wan agreed to to do #1 in addition to believing Anakin really was the Chosen One.
3. The Council agreed to allow Kenobi train Anakin. Or did you forget about this part? "Agree with you, the Council does. Your apprentice, Skywalker will be."
You can't just hand wave extremely strong character motivations from Kenobi to train Anakin. You can pretend there was no plot reasons but fulfilling the dying wishes of a man you loved and admired is hardly "no reason." You PT hater, you. 😆
They're not strong character motivations. They're
just character motivations. We get no real sense that Obi-Wan is interested in Anakin until Qui-Gon dies. It's a bed-side conversion if you will, and it's last minute and shoehorned for convenience. Qui-Gon's request, and Obi-Wan's insistence should
not take precedence over a prediction of
grave danger. This is an ancient order of mystics whose lives revolve around prediction, prophecy, meditation, and apparently wisdom... yet their venerable leader disregards
his own prediction of--and I'll say it again in italics--
grave danger. For no other reason than because Obi-Wan insisted, and that Lucas needed it to be so. We're shown no conflict within Yoda, we're shown no agreement, bargaining, or pleading on Obi-Wan's part, and we're shown no reason as to why Yoda suddenly about-faced. I've pretty much just tautologged my earlier paragraph, but, hopefully 2x will help get it through. Essentially we're shown nothing of these characters'
character--which is why we all often call them "wooden" "boring" or "one-dimensional".
Originally posted by dadudemon
Yeah, cause a Clone Wars that lasted years were hardly any less destructive. Amirite? awesomeSo let us destroy your points:
1. Death of the Republic: Jedi Council's fault, the Emperor's Fault, and the Senate's fault. Not Anakin's.
2. Destruction of Alderaan: Grand Moff Tarkin's fault. In fact, Vader urged Leia to kind of...you know...cooperate.
3. Both Galactic Civil Wars (Clone Wars and the Rebellion) were the fault of the Emperor, not Vader. Oh, guess what? The person that perpetuated the Clone Wars and the destruction you talk of in the OT? Yeah...the Emperor...the man Vader eventually overthrew? Guess you forgot about one of the very best moments in the OT, didn't you? 🙂
Correction: "that the Emperor was the cause of." 🙂
Frankly... no, it wasn't any less destructive. What did we see in the Clone Wars that affected people? Don't quote me EU stuff or come up with your 'maybes' and 'perhapses'. I mean really... aside from a bunch of dead clones no one cares about, and a bunch of robots with ridiculous voices being destroyed... what destruction did the Clone Wars wreak. We don't see much of it. Like 2 1/2 battles filled with nothing but the aforementioned expendable soldiers. Maybe a couple of Jedi whose names we don't know and whom we know nothing about. That's about it. And hell... Yoda started it! Charging in like the Light Brigade with an army of Clones. Diplomacy, tact, and peaceful resolution not the Jedi way, it seems.
But this is one big digression here. My original (tongue-in-cheek) point was that, if Yoda could somehow predict all these (or if he read the script), then the ends (destroying the Emperor) does not justify the means (everything from RotS onward). It's like blowing up your neighborhood to kill a rat. A rat, mind you, that Yoda and his Jedi should have been able to smoke out with unimaginable ease before Anakin had even knocked up Padme. How he managed to get away with everything he did right under the Jedi's collective noses is thanks only to Yoda, Mace, and the rest of the Jedi being nothing short of brain damaged.
Sadly, that was as short as I could make it.