Star wars...which befouls the OT legacy more...PT

[dbunting]

Wrong thread

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Which worlds in particular did people think were well done from the PT? Im being sincere with that question as I don’t really remember too many of them, and many of those I do are as interesting as the new places in the ST, at least imo. Naboo I did like and think it was one of the better established places. I liked it being a mix of both city and wilderness, though the political structure of the place...well its not very well explained in the film that i recall, but if there is one thing the PT didnt needs is more (poor) dialogue trying to deal with politics.

Coruscant was interesting of course.

Mustafar and Kamino fall into the category of looks cool and interesting without having anything to really develop them or make them feel like “worlds.”

Geonosis didn’t leave much impression on me.

Same with Kashyyk, which only really interested me because “look at all the Chewie’s!”

Not saying this to shit on the PT though, i am genuinely imterested to know what people liked more about the world there compared to the ST

Naboo in almost everywhere was interesting, and continued being interesting - neat architecture, neat places, beautiful scenery. Geonosis wasn't great, but was a bit different, and the Geonosians were pretty cool from a design perspective. Mustafar was downright bad-ass, especially once Vader put his castle there. 

I really liked Kashyyyk, not just because of the wookies - because it managed to be both arboreal and busy. It was alive and full of people and things and buildings and interesting terrain. It's just a pretty place.

Kamino wasn't anything special save the architecture of the cloners, which was cool in that Star Wars style that Cloud City embodied. 

Utapau, with its verticalness, was also interesting, though not particularly great to look at. 

Mostly, I think I just want Ralph McQuarrie paintings to come to life. Mustafar and Geonosis and Naboo all did that. So did Krait and Canto Bight. 

[Lord Varys]

24 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

They are both terrible, but I'd say the PT is more worthy of respect. As has been mentioned before, at least the PT attempted to be more original than the ST. It also does less damage to the SW legacy since it doesn't render the final victory pointless, not to mention doing all sort of other weird stuff (looking at you TROS). The PT is also bad in a funny way, which is something I can't say of TFA for instance.

Long story short, the PT shot for the moon and missed spectacularly. The ST didn't even try. Always respect the dreamers more.

Yeah, and just to shit a little bit on the PT:

I think TPM is not only mostly a waste of time (the pod race simply has no point) it is also full of plot holes. Qui-Gon could have immediately left Tatooine, there was no need to drag this out so long. This movie could have been some sort Episode 0, a prologue to the saga, introducing everything, but as part of the trilogy it pretty much sucks. There was also no need for a Qui-Gon as the guy to find Anakin. That should have been Obi-Wan, as Ben implies in ANH. Overall, it could also have worked if Anakin had been a slave who was treated very badly, say, the slave of an actual Hutt on Nal Hutta or Nar Shaddaa (or a similar place). In such a place hooking up with the gang could have made more sense, and his knowledge/skill set could have actually helped to leave the place.

And politically, AOTC should have been Episode I. I actually think structurally this movie was much, much better in script where there was actual political plot left - most of that was cut, and having read script spoilers before I was horrified by the movie in the theater.

Still, the story is disjointed. The way to go would have been to combine the love story with the political story, i.e. have Padmé and Anakin go to a conference where Separatist and Republican senators discuss conditions for peace and coexistence. Dooku could have been there, too, of course. Padmé would have been targeted there because she was about to sway both sides to come to an agreement, having a lot of friends among the Separatists (meaning Dooku and Palpatine would have done everything in their power to get her away so things go their way). Anakin could have been there not as Padmé's bodyguard but a Jedi representative. And the planet could have been Naboo or the Separatist capital Raxus. Once things failed there, we could have had the Tatooine and Kamino story, with the finale on Geonosis.

And then the jump to ROTS is just too fast. There should have been another movie about an important Clone Wars event, possibly only this being the movie where Anakin loses his mother - and not to the Sand People but rather due to some event of the war, direct involvement of the Sith.

ROTS should have been structured differently - the beginning is powerful, but I think Anakin's fall could be convincing regardless his reasoning if he figures out what was really going on with the war after he has already pledged himself to the Sith - meaning that he and the Jedi could only have learned that Dooku was a Sith and Darth Tyranus after that moment, meaning Anakin's final test before getting the mantle of Darth Vader would have been a duel against Darth Tyranus in front of Darth Sidious. One could have accomplished this without much change by having Dooku being captured at the beginning, and then becoming the right hand man of the newly proclaimed Emperor.

30 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Which worlds in particular did people think were well done from the PT? Im being sincere with that question as I don’t really remember too many of them, and many of those I do are as interesting as the new places in the ST, at least imo. Naboo I did like and think it was one of the better established places. I liked it being a mix of both city and wilderness, though the political structure of the place...well its not very well explained in the film that i recall, but if there is one thing the PT didnt needs is more (poor) dialogue trying to deal with politics.

Coruscant was interesting of course.

Mustafar and Kamino fall into the category of looks cool and interesting without having anything to really develop them or make them feel like “worlds.”

Geonosis didn’t leave much impression on me.

Same with Kashyyk, which only really interested me because “look at all the Chewie’s!”

Not saying this to shit on the PT though, i am genuinely imterested to know what people liked more about the world there compared to the ST

Oh, I was more speaking about being able to follow/figure out where the characters are, not so much that the worlds had much depth - that kind of thing is not possible in movies such as those. However, it is quite clear that Lucas had native species for every world he created - Tatooine had Jawas and Tusken Raiders, Hoth its tauntauns and Wampas, Dagobah had animals and, sort of, Yoda (who fit right in, even if he isn't a Dagobah species), Endor had the Ewoks, Naboo has the Gungans, Coruscant has the entire galaxy, Kamino had the Kaminoans, Geonosis the Geonosians, Utapau two species, Mustafar those weirdo robot-like people, and Kashyyyk the Wookiees.

And I'd definitely say that two desert worlds in AOTC wasn't that great of an idea - would have been better to have the droid factories some place else. Or not to have Tatooine in that movie.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

13 hours ago, Relic said:

Which trilogy has more "moments"? I'm going with the PT. There are like 4 awesome bits in this new trilogy that i can think of. 

There's only three movies though. And I assume you mean the entire movies are the "awesome bits." 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

11 hours ago, Vaughn said:

The sequel trilogy never should have set it in the lifetime of the OT characters. From the first minute, the galaxy wide triumph at the end of RotJ is negated, which is far more 'damaging' to the OT than anything they did with Han or Luke. I find the whole concept of movie X ruined movie Y bizarre really. 

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the most entertaining movies of my lifetime. Temple of Doom is unwatchable due to Capshaw and Short Round. Last Crusade is very enjoyable to watch when on cable. The terribleness of ToD has no impact on my enjoyment of the other two. The only reasons SW is different is because the creators and fans have insisted from day two that everything has to matter holistically and can't be enjoyed on its own merits. To view the Last Crusade through the lens of a angry SW 'fan' would be to spend two hours enraged that they discovered the Ark of the Covenant, had it taken by the government and just, just... went on with their lives. As if. 

 

 

Ah, now I understand. I didn't get that old fans hated this aspect so much (that the OT triumphs didn't amount to much in the new trilogy). The first movie I saw in the theater (when I was five) was Return of the Jedi. I grew up on this stuff, but the issue above never bugged me. That's how things work. I guess I was primed on this with my love of the epics. Everything King Arthur did was undone by Mordred, Beowulf's reign ended when he died, and no matter the bravery of Hector, Troy fell with him. I think that's just the way these stories go.

[sologdin]

the tragic is a superior mode, but some readers dislike it.  not all narratives are here to flatter our facile prejudices, yo.

[polishgenius]

Tragedy's fine if that's the way it was designed from the start. It's stupid if you just undo all the triumph of a previous, non-tragic story because you could't think of a new problem so you just bring back the old one.

This was already somewhat the case when the New Order presented basically the same threat as the Empire, but bringing Palpatine back just damages all the personal triumph as well as the broader one.

[Vaughn]

11 hours ago, sologdin said:

the tragic is a superior mode, but some readers dislike it.  not all narratives are here to flatter our facile prejudices, yo.

Love to talk about 'facile prejudices' when discussing a movie series which is, at its heart, family entertainment. 

 

I enjoy the TFA and the fact that it steps on the end of the RotJ doesn't matter much because the movie itself is entertaining for two hours. My larger point there is simply that the Star Wars universe doesn't/can't hold up to extensive scrutiny in the way some fans want. Therefore, the creatives involved in making more should ignore those people entirely. They will never be happy and are at best, completely blinded to their own prejudices which color their reviews of new Star Wars content. 

 

In hindsight, the new series should have followed the MCU playbook of having a Rey, Poe and Finn movie, all set against Snoke and Kylo Ren with a final movie, Infinity War style, where it all came together. C'est la vie. 

[aceluby]

18 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

In hindsight, the new series should have followed the MCU playbook of having a Rey, Poe and Finn movie, all set against Snoke and Kylo Ren with a final movie, Infinity War style, where it all came together. C'est la vie. 

They should have followed the MCU playbook in using the abundance of source material out there in the EU.  

[Lord Varys]

5 hours ago, Vaughn said:

Love to talk about 'facile prejudices' when discussing a movie series which is, at its heart, family entertainment. 

I'd say you have very low standards at what you consider family entertainment. If a movie should have about the artistic quality and internal consistency of, say, a visit in an amusement park, then you would have a point.

But I don't think that's what movies should be.

And Star Wars just happens to be a franchise that's had a larger and deeper impact on a significant number of people than the average blockbuster series.

 

[Underfoot]

Given that my childhood was the prequel trilogy era, to answer the OP's question, the sequel trilogy is what's not holding up for me. To echo what some others have said, at least the prequel had a story, and that story was going somewhere inevitable so the only letdown could be the execution. I also love the color and expansiveness of the prequels, filling in the world way more than the OT did. 

I still (mostly) likethe sequels and in particular appreciate having better representation across the board, but with no cohesive storyline, too many retreads of what had been done before, and flat or controversial send-offs of our OT heroes, it's hard to say that they brought more to the Star Wars legacy than the PT did. 

[The Mother of The Others]

I was raised by strippers.

 

[The Mother of The Others]

...so I know when something has been stripped down.  The new movies are easy breezy fun for everyone.   You can watch them over and over, because nothing slows it down, no content is there to digest and consider, it's all surface level nothings.  The villain is a problem child with spasms of anger and attention deficit disorder that makes his mind wander halfway across the galaxy to peek in on Rey and kick the back of her desk to get attention like a middle schooler.  So for parents it's a perfectly understandable villain- - - it's their kid.  Not really a fantasy escape so much as the modern family directly transposed onto the screen.   We love seeing ourselves in funhouse mirrors, so that makes these the perfect family movies. 

Spoiler

Except for when Ren kills his dad.

  But that's just one incident.  He doesn't kill his

Spoiler

mom.

He just thinks about it and is about to do it.  Which is progress!  But he lost out on the opportunity when someone else pulls the trigger first, which teaches kids in the audience the important lesson that the early bird gets the worm.   You can see clearly how the worth of... this.... is equal to the original trilogy's worth.  Yes.

So the sequels are dense in the 'dumb' way, while the prequels are dense in the packed-with-tedious-plot sense of density.  The prequels' denseness weighs them down and makes them unfun, while the Duh dense sequels are bristling with fun at the expense of everything else.   The verdict is we like having fun in a speedboat more than we like slowboating with a tour guide pointing out historical junk.  

You know how Transformers makes you cry?   While everything is blowing up the Witwicki family of humans runs across the sand and very important sounding music plays, and keeps on playing as more explosions explode, until......  And then you hate yourself for letting Transformers manipulate you like that for no good reason.  Well, the new movies have manipulated us into feeling a star wars feeling.  Like how designer perfumes combine a bunch of chemicals to make you believe you're smelling a fresh strawberry waffle on someone's skin, so you salivate and crave that person, and you eat them but it does nothing to sate your desire for a filling breakfast.  They've been had, and you've been had.   Everyone's kind of happy but also a bit befuddled too by the time it's over.  And you still need to go to the kitchen and make breakfast for real this time, because while the artificial waffling experience was fun it was also hollow and left you unfed in other ways.

And that's the state of star wars today.

[sifth]

On 12/23/2019 at 3:13 PM, felice said:

I don't think the problem is the timeline, it's what they did with it. Instead of starting with Leia back leading a small rebel group against a rebranded Empire that conquers the whole galaxy off-screen, the story should have been set in a successful, peaceful New Republic which now faces a new threat that could destroy it all, but in the end is saved by the heroes. And if you want to do something vaguely similar to the Disney Trilogy, start off with Ben and Rey as rivals at Jedi school, so they have an established relationship rather than just an instant magical bond and it makes sense for their Jedi skills to be at the same level. Show his seduction to the dark side, so she can understand and sympathise with it even though she thinks he's making the wrong choices. And build stronger relationships with the supporting cast! Rey barely knows Finn, Poe, and Rose exist.

I've been saying this for years. The fact that they rush us right into another war in TFA, really does hurt the ending of RotJ. It makes the entire victory at the end of that film meaningless. Not to mention it just raises questions that don't make a whole lot of sense.

[Ran]

6 hours ago, The Mother of The Others said:

You know how Transformers makes you cry? 

No.

[Rippounet]

Picking up where we left...

On 12/23/2019 at 10:22 PM, Lord Varys said:

That might be ... but then, I really don't know how they could have stopped the Sith. Do you have any idea how this could have worked? I mean, is there a guarantee that a less strict code or more dark emotions could have helped them? Could that not perhaps led to more Jedi joining Sidious rather than opposing him?

I'd say the point made by the prequels was that the Jedi failed at saving Anakin, and that this proved their undoing, since Anakin saved Palpatine from Windu before heading to the temple.

I could speculate more, but quite frankly that would be uninteresting.

On 12/23/2019 at 10:22 PM, Lord Varys said:

With those movies one could make a very solid case that Yoda's condemnation of Anakin in TPM was very justified.

Yes, it was. And yet, the Jedi's inability to train and protect a young boy was also their failure.

In my eyes, the point of episode 1 was to show future Vader as a young, innocent, sweet boy, so that the viewer would always remember that no one was fundamentally evil. Even episode 2 still underlined Anakin's human failings.

But of course, we do agree that the fact some teachings of the Jedi or Jedi code were wrong doesn't mean the Jedi order as a whole was corrupted. It just means that some apparently minor mistakes ended up having large consequences when the "Chosen One" entered the picture.

[Rippounet]

Also, turns out this rant of mine is perfect for this thread:

I think the reason I like the prequels better than this trilogy is summed up in a single word: world-building. The OT's world-building wasn't grand, but it was subtle and adroit. A line here, a line there, had a lot of implications. And the OT established StarWars after all. Many things remained vague, but that was ok, since it was just the beginning.
What the prequels achieved was flesh out all the things which had only been hinted at in the OT: the Jedi order, the Republic, the Separatists, the war, Palpatine's rise to power, Anakin's fall... It wasn't perfect for sure, and it took the Clone War series to build and expand that, but it was there. The world of StarWars started existing for me with the prequels. And I loved the political intrigue (the romance less so, but let's not go there).
This trilogy hardly did any world-building. You had a few worlds that were interesting, but only Exegol was somewhat new-ish (for the movies at least). I expected so much more. I expected to see what the New Republic would be like, and the inevitable struggles it would be facing (going beyond having to fight the remnants of the Empire). I expected to see Luke's Jedi order with its inevitable failings and philosophical questioning (since Luke was not himself properly trained as a Jedi in the first place). I expected to meet plenty of new Jedi trained by Luke, each with distinct personalities.
But there was none of that. All of what would have built the world post-Empire was conveniently skipped. Instead the story focused on a -seemingly- random girl, the son of Han and Leia, and a random stormtrooper with moral issues (I don't think Poe was too important in the first movie). It's not just that Luke had failed, his Jedi Order had vanished with him and the New Republic was nothing but a joke's punchline. Everything was just as vague as the OT, but this time there were no excuses.
Lazy writing is what it was.
It was all character-driven. The plot was just a rehash of what had been done before. What was actually interesting to me, the fall of Luke's Jedi Order was treated through a flashback. And somehow Luke really decided the Jedi had to end (burning the ancient texts) after that.
How much more interesting it would have been to have Rey as a new padawan in Luke's Jedi Order, meet Ben Solo, and then have Luke realize that what he had built was a disaster and have his existential crisis. To see the First Order as a constant thorn in the New Republic's side, until eventually the New Republic collapsed under the weight of its own failings, just like the Old Republic had before ; Finn would have deserted precisely as the First Order was winning. We would have understood the strength and appeal of the First Order instead of them being cardboard vilains. The second movie could then have focused on Rey, Finn & all.
The huge problem I have with this trilogy is the way it begins. It tries to imitate the OT by skipping stuff and hiding behind mystery. It doesn't achieve anything because it doesn't have any real story to tell, except the well-known story of two force-users struggling against the dark side and the resistance/rebelion having to destroy planet killers or evil fleets. Whoopee-do, was that the best you could do?
I watched the prequels several times, and as time passes, my brain does tend to leave out the bad. Instead I see the story. The seemingly innocuous lines that actually say a lot more than you'd think at first. Yes, it's only the "skeleton" of what should have been... But at least there is a skeleton.
This new trilogy has all of the bad things of the other ones. To me its only redeeming qualities are the visuals and a handful of emotional moments, moments that are mostly copied on ones from the OT. Again, whoopie-do. I get that it works for some people, but I think in the end I'd rather have a good story that is poorly executed than a non-story.

[Lord Varys]

5 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I'd say the point made by the prequels was that the Jedi failed at saving Anakin, and that this proved their undoing, since Anakin saved Palpatine from Windu before heading to the temple.

I think this setup is also the main flaw of Anakin's fall since as I think I already pointed out somewhere - Anakin must know what Palpatine is and what he did when he reveals he is the other Sith Lord - he was Maul's and Tyranus' master, and is thus responsible for the attempts on Padmé as well as the deaths of hundreds of Anakin's friends and fellow Jedi (not to mention doing his best to murder Anakin and Padmé during the war).

If he is indeed willing to ignore all that for the (empty) promise of a monstrous person to save his wife from a vision that might not even come true, he reveals himself as the kind of person that is not really worth saving. There is something very wrong with Anakin Skywalker on a pretty fundamental level.

To make him more tragic/sympathetic his fall should have been structured differently, or been about something else. And I honestly don't see much wrong with Yoda's advice to Anakin early in the movie - death is a part of life we all have to accept, and acting on hunches and visions that might not even be entirely accurate or the whole picture is definitely a bad foundation for any action.

5 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

In my eyes, the point of episode 1 was to show future Vader as a young, innocent, sweet boy, so that the viewer would always remember that no one was fundamentally evil. Even episode 2 still underlined Anakin's human failings.

Yeah, and I think especially TPM works pretty well in this regard. It is a pity that the little brawl he had with one of his friends was cut.

5 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

But of course, we do agree that the fact some teachings of the Jedi or Jedi code were wrong doesn't mean the Jedi order as a whole was corrupted. It just means that some apparently minor mistakes ended up having large consequences when the "Chosen One" entered the picture.

I've immersed myself in 'The Jedi Path' (I've got the luxury editions of both that thing and the Sith book with the fancy items and the box/holocron they come with) and the rules are indeed rather strict, with the order being pretty authoritarian - especially with such things as the Force as seen by your betters can pretty much determine your career in the order. But it also seems that the various trials as imagined really can help a lot with character growth and coming into your own as a person within this Jedi/Force philosophy thing.

I also get the vibe there that Jedi are not without deep friendships and relationships - they just should not get so close that they cannot deal with the inevitable loss or allow their feelings for other people involve with their work.

[Those two books are real fun if you want to pretend for a time that this world is real and you could become a Jedi or Sith yourself.]

As the career of a Jedi is imagined there we only get the kind of 'ivory tower indoctrination' only in the younglings phase. Only then do they mostly reside at the tower - as padawans the Jedi-to-be travel all around the galaxy on the kind of missions Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan do in TPM. This indicates, I assume, that they actually do have ample contact with the common people of the galaxy without and outside the Republic to not necessarily lose touch with reality (and they definitely should be much more grounded in this regard than, say, career politicians a bureaucrats on Coruscant). Even the Jedi on the High Council do go on missions occasionally.

As for your rant there, I can agree with everything there. I would only perhaps add that while I think that in your rudimentary scenario the First Order/Republic struggle could have made more sense, I don't think this would have been a good scenario as such. I don't think there should have been Empire stuff there even if they had had a story about the falling of some Jedi students.

The Kylo Ren character could have easily enough been an older student of Luke's who failed, sort of filling the role of Snoke, who then corrupted Han's son in a compelling story that made sense, causing him to kill his own father eventually at a later point in the story - if that was what we had to go. There are so many ways how this story could have been worked.

The basic flaw of these people seems to be that they actually don't understand Star Wars at all. They made a couple of movies on the basis that the setting as such is irrelevant because Star Wars is just always the same good vs. evil story - but that's not really the case. Or rather: insofar as it is the case it does very much matter how the story is told. You cannot just arbitrarily throw things together and expect this to make sense.

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, Lord Varys said:

Yeah, and I think especially TPM works pretty well in this regard. It is a pity that the little brawl he had with one of his friends was cut.

That was Greedo he fought with. and then the other kids are like "silly Greedo, you should never attack first" or something. So yeah I'm fine with that scene being cut. Though I guess they could have just ended it before that line. 

[Lord Varys]

3 hours ago, RumHam said:

That was Greedo he fought with. and then the other kids are like "silly Greedo, you should never attack first" or something. So yeah I'm fine with that scene being cut. Though I guess they could have just ended it before that line. 

Yeah, right. Greedo wasn't one of his friends - that was the other Rodian.