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

[Slurktan]

On 1/4/2020 at 6:14 PM, Ran said:

That's a rather absolutist reading.

The Deathstar was destroyed. The New Republic flourished, for a time. Anakin Skywalker was redeemed, rejecting the Dark Side of the Force, and saved his son Characters were born in the aftermath who would not have lived if the Emperor had won that day. Luke made his new Jedi temple and attempted to resurrect the Jedi order. And so on, and so on. Nothing has been nullified. 

It's like LotR, with Palpatine. Elendil died to kill Sauron, winning Middle-earth a thousand years of relative peace... until it transpired that Sauron wasn't really dead and had reformed himself and had begun to extend his power once more. Elendil's victory and its effects aren't mitigated because of unforseen eventualities. 

 

I'd accept your analogy more if Saurons fall at the end of the second Age had come out 30 years prior to the Lord of the Rings and was one of if not the biggest blockbuster book of all time.  Instead it was just backstory whereas the Lord of the Rings was actually a sequel to the sil

[Rubicante]

I'll just jump in here with my own thoughts based on what people have said in this thread.

1. I think the sequel trilogy does more damage to the original trilogy than the prequel one.  Bringing Palpatine back was a terrible decision.  There is no way the Emperor survives that fall.  We see him get vaporized!  This is about as realistic as Ned Stark actually not being killed in A Game of Thrones.  And as mentioned by many people in this thread, the sequel trilogy starts off by just resetting everything done in the original trilogy.  Everything and everybody, with the exception of Luke, just reverts to how a Episode IV started off.

2. I agree about a lot of the new planets not being memorable at all.  I feel like the line of thinking here was "the Prequel Trilogy was awful because too much was filmed in front of a green screen, so we need actual settings".  The problem is the settings chosen are just dull and boring.  The settings that that were a bit more unique were the Sith planet, the Salt planet and the Casino planet.  The Sith planet is the best of the three, but difficult to properly enjoy due to the absurdity of the Emperor still being alive.  The Casino planet was possibly the worst part of the entire trilogy.  And the Salt planet just seemed like a cheap rip-off of Hoth.  We had to have a dude taste the salt and say "salt" just to clarify that it wasn't snow, and therefore not Hoth.  How stupid is that?

3. The light saber battles are not memorable at all in this trilogy.  Again, biggest problem is that there are too many cuts.  I really appreciated in both TPM and ROTS Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Liam Neeson and Ray Park actually learned and practiced longer sequences of fighting.  However, the light saber fights in AOTC are a travesty.  Easily the worst in the entire saga.

4. I think the Sequel Trilogy learned all of the wrong lessons from the Prequel Trilogy.  The Sequel Trilogy seemed to be designed on the premise that "Everything in the Prequel Trilogy was awful, so let's ignore it and copy the Original Trilogy as much as possible". 

The Prequel Trilogy does a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong.  The overall story is fine.  It is completely distinct from the Original Trilogy.  The world building is fantastic.  The main issues are directing, writing and pacing.  I see Lucas as a man that has a great vision in terms of what the universe should look like, who should be in it, what can and cannot be done.  But he really struggled with the dialogue, especially between Anakin and Padme. 

A lot of the issues in that trilogy just seem to originate from spending an entire movie showing Anakin as an innocent, good-hearted child.  That left only two movies to show Anakin's fall to the dark side.  And I think Lucas realized very quickly that he had kind of written himself into a corner.  When we meet up with Anakin in AOTC, he is suddenly an asshole.  The transition from the kind child to the unstable asshole in AOTC happens just too quickly, and is comically bad.  And with ROTS, Lucas had really run out of time, so he had to use Anakin's fear of losing Padme as his primary motivation for turning to the Dark Side.  And that made it a little hard to swallow.  As someone else mentioned, having TPM as an episode 0 would have worked a lot better.  That gives an entire extra movie for Anakin's fall to the dark side, and his romance with Padme, the time to build properly.

So, the biggest lesson the Sequel Trilogy could have learned from the Prequel Trilogy was the importance of pacing.  And to that end, the Sequel Triology, specifically The Rise of Skywalker, fails miserably.  There is just too much going on in that movie.

 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Rubicante said:

Bringing Palpatine back was a terrible decision.  There is no way the Emperor survives that fall.  We see him get vaporized! 

Years ago, one of the earliest Lucas-approved post-OT works was Dark Empire, the comic book  written by Tom Veitch. See what Veitch had to say about the pitch and George's input.

Quote

Our original proposal was to bring back Darth Vader's costume and mask, with somebody else inside it. We felt the Empire would want to maintain the fearsome image of Vader and wouldn't much care who was wearing the armor and breathing mask. George vetoed that idea (although he did allow us to have Vader appear in dreams and memories). He said, no, you can't bring back the Vader costume...but if you can figure out how to bring back the Emperor, that's o.k.

 

The obvious way to bring back the Emperor was with cloning, which George immediately approved.

 

[RumHam]

The fake Vader idea sounds a lot better to me! Frankly I don't necessarily see Lucas's approval as a positive thing. 

[The Mother of The Others]

Didn't they just do vader II ?     Snoke should have taken Kylo aside and told him "It takes more than a helmet, son.  You need a brain to put in the helmet."   

 But yeah, bringing Sideous back was also nutty.   I bought into his return the way the Jerry Springer audience starts chanting "Jerry! Jerry!" but seriously it was easier to picture him coming back than the dongship fleet that comes with him as a package deal apparently.   That was just pure chuckles.   Like, for the merchandising of this movie's toys, I'd expect to get 50 tiny star destroyers with my Sideous action figure as "accessories."   Maybe make each of them the size of a mcnugget?

[Ran]

 

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

The fake Vader idea sounds a lot better to me! Frankly I don't necessarily see Lucas's approval as a positive thing. 

The only point here is that Lucas felt there was a way of doing it, and approved one, in response to the argument that there was no way. I mean, yeah, Palpatine's body did not survive being chucked down the power core and the subsequent explosion, but his malign spirit having an out is such a magical, fantastical kind of thing that it "fits". It needs limitations, of course -- in Dark Empire it's that the clones quickly corrupted and died and he had to keep hopping, while my guess is that in RotS it's that he can't do it again and his cloned body is falling apart for whatever Sith magic reasons they want.

 

14 minutes ago, The Mother of The Others said:

Didn't they just do vader II ?   

This is not The Greatest Sith in the World, no.
This is just a tribute.

14 minutes ago, The Mother of The Others said:

  But yeah, bringing Sideous back was also nutty.

Yes, but also no. I'm strongly on the side of the argument that Kylo is not a suitable "big bad" for the finale of this all, and with TLJ getting rid of Snoke, they went to that well (although as others have shown, it may have always been JJ's idea from the start that she was related to Palpatine, just that they didn't necessarily expect Palpatine to personally show up again).  It's nutty that they had to be in that position in the first place. 

 

[Rubicante]

If they were going to bring Palpatine back, which I still think was a mistake, they needed to at least somehow explain it beyond one throw away line of "Sith Cloning".  Like what is that even supposed to mean?

I wonder if part of the reason the Empire in "The Mandalorian" wants the baby Yoda so bad is because they need it to somehow bring the Emperor back.  

By the way, am I the only person here who dislikes the baby Yoda character?  I can't take it seriously.  Whenever I see it, I immediately just start questioning how much money Disney is going to make through baby Yoda sales.  I think the show would be just fine without the character.

[Kalbear]

Palpatine coming back would have been a great thing to set up...in TFA. With the final reveal in TLJ, and the dealing with him in TROS. 

[Darth Richard II]

There are a hundred ways they could have made Palps return work, instead they just....ignored it.

[Corvinus85]

45 minutes ago, Rubicante said:

By the way, am I the only person here who dislikes the baby Yoda character?  I can't take it seriously.  Whenever I see it, I immediately just start questioning how much money Disney is going to make through baby Yoda sales.  I think the show would be just fine without the character.

Yes, you are the only one... OK, probably not the only one, but still I find your lack of baby Yoda love disturbing.

 

[Vaughn]

So the Sith planet at the end. Where those real living beings in the stands, cheering for the Emperor? Or spectral evil force ghosts or something? For some reason, I thought it was the later.

If they were all living, what on earth are they all doing out there day to day? Doesn't seem like a planet with a lot of agriculture or food generating resources... 

[Kalbear]

59 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

So the Sith planet at the end. Where those real living beings in the stands, cheering for the Emperor? Or spectral evil force ghosts or something? For some reason, I thought it was the later.

If they were all living, what on earth are they all doing out there day to day? Doesn't seem like a planet with a lot of agriculture or food generating resources... 

It's hugely important for the Sith to be able to hold large rallies, because the Emperor needs to have the kind of regular affirmation that he's doing super well and is the most intelligent, powerful sith ever. 

[Vaughn]

10 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It's hugely important for the Sith to be able to hold large rallies, because the Emperor needs to have the kind of regular affirmation that he's doing super well and is the most intelligent, powerful sith ever. 

All I'm saying is Lord Business in the Lego Movie had a clearer plan and better explained motivations. 

[Kalbear]

9 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

All I'm saying is Lord Business in the Lego Movie had a clearer plan and better explained motivations. 

Hey now, Palpatine is the best business guy there ever has been! He's a stable genius! If he needs a giant ampitheater filled with cultists while his military wages a war so he can hear about how great he is and get adoration, that's what he should get! 

[Lord Varys]

Having rewatched AOTC today - and the political part of the story works pretty well. But the romantic dialogue is really terrible, more so than I recall. And Anakin Skywalker is just a freaky creep, talking as if he had obsessively jerked off to a mental image of Padmé since TPM.

However, much of the issues the movie has is due to the gutting the film received in editing. There are many crucial plot elements (and some even in action scenes, like the lightsaber duels at the end) that were simply cut. That's not the way to make a proper movie, especiall not one with that big a story.

There are also considerable issues with connection of the two stories - it would have worked much better if the starting point of the movie had been on a neutral world where representatives from the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the Republic had tried to come to an understanding (hell, that world could have even been Naboo!) - with Anakin and Obi-Wan being there, and Padmé being targeted earlier. That way Dooku could have been introduced earlier, and he could have even interacted with Palpatine as politican, not just a Sith apprentice. And from there they could have gotten to investigating things, going to Kamino for the secret Republic army, and to Geonosis for the secret Separatist army.

9 hours ago, Rubicante said:

Bringing Palpatine back was a terrible decision.  There is no way the Emperor survives that fall.  We see him get vaporized!  This is about as realistic as Ned Stark actually not being killed in A Game of Thrones.

 

7 hours ago, Ran said:

Years ago, one of the earliest Lucas-approved post-OT works was Dark Empire, the comic book  written by Tom Veitch. See what Veitch had to say about the pitch and George's input.

The fun thing with that is that 'Dark Empire' simply is the better ST overall - and that's very sad considering its over-the-top comic plot. It repeats a lot of OT motives and stuff, but it also serves as a better and proper continuation of the OT which the ST not even remotely is. It has the better Clone Emperor, the better 'good guy goes to the Dark Side' story, the better super weapons (Word Devastators and Galaxy Gun), the better new characters, and the better overall plot. And that tells you a lot about how bad the ST is - because while I very much like DE it is not exactly the best literature/story SW has to offer.

And it was ridiculed the longest time for bringing back Palpatine as a clone.

And the problem of the resurrected Emperor is also better explained in DE. TROS doesn't explain it at all, it just has people speculate about it and then ignore it. And the entire Palps-is-going-to-possess-Rey is also a direct ripoff from DE.

You cannot go with a story like that and not try to explain it.

Even the looks of Palpatine are nonsensical in TROS. The man looked like hell because his own Sith lightning deformed and disfigured him in ROTS (for some unknown reason). If he was cloned he should like young red-haired Ian McDiarmid at birth and slowly age into the grandfatherly fellow from the PT. Are we to believe the man had himself electrocuted again just to look as shitty in his second body as he did in his first?

They could have pulled some explanation for that out of their asses - or ripped off the old DE explanation that the Dark Side was ravaging Palpatine's body so much that it was starting to look shitty (which was what Lucas wanted to go but abandoned for ROTS - thanks to that Palpatine looks much older in AOTC than in ROTS).

9 hours ago, Rubicante said:

3. The light saber battles are not memorable at all in this trilogy.  Again, biggest problem is that there are too many cuts.  I really appreciated in both TPM and ROTS Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Liam Neeson and Ray Park actually learned and practiced longer sequences of fighting.  However, the light saber fights in AOTC are a travesty.  Easily the worst in the entire saga.

AOTC suffered great harm there due to them even cutting the saber fights to pieces. Both Dooku-Obi-Wan, Dooku-Anakin, and Dooku-Yoda were to fight much longer. And especially Yoda would have profited from the original plan, having him simply block Dooku's attacks for a time until the old man started to tire, and only go on the offensive then.

9 hours ago, Rubicante said:

The Prequel Trilogy does a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong.  The overall story is fine.  It is completely distinct from the Original Trilogy.  The world building is fantastic.  The main issues are directing, writing and pacing.  I see Lucas as a man that has a great vision in terms of what the universe should look like, who should be in it, what can and cannot be done.  But he really struggled with the dialogue, especially between Anakin and Padme. 

Just take the time and read the AOTC script. A lot of the dialogue and their story gets better this way - they were to talk more in essentially every scene, and cutting the exchange with Padmé's parents, sister, and children is really a big loss because it would have established why and how Padmé actually develops feelings for Anakin.

But, man, Christensen should have played Anakin less creepy. Less sulken boy who could explode and run amok any minute, and more, well, nice. At least in the romance scenes. How you can go from 'I've revealed myself to be a would-be fascist' to 'Let's have dinner and talk about love' is stretching things to make them almost unbearable.

But Obi-Wan lecturing Anakin in front of others at the beginning is also completely out of place, as is his ridiculous rigidness of not caring who the attacker is (and then jumping out the window to catch the droid).

9 hours ago, Rubicante said:

A lot of the issues in that trilogy just seem to originate from spending an entire movie showing Anakin as an innocent, good-hearted child.  That left only two movies to show Anakin's fall to the dark side.  And I think Lucas realized very quickly that he had kind of written himself into a corner.  When we meet up with Anakin in AOTC, he is suddenly an asshole.  The transition from the kind child to the unstable asshole in AOTC happens just too quickly, and is comically bad.  And with ROTS, Lucas had really run out of time, so he had to use Anakin's fear of losing Padme as his primary motivation for turning to the Dark Side.  And that made it a little hard to swallow.  As someone else mentioned, having TPM as an episode 0 would have worked a lot better.  That gives an entire extra movie for Anakin's fall to the dark side, and his romance with Padme, the time to build properly.

Yeah, that was me, and I think that could have worked very well. TCW delivers a good deal on that front, but it would have much nicer to have a more rounded PT as such.

9 hours ago, Rubicante said:

So, the biggest lesson the Sequel Trilogy could have learned from the Prequel Trilogy was the importance of pacing.  And to that end, the Sequel Triology, specifically The Rise of Skywalker, fails miserably.  There is just too much going on in that movie.

While Lucas at least had a some sort outline in his head for the PT, the ST guys obviously had none.

4 hours ago, Ran said:

The only point here is that Lucas felt there was a way of doing it, and approved one, in response to the argument that there was no way. I mean, yeah, Palpatine's body did not survive being chucked down the power core and the subsequent explosion, but his malign spirit having an out is such a magical, fantastical kind of thing that it "fits". It needs limitations, of course -- in Dark Empire it's that the clones quickly corrupted and died and he had to keep hopping, while my guess is that in RotS it's that he can't do it again and his cloned body is falling apart for whatever Sith magic reasons they want.

Obviously there are none such reason given so that people speculate, doing their job for them. Don't fall into that kind of trap.

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Yes, but also no. I'm strongly on the side of the argument that Kylo is not a suitable "big bad" for the finale of this all, and with TLJ getting rid of Snoke, they went to that well (although as others have shown, it may have always been JJ's idea from the start that she was related to Palpatine, just that they didn't necessarily expect Palpatine to personally show up again).  It's nutty that they had to be in that position in the first place.

I'd agree there - but, you know, if you have a Babyface-like character who cannot possibly serve the role of a real villain and you want to tell a story where there is supposed to be a big villain in the end, then you simply do not kill your actual new big bad in the middle of the second movie of your trilogy. If you do that the audience has a good reason to expect you know what you are doing and you can come up with a good story for the final movie even with the pathetic excuse for a villain Babyface is.

The idea that that the obvious way to resolve that mess when you don't know what to do is not to recycle a long-dead villain from an earlier series of movies is, let's say, as ridiculous as it sounds.

As a DE fan I'm not opposed to Clone Emperors - but if that was the plan why the hell not make the entire trilogy about that. Why not give our first glimpse at Palpatine in TFA? Why not make Joke Snoke a clone of the Emperor that they destroy - only for Palpatine's spirit to live again in a new clone. Or have Palpatine's spirit possess some other guy before he comes back in a clone body, etc.

If they had any plan there it sure as hell looks as if they didn't have a plan.

3 hours ago, Rubicante said:

I wonder if part of the reason the Empire in "The Mandalorian" wants the baby Yoda so bad is because they need it to somehow bring the Emperor back.

This has been theorized. I for one think that this creature essentially appear to be Yoda reborn, considering he can actually control the Force actively as a child to no small degree, something a mere clone of Yoda without his memories/personalities (or what of that an infant can process) shouldn't be able to do. This causes the weirdo problem where the hell young Yoda is during those ST movies. But then, the idea of him not being to able to speak at the age of about fifty (which should be the equivalent of him being 5-6 years old if we imagine he died at 900 at the human equivalent of 90-100 years) is very odd, as is the idea that we now have to imagine Yoda to have being a youngling for 100 years and likely a Padawan for another 100 years (until he was then 'twenty or so') which wouldn't exactly well fit with his claim having trained Jedi for 800 years...

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

So the Sith planet at the end. Where those real living beings in the stands, cheering for the Emperor? Or spectral evil force ghosts or something? For some reason, I thought it was the later.

If they were all living, what on earth are they all doing out there day to day? Doesn't seem like a planet with a lot of agriculture or food generating resources... 

I expect them to have been real cultists. After all, Force ghosts should care that they were crushed by stones, right?

That planet must have housed a considerable number of people considering that HIS EVIL RESTORED SITHNESS had not only a huge pointless fleet of Star Destroyers built there, but was also able to man them...

[Darth Richard II]

Um, where are you getting all this info about what was cut from AorC from?

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

The fun thing with that is that 'Dark Empire' simply is the better ST overall - and that's very sad considering its over-the-top comic plot. It repeats a lot of OT motives and stuff, but it also serves as a better and proper continuation of the OT which the ST not even remotely is. It has the better Clone Emperor, the better 'good guy goes to the Dark Side' story, the better super weapons (Word Devastators and Galaxy Gun), the better new characters, and the better overall plot. And that tells you a lot about how bad the ST is - because while I very much like DE it is not exactly the best literature/story SW has to offer. 

It's also irrelevant, as we don't have young Mark Hamill, harrison ford or carrie fisher. There's a lot of things that work better if you have it coming 5 or 10 years after the OT. 

2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Even the looks of Palpatine are nonsensical in TROS. The man looked like hell because his own Sith lightning deformed and disfigured him in ROTS (for some unknown reason). If he was cloned he should like young red-haired Ian McDiarmid at birth and slowly age into the grandfatherly fellow from the PT. Are we to believe the man had himself electrocuted again just to look as shitty in his second body as he did in his first? 

I mean, the guy was missing fingers, had gangrene, and didn't look super awesome anyway, but okay boomer

2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I'd agree there - but, you know, if you have a Babyface-like character who cannot possibly serve the role of a real villain and you want to tell a story where there is supposed to be a big villain in the end, then you simply do not kill your actual new big bad in the middle of the second movie of your trilogy. If you do that the audience has a good reason to expect you know what you are doing and you can come up with a good story for the final movie even with the pathetic excuse for a villain Babyface is. 

I think that if you don't go the route of redemption for Ren, he becomes a very good villain. He's a villain who doesn't look like he's super harmful but continually does atrocities left and right. Ren ruling with a habitual 'go big to show how bad ass you are' is actually scary in the same way that a rabid dog is. You don't know what he'll do or why. And him being actually charming at times is also scary. It would have been a significantly less mwahahaha evil villain, but that is probably okay. 

It would also be actually different. That's probably a bit too scary for you to comprehend, but it's certainly possible.

2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

This has been theorized. I for one think that this creature essentially appear to be Yoda reborn, considering he can actually control the Force actively as a child to no small degree, something a mere clone of Yoda without his memories/personalities (or what of that an infant can process) shouldn't be able to do. 

Why not? We've literally had a whole lot of examples in the new stuff about untrained people using the force left and right without issue. You might not like it, but it's entirely canonical that you don't need training in order to do jedi stuff.

2 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

I expect them to have been real cultists. After all, Force ghosts should care that they were crushed by stones, right?

It doesn't hurt them, but it's super offensive and mean to treat them unkindly. 

 

[Lord Varys]

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It's also irrelevant, as we don't have young Mark Hamill, harrison ford or carrie fisher. There's a lot of things that work better if you have it coming 5 or 10 years after the OT.

Hihi. Sure. Where did I say I wanted them to make DE into three movies? But, you know, people who can bring back Peter Cushing could also made Luke, Han, and Leia look thirty years younger, no?

The point I was making here is that taking inspiration from DE by, say, making Babyface into a guy following sort of Luke's path in DE, after finding out that the Emperor is back. He could have been a Jedi Knight having believable issues trying to understand why his grandfather did what he did, like Luke in DE.

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I mean, the guy was missing fingers, had gangrene, and didn't look super awesome anyway, but okay boomer

Yeah, and why did he look like that in TROS? No explanation. Just like there is no explanation for that in ROTS (which is a problem in that movie).

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think that if you don't go the route of redemption for Ren, he becomes a very good villain. He's a villain who doesn't look like he's super harmful but continually does atrocities left and right. Ren ruling with a habitual 'go big to show how bad ass you are' is actually scary in the same way that a rabid dog is. You don't know what he'll do or why. And him being actually charming at times is also scary. It would have been a significantly less mwahahaha evil villain, but that is probably okay.

He was just a consistently bad character. He was conflicted, but we never learned why he wanted to be evil (and actually 'evil' was what he wanted to be!), making him both comical and pathetic, even more so with his silly mask fetish, etc. This guy simply had no background story - even with Luke once being afraid of him doesn't explain why he wants to be evil.

If you create such a special character, without explaining why he wants what he wants (even if he fails at ever getting there) then you have lost before you started - which these people did.

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It would also be actually different. That's probably a bit too scary for you to comprehend, but it's certainly possible.

I'd have preferred Babyface being the final big bad of TROS even if I don't like the character at all - because that would have been the preferrable to Palpatine the Jack in the box.

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Why not? We've literally had a whole lot of examples in the new stuff about untrained people using the force left and right without issue. You might not like it, but it's entirely canonical that you don't need training in order to do jedi stuff.

Up to this point it is not canonical that creatures too young to speak are capable of that great feats of the Force. But, sure, perhaps this means that this shit is canon now.

11 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

It doesn't hurt them, but it's super offensive and mean to treat them unkindly.

LOL, perhaps it is also canon now that Force ghosts can be crushed by stones?

[The Mother of The Others]

39 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

The man looked like hell because his own Sith lightning deformed and disfigured him in ROTS (for some unknown reason)

I was always imagining him to be ancient, so the politician face was the false one and the Windu battle gave him an excuse to take off the makeup and show his true face openly as part of achieving 'unlimited power,' --a testament to the genius of his plan.   The way they delivered the line about how the attack disfigured him told me it wasn't the truth.  Because Siddy don't roll with the truth.

 

[Lord Varys]

1 minute ago, The Mother of The Others said:

I was always imagining him to be ancient, so the politician face was the false one and the Windu battle gave him an excuse to take off the makeup and show his true face openly as part of achieving 'unlimited power,' --a testament to the genius of his plan.   The way they delivered the line about how the attack disfigured him told me it wasn't the truth.  Because Siddy don't roll with the truth.

That is how it should have been - but it wasn't, unfortunately (Palpatine was as young as he pretended to be, and Darth Plagueis was still alive and well during TPM, dying only around the end of the film, when they celebrated Palpatine's election to Supreme Chancellor - at least as per the EU novel which did receive considerable impact from Lucas).

The 'Unlimited power' line seems to refer to him finally having secured the Chosen One as apprentice, not his looks. He certainly lies about him being severely weakened by the reflected Sith lightning - that was an act. The disfigurement as such wasn't.

If it had been a mask the effect of the revelation in the movie would have been different - we would have seen the lightning burn away or cut through the 'Force mask', revealing his true appearance, and this could have been reinforced by Windu saying something like 'Look Anakin! Now we see his true face! The face of the dark side of the Force!' or something along those lines. In fact, something like that could have helped immensely to help establish why Windu jumps from 'Let's arrest the Sith chancellor' to 'Let's execute/murder the Sith chancellor without trial' essentially in a heart beat (implicitly Palpatine's weirdo looks may have contributed to that, but it would have worked much better if we had been given an explanation why he was suddenly looking this way).

The thing to go would have been to have Darth Sidious indeed being some kind of twisted monster due to heavy Dark Side use - and him sugar-coating his true appearance with some kind of Sith magic/ritual until a crucial confrontation with the Jedi (or Yoda, specifically) in ROTS.

The other way would have been to go with him hiding his powers and true nature in the Force as taking a great strain on him (as I think was implied with his older and somewhat consumed appearance in AOTC) with him possibly being transformed into the known Emperor-creature during a fateful confrontation in ROTS.

But the bolder move still could have been to have Palpatine simply as a slightly older, slightly more consumed person throughout ROTS, thus implying that the Dark Side was slowly but surely ravaging his body due to the immense power he wielded - which is actually the explanation they used in DE to explain the whole cloning thing. There Palpatine had died before ROTJ and had used clone bodies before to come back from the dead.