When something new and influencial takes the world by storm as the original SW did, it's quite easy to overlook the problems until 16 years later, an addition to that series is added and it's not what you were expecting to get.
We then nitpick over little things that we can easily draw comparisons to the original one as well, it's as simple as that.
I don't feel like I ever understood why Vader was following orders from Tarken. Leia says that she was expecting Vader to be on Tarken's leash. Well, I could rant all night and day and say that they should have kept Tarken in Empire and Jedi, just like people say Maul should have stayed in all 3 movies. But he didn't...whatever.
Why doesn't Luke cry when he sees his Aun't and Uncle's burnt corpses lying on the ground. He shows zero emotion except puts his head down, then looks back up. Not only would I be tramatized at seeing something like that, let alone horrified, I would most definitely be crying if I saw my guardians in that condition.
I can make a laundry list of problems I have with the OT....just because they're the originals, doesn't mean they don't have problems like the PT does. The problem is people refusing to accept the PT for what it is and holding it up against the OT and looking for the dumbest things to complain about.
I guess I forgot that somewhere along the line, 70 percent of movie goers became infatuated with only liking a movie so long as the story was absolutely perfect and they could relate to all 500 characters. Why is it when we go to a comedy, we can enjoy the movie for being a comedy and laugh, even though we might not build some enormous relationship with any character. We enjoy a horror movie like "Scream" because it scares us, even though the plot is extremely shallow...basically "good girl vs. serial killer" and nothing more. Yeah, we know who to root for, but it's not like the plot was overly amazing, yet we can enjoy that for what it is.
So why can't we realize the Prequels aren't and never will be the OT, and not nitpick over things that really don't change our lives one way or another because it's a sci-fi entertainment film meant to show off colorful worlds, flashy effects, and simply show the backstory behind a lot of what we heard about in the OT?
Having Anakin as a boy was far from the wrong decision. You can understand what George was trying to do with that...establishing that he was once and innocent child like everyone else, forced under slavery. Don't say that, "Well, we could have just heard about him being a slave" because the common arugument I'm hearing here is that "If George tells us about it but doesn't show it, we can't make a connection to it." People just went about refusing to accept that there was a kid in the film because "oh, the OT didn't have any kids!" So what? It had annoying robots and a furry guy that knows only how to shoot blasters and pilot ships.
Bottom line is, I think we're getting to a point where we're all just gonna have to agree to disagree.
__________________
I like George.
Last edited by Sith Master X on Jan 10th, 2011 at 01:23 AM
you are right OB1 didn't get to the bottom of this, cause he never got the chance to apprehend Jango, and then he was killed. and the republic was forced to use the clones anyway, but the audience still knew who ordered it.
How it was ordered and by who, is important cause it shows that it was Palps idea and he is the one in control and it eventually effects all the heroes, once order 66 comes into play. and who's DNA it is, is important too cause it creates a tie to the OT with Boba and with certain things that he and the stormtroopers do in the OT. (stormtrooper hitting his head in EP4 and Boba not falling for the falcon in the garbage dump)
Not every point or character in the movie has to affect Anakin, but it all has a bearing on the movie or movies as a whole.
Jango did indirectly affect anakin cause he was the one trying to kill padme.
Dooku did affect anakin at the end in EPII and at the beginning of ep III, he did have an influence.
could some of the character interactions been done better yes
, like maul should of survived till the beginning of epIII
I would of loved to have seen Boba (who has gone back to kameino to genetically age himself 10 years) with Anakin attacking the jedi temple and taking the braids to hang on his shoulder( i know in the books they are suppose to be wookie scalps) but jedi braids would be better and more meaningful in the movie universe.
So many story lines? It's about how anakin becomes vader and how palps comes to power. the OT is about anakin again and luke becoming a jedi and at the end of ROTJ the fall of the empire.
It's suppose to be simple? and it has become simplistic? K. that doesn't make sense.
I'll be the first to admit the PT wasn't perfect but neither was the OT when i watch it now. But when i still watch them all now they make me feel good and remember being a kid and just having fun with the movie and forgetting about all the sh1t that is going on in this craptacular world and wish i could just hop in the falcon and leave.
This entire paragraph just may be the very first time I've read someone else sharing the exact same thoughts about Star Wars as myself.
Pretty much the same way I view it. I have fun with the movie because it's just a movie...and well, I've seen far more movies that are worse than the PT. The PT will always be a failure to the majority of people based on the simple fact of it being compared to the originals.
Feel the same as you with your comment on the top of the page.
People seem to think the OT is flawless but it's not. But if the movie is made correctly and you can let your mind go and beileve the world you are watching then anything is possible and you can have a blast watching it. A prime example for me from 2009 would be Gi Joe (highly entertaining and well put together) and transformers 2 (entertaining for the first 10min then fell apart with annoying characters both human and transformer and crap jokes that took you out of the movie)
Well, why didn't the PT make an impact like the OT did? It's not like times have changed so much that movies can't make a huge impact did.
THe Matrix did 1999... also a very flawed movie, but it made an impact by combining an idea that had been done before in a completely new form. People were going nuts over it, the effects were new, it had a look. And yet. the Matrix too is a very talky picture. But somehow it's more alive than the PT, simply because everything comes down to one things: what is the matrix?
Lord of the Rings. Well, I guess I don't have to explain the worldwide impact these three movies made. Even their CG Gollum is much much more convincing than Jar Jar or Dexter Jettster... And this was made by a couple of guys in New Zealand, not by the great and mighty ILM
And then there was Avatar, also flawed storywise, but it had originality and a convincing new world.
You gotta be honest here: the PT made nowhere near as much as an impact as these movies did. And yet, the OT did. I think it has to do with the very muddled storyline, unconvincing characters and very little room to sympathise with your main heroes, because they make no sense.
Let me try to sum this up. I sai SW is supposed to be simple. And the PT simplistic in the way it seems to think the audience is studip (ya know, Jedi being passive and emotionless, contradictory to not fighting wars while that's all we see them do, an Anakin who is angry from the start, very little character development etc etc). But simple means a simple plot line so it's clear what's ats stake.
Let's see the list then:
3. ANH - it's about destroying the death star, the new universe's super weapon than can destroy planets
4. ESB - it's about the heroes trying to survive (Luke goes into training because now Vader knows who he is, he needs to be equipped against that power)
5. ROTJ - it's about destroying the 2nd death star and the entire empire
Everything that happens in the OT movies is in service of reaching that goal. There is character development, the heroes change. After each movie they have grown, they are not the same people they were at the beginning of each film.
Now, let's switch to the PT
1. TPM - it's about getting a Trade Federation blockade to go away or a treaty not being signed... or something
2. AOTC - it's about finding the one who tried to assisinate Padme, the discovery of a clone army and about Anakin falling in love (and yes, we all know how well that was done... NOT)
3. ROTS - it's about a revenge from Sith (who we still don't know from the movies themselves who they are and why they hate the Jedi so much) but mostly about Anakin's fall to the Dark Side... (and about a general Grievous that needs to be killed, the separatists that need to be stopped etc etc.)
THe PT is has no simple storylines, it's not very clear why these people do all this stuff? Decisions seem to be made at random and Jedi don't seem very smart, like having Anakin spy on Palpy while we found out later that they can just access the security camera's in Palpy's office... why send Anakin???? - oh yes, he has to fall to the dark side so that's why the Jedi send him... That (and many other examples like that) make the PT simplistic, like we're stupid or something.
Of course the OT is not perfect, but it has energy, dynamic, emotion and it doesn't try to be more than it is: a simple fun ride that is filled with emotion, action and a great used-future look (another weird decision: why the heck did Lucas ever abandon this concept???)
Vader probably deferred to Tarkin because it was Tarkin's command ship and therefore his right to rule in that situation. Vader just generally does what he likes anyway and in the next movies he's speaking to the Emperor direct via holo-link so you would draw the conclusion that he is the Emperor's right hand man overall.
The reason why Luke may not have been so emotional may have been the fact that he probably had already known what the stormtroopers would have done by now considering the slaughtered Jawas. He just had to see for himself and had probably steeled himself for whatever was waiting for him.
I'm not saying the OT is perfect but this is what happens when you do one part of a saga heavily focused on emotion, spiritualism, friendship and clearly defined good vs evil themes and then create a prequel that doesn't mesh with what you did first and is purely 'entertainment' as you say. Its has to mesh because it's not a re-imagining, its parts 1,2,3 outlining events that HAVE to correspond to 4,5,6 (in my opinion visually correspond). Lucas strengthens this notion by adding PT things into the re-releases of the OT, trying to almost bully them into fitting and failing in the process.
To use your analogy of a horror movie say I made three horror movies that are emotional, full of friendship and excellent character development and progression. People love them, want to know more about the origin of these characters. I say fine, make three prequel movies but jam a lot of violence and action sequences into it, forget the old school model-making (Tom Savini style!!) I used for the previous movies and just totally layer it with CGI, totally destroying the vision and the connection between the two movies. It wouldn't work and I would be rightly criticised for being sloppy/lazy.
In a way having Anakin as a kid may not have been bad but to have him meet Padme as a kid was. He may have considered her pretty but to start their relationship like that was weird. No adult or young adult(Padme) would consider forming a relationship with someone who they knew as a child(Anakin). It just doesn't work, its like the movie just throws morals out of the window.
Last edited by Lord Shadow Z on Jan 10th, 2011 at 03:00 PM
When you speak of the used-future look I can't help thinking of Firefly/ Serenity and how they did this perfectly. It was this care-worn universe that didn't really ascribe to the usual sci-fi/fantasy rules e.g. aliens, laser weapons, an unexplainable proplusion system for ships. Okay they used CGI but only for space scenes and for other brief gimmicks but the film and series had cool environments and sets and in contrast to the SW PT you always felt you were somewhere real.
I don't know why he felt he had to almost create a different look to everything... ships, blasters or even introduce more alien races in almost every scene. Why couldn't he use the original Star Destroyers, TIE fighters and X-Wing models or the same look of the stormtroopers and Imperial troops? Would have communicated from the beginning that they were all part of one massive fleet/army and as Palpatine wrested control they were forced to serve under the Empire. Then say the rebels steal the designs for the prototype X-Wing and develop it as their ship.
That would have been cool!!
The sad irony is is that using effects makes the ships (and most of everything else, including some of the droids) in the PT look more advanced than the ships in the OT even though the PT is meant to be the past. This even happened when they made the Star Trek: Enterprise prequel series, the Enterprise NX-01 looks more advanced than the the NCC-0701 from the original series. Although with the JJ Abrams film it's okay because that is a complete re-hash of the franchise.
The PT didn't make as such a big impact because we had seen it before in the OT. And when the OT came out we were younger and more impressionable and nothing like it had ever been seen before ever! There were a few things in the PT that impressed me. The cgi, pod race, darth maul fight scene, speeder chase, clone war, yoda fighting, battle over coruscant, and battle on mustafar.
Some of the cgi of golumn isn't good and the war rogs in tt arent very good.
Avatar did not have originality. It was the matrix with dance with Indians.
The PT is just that a prequel and it is telling the back story that most of use know the outcome to.
Ep1 is about finding anakin and palps rise to power
Ep2 again is about palps rise to power and Anakin and padme
Ep3 anakins fall and the sith coming into power and the fall of the republic.
Seems pretty simple to me.
I will have to see what video cameras you are talking about.
"the ot has a great used future look, why did Lucas abandon this concept?"
You have missed the point of the PT then. It was to show us the republic and Jedi in all it's glory in a more civilized day. Where everything is perfect and clean and neat.
The OT is suppose to be used future look cause of the control of the empire and the rebels are using old battered ships from 20 years ago.
THe PT is about Naboo and the blockade the Trade Federation has set up. That's the main plot point, the main problem that has to be cleared up by Jedi, Jar Jar, Padme, Bibble, Palpy, the Senate, Valorium, the Neimodians etc etc... As this is the problem that's to be solved we learn about Anakin and how a Palpatine becomes chancellor...
Ep2 IS about finding the one behind the assasination of Padme, and clones, and libraries, and Dooku and Jango and more Senate and if a Clone army shoudl be used in the fight against the separatists, of and separatists... the republic in decay etc etc... But the main issue is to find the people who ordered the assasination ( we don't even find this out until ROTS when it's no longer relevant) and then where the clone army came from... Which we know only indirectly is solved.
It's not simple... it's amess.
You missed the point of George Lucas' 'used future' then. When Lucas made THX-1138, a very sterile futuristic world where everything emotional was kinda dulled by the system - everything was white, Lucas insisted on scratch marks on machines, even the pristine white walls had a little smudge where someone had bumped into. His point was (and this translated well into SW) that however new something is, it's always being used and therefore gets damaged, scratched etc... Even your brand new hummer can have bird sh!t on it... That was the point.
In the PT Lucas totally abandoned the very concept he once devised to prevent a science fiction film from being too pristine, too clean, too dead and made the PT world quite sterile. There is no argument of saying the PT universe is perfect (which it isn't at all - it's called Star WARS still,. right...) and therefore everything has to look unused. It goes against the very concept Lucas himself once devised. A look that made SW stand out from everything that had been done before and seriously influenced SF after it. See Alien, See Blade Runner etc etc.
The PT has no look that will influence any other films. It has no memorable quotes, it doesn't have iconic scenes... There just more of SW in the PT way.
And that's fine, but it's arguably a missed opportunity for something new.
You can say the same for the OT too, but the underlying story still revolves around vader and luke and the empire and all the points we have seen are relevant.
Sorry you are wrong! Lucas said himself and i'm pretty sure it's in the documentaries that the OT was old used ships and for the PT he wanted to use new clean pristine ships and locations within the republic, that is why when you get to tatooine things look old and bashed because it's outside the republic.
doesn't have any iconic scenes? what about the light saber battle at the end of ep1 and yoda fighting and the final duel between anakin and obi-wan?
USed future is an idea by Lucas.... Lucas said that however new stuff was, it would always be used by people. For the PT he obviously changed his idea. there's no question about it. I just wonder why??? It is so contradictory to what he used to say... before the Dark Times... before the PT.
And no, in the OT the storylines are all focussed on one thing.
R2 with the DS plans comes to tatooine, gets bought by Luke's family and escapes to find OB1. Luke has to follow him, finds out about the plans and decides to escort OB1 to return the plans. Han Solo is their vehicly to Alderaan where the plans should be delivered. Obstacle: Alderaan is blown up and they get captured. They have to escape, take the princess who sent the plans in the first place with them and go to Yavin V where the plans are analysed and the attack is devised: clean, simple, to the point and it all focusses on one thing: destroying the DS.
Same goes for ESB and ROTJ. Not for the PT because a lot is totally irrelevant.
He did it to make the things in the PT appear new as this was the height of the republic. But you can see where the rebels got the xwings and awings from and where the empire got the star destroyers and ties from
Ep 1 focus on palps rise to power. He sets up the blockade. The Jedi are sent in and try to take the queen to coruscant have to go to tatooine to fix the ship. They meet anakin and get him to come along and head back to coruscant. Palps takes the opportunity to get a foot hold of the senate and the Jedi decide on anakins fate. The queen goes back to naboo to take back the planet and the Jedi face maul. Palps is Elected as chancellor and we see he is the menace behind the whole plot.
Again, you are wrong. We only know TPM is about Palpy's rise to power when that materialises in ROTS. Just like ANH is in the grand scale of the things about the rise of Luke Skywalker. Yet the STORY is about destroying the Death Star.
TPM does show in hindsight the start of Palpy's rise to power (we're not supposed to know it was Palpy who set up the blockade, we can storywise only conclude this after ROTS), but the STORY, that what we actually see in this movie, is about solving a dispute about taxation of trade routes.
That's assuming you havent seen the OT. If you never saw the OT then ep1 is about the sith using the trade route taxation to make a move to take over the galaxy and at the end it is hinted that palps is the sith lord.
Now i know what you are refering to here. They didn't access a camera in Palps office. it was a security holocron from the Jedi temple.
That's where the image came from.
Yes, that's sort of the story behind it. But if we look at the protagonists and what their actions are, then it's all focussed on resolving the dispute on the taxation of trade routes. Palpy is not the protagonist here... and that's why it's so damn muddled.
The story is about Jedi, Padme, R2 etc doing a lot of stuff to resolve this boring blockade situation. But if what Lucas really wants to tell is Palpy is active in moving towards a rise to power, then he should be the protagonist of the story, his Sidious identity should not be hidden from the audience (since that would be the very point) and the Jedi should be the antagonists.
You see, this is what I mean... Lucas is trying to do a lot and doesn't do any of these storylines very well.
That is correct, even the dialouge is different, than when he was in Palps office.
Sidious is the protagonist, but Lucas wanted to keep it a secret for people who have never seen the shows and will watch them ep1-ep6. then it's a surprise for them unless they can figure out from the 2nd last scene in ep1 that Palps is the Master of Maul.
For me this all works fine
Now I know you're wrong. Palpy is NOT the protagonist. Anakin is. (And I think prolly QGJ in TPM). You don't keep a protagonist hidden from your audience for 2,5 movies. Who are you to sympathise with? Who can you feel along with? A protagonist also has character devlopment, Palpy has none of that. (Neither has Anakin for that matter)
Palpy is the ANTAGONIST. No wonder you think the PT is great. You don't know what you're talking about.
The PT would be even more flawed if Palpy is the protagonist. We never see him do anything... all he does is talk.
That depends on your point of view on who is good and who is bad
LOL
My bad i meant antagonist. Palps (sidious) and Maul are the antagonists and Anakin is the protagonist along with quigon, obiwan and Padme.
I guess Palps could be a small protagonist from the unknown audiances view, and sidious would be the antagonist.
KMC Community Forums
Jan 10th, 2011 01:08 AM
on who is good and who is bad 
