http://movies.yahoo.com/news/why-star-wars-prequels-better-original-trilogy-160300514.html


"The difference is that the original trilogy appealed directly to the simplistic moral perspective of an America above reproach and always on the side of right in global geopolitics, whereas the much more subversive prequel trilogy stands in defiant counterpoint to the much more dangerously simplistic moral absolutism of the Age of Bush."

His thesis falls on the simple fact that the prequels suck donkey balls.

+1. Even a certain main cast actor said it was rubbish in an interview on top gear.

As a debt to society, Lucas and co should be made to remake the prequels, publicly execute jar jar, recast anakin, queen amadlia(however you spell her name) and a host of other actors. And provide a written apology for ruining what was the most groundbreaking and immersive trilogy ever concieved.

My thoughts only.

LMAO!!! This reminds me of the time when Oliver Stone blamed Bush for his movie "Alexander" bombing at the box office.

I'm going through the movies with my kids, and I agree that the cast was absolutely terrible. I think the major problem is that Lucas should never tell a love story. Even in the original series, once Han and Leia started getting hot and heavy in Jedi, it got cheesy. The only member of the original cast I would keep would be Ewan McGregor as Obi. My kids, ages 3 and 7, are also curious as to how Anikan got so old in the second one when Amidala stayed so young. I told them because the director screwed the movies up from the beginning.

In Phantom Menace, Anakin was supposed to be 10 years old and Amidala was supposed to be between 15-18. Naturally, a boy going from age 10 to 20 is going to change a lot more drastically than a girl going from her teenage years to her mid 20's.

Episode II takes place 10 years after Phantom Menace.

George 'is our children learning' Bush may arguably be to blame for a few things, but Star Wars Prequels are not among them in fairness to Dubya.

This is one of the funniest reviews I've ever seen on the net of 'Attack of the Clones'. Comedy gold if you haven't seen it already. What is possibly even funnier is the phenomena of grown men taking these films so seriously....particularly the Maelstrom of 'Nerd Rage' and indignation that ensued. I was a kid when I watched the originals, and they blew me away. Watching them in later life, you begin to realise that they weren't actually that good to start with anyway.

59 MINUTES!!!!





Heresy amongst some, I know....but the truth hurts. Kids love them because they are really made for kids. Grow up, and get on with your lives! You can't be innocent forever. It's all over, man.....Over!!!

Oh, and yes bagpipes are f*cking awful too. I love this bloke. He speaks the truth.

*Countdown to PWEC commencing......'rage comments' imminent...Tick.....Tock.....*

Actually, the first one was in the same way that a Saturday matinee western is.
Entertaining, with a black and white sort of storyline that doesn't need to be over analyzed, just get the popcorn and enjoy the movie.
If you approach it now with that same attitude it's still a good way to kill an hour and a half.



Lucas himself said that the original Starwars movies were aimed at the "around 14 year old" crowd.
The same way that American Graffiti was aimed at the late teen audience.

Now as to the matter of Lucas and the "prequels" including (shudder) Jar Jar Binks...

"He's nothing but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!"
(5 points if you know what movie that came from.)

WOLF

I don't know, Anakin in phantom didn't look 10 to me. Maybe its my perspective, but heck my daughter is seven and seems to be the same age. I guess I can see your point on the changes, but honestly, it seems like Anakin changed a ton, and Amidala change none.

All things considered, my kids love the movies. My son is still a bit too young to get them, but my daughter loves them regardless if its Jar Jar or Han Solo. They love all the characters.

Absolutely! Thats pretty much exactly what it is. In space.


Couldn't agree more, which is why I laugh at any attempts at 'socio-political analysis', or the search for some deeper metaphysical subtext or truth....then wonder with bemusement why people read far too much into things. Its not really that deep. Just a bit of swashbuckling space fun. I confess I watch them every Christmas on the telly, though I don't have a single one on DVD. I had all the toys as a kid too (who didn't, lol). Still have the Millenium Falcon and God knows what else in the loft.



I know. That's precisely why I wrote 'Kids love them because they are made for kids.' Not everyone seems to get it though, especially the more vociferously obsessed 'nerd rage' adult critics.

I'm just having a laugh man, long live Star Wars and may the force be with you all.

Star Wars is a very good film, The Empire Strikes Back was even better.

I put on Return of the Jedi a few days ago. It is rotten. I actually preferred The Phantom Menace, and given the choice of running over a bunch of Ewoks with a sandcrawler, or bisecting Jar Jar Binks with a lightsabre...both are mouth-watering prospects, but erasing the teddy bears would be my choice.

The Snowspeeder is/was about the coolest looking (space)ship that i've seen.

Of course it was George Bush's fault; there was no othe choice since blaming Global Warming would be just silly.

There isn't anything that can't be blamed on one or both of those things.

The Jump the Wampa moment in the series is when Obi says the Jedi don't deal in absolutes in the third one.

Jedi Knights are all about absolutes - they don't talk about the Grey Side of the Force.

Everyone fears them entering "negotiations" because they don't negotiate, they dictate (that's why in EP1 they try to gas the Jedi). It's the unbending adherence to absolutes of the Jedi order that causes Anakin to break his covenants and wind up on the Dark Side to being with.

Here's my take on why the pre-quels were not so good. I love analyzing Star Wars and this is only my opinion.

Lucas realized that the kind of serious violence and darker good versus evil subtext that was acceptable in the 1970's and 80's to younger audiences had changed by the mid 1990's and he tried to design the prequels to gain a bigger audience of so called "new" Star Wars fans without being so dark. Seems to make good business sense, but... and this is where he failed in my opinion. Just about everyone for 2 or 3 generations had seen the original in places other than the theatre, where parents were the filter, not the MPAA, meaning kids of all ages were able to see it regrdless of its rating. Lucas didn't realize that everyone young or old who had seen the orignal trilogy was already comfortable with and accepted the darker elements of the Star Wars saga and over time the darker elements were what made Star Wars so interesting. The violence escalated with every movie and the dark side was almost always on the verge of winning. That made for great drama.

The public did not want to see a campy kid friendly story in the Phantom Menace, they were used to the darker more adult tone of the originals. So, Lucas simply misunderstood what his audience, both young and old, really wanted. A serious adult story showing the rise of the evil emperor with the fate of galaxy on the line with violence to match. He simply misjudged what his audience wanted and the changing "norms" of the 90's influenced him too much. Although, you can see by the inclusion of the damn Ewoks in Ep. VI that he was already leaning to a more "kid" friendly audience by 1983.

What's funny is that Lucas says he designed all his movies for kids. Maybe true, but the kinds of stuff that kids of Lucas's generation watched on TV and in the movies were much more mature in content. Compare TV serials like The Lone Ranger to the Spongebob nonsense you see today and the difference becomes clear.

Lucas realized his mistake after Phantom and tried to adjust with Ep. II and by the end of Ep. III the old school Star Wars was poking through the facade somewhat, but it was still quite campy.

Anwyays, what I hope for someday, is a remake by someone else. Maybe after Lucas passes away or he agrees to it, but that could be really cool. Just take the basic story of Star Wars and all the great base elements and write a strong, serious script and treat the subject matter seriously and it could be even better than the originals.

By the way, my cousin worked at 20th Century Fox during Phantom's release and all employees got to see it a week early at a Hollywood theatre. Everyone could bring 1 guest so my cousin picked me. We went and afterward everyone walked out of the theatre shaking their heads in disbelief. Right then I knew the prequels were in trouble.

The one weird thing is that if you watch Ep. 1-6 in sequence they basically get better and more adult with each one so that makes it a little better experience to watch them in order. As far as all the tweaking of the movies over time, that is a bit ridiculous. Solo always shoots first in my book.

Jason

Wasn't giving you a hard time there Biggles, I was just commenting.
I agree completely with most of what was in your first post, there's just a few places where we have a slightly differing opinion.

WOLF

Phantom Menace Global box office: 967 million

source: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars.htm


So how exactly did Lucas misunderstand what his audience wanted?

And just to prove that people kept coming back for more even after seeing Phantom Menace,


Attack of the Clones Global box office: 649 million

Revenge of the Sith Global box office: 848 million

Because everyone went in hope it was going to get better ?

I remember watching the first one and me and the missus at the time just going mmmm oooooookay, that was pretty boring.But we still went and saw the next one...and the next one Most overhyped movie set i think i have ever seen , but i too became one of the sheep and watched the lot. DAMN YOU LUCAS..YOU RUINED MY CHILDHOOD

Man if Razorback was here he would be all over this thread , so consider yourselves lucky girls and boys

I like the prequels.

There I said it!

Yes they are different, and they have ginormous shoes to fill. But at face value, I enjoy watching them. Of course there are problems, and Phantom Menace has a few questionable moments. However, not all the Star Wards movies can be ESB. Which has a massive Spaceship eating sock puppet in the middle of it.

I regularly watch the movies, and for me I can stomach most of them, but the scene where Han 'ambushes' a bunch of storm troopers with a pistol and some Ewoks... THAT is the nadir of Star Wars. In the first few movies the troopers were death dealing machines.

I know according to canon the Emperor was a big part of the cohesiveness of the Empire... But still the end of ROTJ is miserable.

I still say that it's mostly due to a generational issue. My impression is that the vast majority of people under the age of 20 now who saw the SW prequels as kids enjoyed them quite a lot while many if not most people over the age of 35 didn't care for them.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 GWB was not presidnet then, so there.

Maybe the author simply confused Bill Clinton with George Bush?

That was my first thought. Part two was either in the can or in post production when the Iraq war started too. I just don't see the correlation, myself.

The prequels could have been great. The 'mythology' of Darth Vadar was already set in IV, V, and VI. The back story could have been great, but to me the biggest killer of the prequels was Lucas' inability to tone down the action and CGI. The opening scene in Part TWO where Annikan and Obi-Wan went to protect Amadala from assasination was too drown out and so beyond belief that it took me out of the movie. It felt immature and amaturish. Yippee for the pod racing scene. Another dragged on scene that shouldn't have been a show case for CGI, but a vehicle for the movie. It was boring. The final battle between Obi-Wan and Annikin seemed like it was trying to be exciting for exciting's sake. The probability of them landing on those floating pod robots insulted me. Did every scene need to be filled with the impossible and improbable?

I felt like I had a gourmet dinner from the world's worst cook. What should have been fantastic and memorable was atrocious and memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Episode 2 came out in 2002, one year before the Iraq invasion.

The lone change made to Ep II was originally a ship crashed into a building on Coruscant causing the building to collapse. Post 9/11 that was seen as too familiar an image, so IIRC it was never finished (although I suppose at that time, just 8 months prior to release, that early versions of it must still exist).



The Jedi Master

I consider Star Wars A New Hope the weakest of the original in retrospect; however, when that first came out there was nothing else like it. Sure there was Sci Fi fantasy before it, but the blend of story and action sequences were still unlike anything prior, so much that all kinds of new films and TV sagas started popping up trying to reproduce the formula. There was never really quite the same response from rival production studios to Star Trek or Buck Rogers or Doctor Who in the same way as Star Wars. In the order that I rate the first 3 films:

Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi (Ewoks and all)
Star Wars

Phantom Menace had no characters you could like or identify with. Audiences seemed to have their preference in the first 3- they either identified with Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, if not both. Darth Vader was a great nemesis. When Lucas permitted re-releases of Star Wars in theatres, I recall audiences cheering when Darth Vader when first arrived on screen.

The next 3 films had no Darth Vader. Darth Maul could have been a terrific villain, he looked quite cool. This character was never really introduced to the audience with much screen time and he just got aced at the end of the first film. That's it. In contrast, the audience was forced to endure Jar Jar, a character you would probably just hand over to the Emperor to kill if you had to go on adventures with him. You had Palpatine, who was probably the most interesting character in my view, but because of his role more in the background pulling the strings most of the time, you don't really get much sense of his evil or powers just yet- at least not until the final curtain.

The nonsensical politics that Lucas tried to craft with some kind of deep background was actually rather shallow, too bad the films were so engrossed in it. De-mystifying the Force and making the Jedi more or less into a defacto investigative police force given free reign kind of just seemed to miss the mark. Once you see them driving around in cars, fighting in the cockpits of space ships, or using submersible water craft, it doesn't really make sense they would need to later hire a mercenary space captain to ferry them around, they already seemed more than capable of doing everything. Less a removed, Eastern like sect of monks or whatever when you see them interacting with technology so much with digital libraries and whatnot.

One could look at them either way: do the newer films stand on their own if you forget nostalgia or don't compared them to the original 3? As said before, perhaps if you're younger without that background. To tell the truth, as standalone films I think they are even worse, it's only any sense of history that even brought me into the theatre in the first place, even knowing ahead of the time of mediocre reviews. In time, the films won't be remembered as bad as we thought they were though.

The Phantom Menace was definitely a plot-driven movie and not so much a character-driven movie. Plot-driven stories have worked well in other films but it was a mistake to do that in Phantom Menace IMHO. The film also suffered from not having a Han Solo-type character.

That's probably a very succinct point, I never really could compress everything down to that summary. I think you have it wrapped up in three sentences.

It's a tweet!



The Jedi Master

plot/plät/
Noun:
A plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful.

I have to agree...

Good observations, Kontakt5 and PanzerMeyer, I largely agree.

I do think that ROTJ was worse than A New Hope, though, largely because it was a sequel in more the old-school way, just kind of re-hashing stuff from previous movies.

It had another Death Star (but a super Death Star), it had another cantina scene (Jabba's palace), it kind of had another trash compactor scene (the Rancor and Sarlacc), another big space battle with fighters having to fly a special way to get to the weak point, and probably a few other retreads.

Add the ewoks and Boba's departure (kind of foreshadowing what would happen with Darth Maul - cool villain that gets wasted), and it just felt kind of weak overall compared to ANH. I think it was about the only one of the first three that really benefited by Lucas' tweaking. The original ending didn't have as much impact as the added scenes of celebration around the empire/republic.

Panzer,

I'm talking about the critical response to the movies and the endless negative comments about the prequels, not the $$$ response. I didn't like the prequels as much as the originals, but I still watch them because just about any mediocre Star Wars movie beats out 99% of all other movies.

Jason

That's because it's literally the truth. Ep IV was originally "act 1" of the mega script he wrote before he broke it into 3 films. When he realized it may well be the only one he'd get to make, he took the ending of the 3rd film and made it the first (to a degree), likewise cherry-picking his best ideas for it. Once the time came to actually make the 3rd one, he had to scramble for replacement ideas and those weren't as good. Jabba's Palace was a chance to do the cantina "right" (remember he'd always hated it for the compromises he had to make due to budget and tech), the 2nd Death Star was more dramatic going IN it rather than along the surface (really, why not fly in from space and fire right into that port, why start far away and fly along it??), and of course the Ewoks replaced the original Wookiee idea after he'd made Chewie too smart in ESB (fixing C3PO and the Falcon and all) to really buy into the same scenario, which coincidentally Cameron also used for Aliens.

That's not the only time that happened. The end of Superman was originally the ending of Superman 2. Superman turned back time to fix the global damage the Krypton Trio caused and also made Lois forget him. When the first film got in trouble, they realized they needed a better ending, so they decided to kill Lois and then use the time warp thing to bring her back. That meant they couldn't use it for Superman 2, and came up with the kiss-hypnosis for Lois and just manual labor to fix the damage.

Oh, as for Boba Fett, thanks to primitive forms of feedback in the 80s, Lucas never knew how popular Boba Fett was until well after the release of ROTJ. He said if he'd known, he'd have made the death more spectacular than the "oops" which was all he felt the character was worth. Honestly, though, it was the costume. He actually does very little in ESB and ROTJ, boiling down to "figures out where Han was" in the asteroid field. Everything else in ESB follows logically from that and was unimpressive. In ROTJ, he manages to capture Luke for about 5 seconds, but is otherwise inept.



The Jedi Master

I thought the shielding on top of the port is what made going into the trench and firing the torpedoes from the side necessary?

Ummm...no. You have that ass backwards.
George Lucas is such a terrible director, that he can actually make proven, outstanding actors like Natalie Portman, Ewen McGregor and Samuel L Jackson look stiff.

It suffered from having Lucas as a director and containing one Jar Jar Binks.

Yes I know Lucas directed American Graffiti and the original Star Wars.
He blew his wad it seems.

Hey, even legendary directors like Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppolla directed some turds.

And yet for all of our discontent with the Star Wars prequels, they're still better than Howard the Duck.

Portman is a top notch actress. If she couldn't make Princess Amadal into a likable, realistic character then it was clearly the writing. I thought Ewen did a good job as Obi-Wan. I had no problem believing he was a young Alec Guiness. I enjoy Samuel L. Jackson, but his part seemed to be included just to have S.L. Jackson in a movie. It didn't fit very well. After Pulp Fiction and a plethera of other movies where he plays anything BUT the calm serine Jedi type, it stretched my ability to believe in his character. Bad casting IMO.

Fair enough

And let's not forget Liam Neeson. I'm sure most of us would agree that he's a very good actor and yet the Qui Gon Jinn character was pretty dull and forgettable.

Dissecting Lucas' romance elements in Attack of the Clones. Very, very funny.

His Qui Gon Jinn was better in Batman Begins.

Lack of editing. Notice how slow and boring IV-VI are with Lucas' extra scenes added in? The original cuts are much more dynamic. Basically, I think the prequels would have been alot better with some serious editing.

I've never seen the so-called "Phantom Edit" version, but I've heard many like it more than the original release.

Anyway, the prequels just proved that George having "total control" wasn't as good for the films as his original compromised visions on the first trilogy. Some people can handle it all, like Cameron. Others are better with more fundamental roles. Lucas is good at creating a story and being a producer. His directing and scriptwriting need help.



The Jedi Master

This is really the crux of the matter right here.

The whole SW saga/experience also proves that having a limited budget is sometimes a GOOD thing because it forces the film-maker to be more creative.

Red Tails demonstrates that he can't always be trusted to produce either.
Those terrible decisions with regard to direction, dialogue, etc were approved by him I reckon.

The Star Wars prequels didn't suck because George Bush was in office. The Star Wars prequels sucked because they sucked.

Welcome to page 1

Qui Gon was a great character. I think his failing was that for his screen time he always seemed to be surrounded by a cartoon.

Best thing to come out of SW Episode 1? This of course: