Star Wars - We're ALL Being Tortured For No Reason

[Ran]

42 minutes ago, mormont said:

One of my film series hobby horses (apart from Indy 4 not being nearly as bad as people say

Watched the once, and once was enough, but I can believe this -- people tend to go through extremes on the internet, and RT shows this was an area where critics less invested in a specific vision of what Indiana Jones 4 ought to deliver liked it a lot more than ... well, the other viewers.

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and Revenge of the Sith being by a distance the worst Star Wars film ever made

This one I can't say I agree with, but only because Attack of the Clones exists...

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) is that First Class is, objectively, shit. It's much worse than X-Men.

X-Men and X-Men 2 are quite strong in my memory, whereas First Class I saw the once and haven't felt a reason to see it again. Fassbender's the only one who left a strong impression, maybe Hoult and McAvoy as second fiddle, but I barely recall what the plot action was about other than something to do with a Russian nuclear sub at the end. Was it the Cuban Missile Crisis? And the Hellfire Club fit in somehow.

ETA: I'm not sure I'd say it's shit, mind you. But not better than X-Men.

[DMC]

First Class is kinda cheating anyway.  If it wasn't for Days of Future Past would it really be considered a prequel or a reboot?

This really is a tough question though.  While I still haven't gotten to the fifth season, BCS definitely hasn't reached Breaking Bad yet imho.  I refuse to count Godfather 2.  Actually having a hard time thinking of a lot of prequels..wikipedia has a list!  They count The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a prequel.  I guess if you're gonna count it yeah, but I'm not a big Leone fan so I'll defer to others on that one.  Other than that, bupkis.

[RumHam]

Just now, DMC said:

First Class is kinda cheating anyway.  If it wasn't for Days of Future Past would it really be considered a prequel or a reboot?

Was it originally a reboot? Then why were they using such weird characters? Like Angel the stripper with dragonfly wings and Darwin who could adapt to survive anything until someone tried to kill him. 

I know at first it was the Origins: Magneto movie, which might have been better if it was mostly Fassbender hunting Nazis.

I'm one of those wierdos who thinks Saul is better than Breaking Bad as a whole. Maybe it doesn't reach the highs of Breaking Bad's best moments though. But the people making the show have only gotten better at it. Some of the stuff on Saul really shouldn't work

lets tell the story of Gus building the meth lab!

but it does. 

[DMC]

14 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Was it originally a reboot? Then why were they using such weird characters? Like Angel the stripper with dragonfly wings and Darwin who could adapt to survive anything until someone tried to kill him. 

I know at first it was the Origins: Magneto movie, which might have been better if it was mostly Fassbender hunting Nazis.

The Darwin character was weird yeah, but other than that I don't think the characters used speaks against it being a reboot.  As for just Fassbender hunting Nazis, would that make it a prequel to Inglourious Basterds?

I agree BCS demonstrates the improvement of Gilligan and co., that's a good point.  That still doesn't change my opinion on comparing the two.

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

One of my film series hobby horses (apart from Indy 4 not being nearly as bad as people say and Revenge of the Sith being by a distance the worst Star Wars film ever made) is that First Class is, objectively, shit. It's much worse than X-Men.

Amazing. Almost every word of that is wrong :p

[RumHam]

7 minutes ago, DMC said:

The Darwin character was weird yeah, but other than that I don't think the characters used speaks against it being a reboot.  As for just Fassbender hunting Nazis, would that make it a prequel to Inglourious Basterds?

I agree BCS demonstrates the improvement of Gilligan and co., that's a good point.  That still doesn't change my opinion on comparing the two.

I just meant why not use Cyclops, Jean, original Angel, Iceman etc. if it's a reboot. 

[Vaughn]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I think that might be one of the most disappointing aspects of the prequels. It ruins Vader as a character. I still can’t connect Anakin from the prequels with Vader, they don’t appear to have any connecting characteristics and no matter how many times Id see those movies I still wouldn’t understand how one becomes the other 

I will say that if I was covered in permanent wounds and lived inside a big breathing machine, I would still hate sand as much as I did in my youth.

[DMC]

17 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I just meant why not use Cyclops, Jean, original Angel, Iceman etc. if it's a reboot. 

Fair, although on the latter two - and Beast - you could say the same thing about the original movie.  Even if it was entirely intended to be a reboot, I don't think using different characters initially to create some separation would've been the worst idea.

[Vaughn]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

One of my film series hobby horses (apart from Indy 4 not being nearly as bad as people say and Revenge of the Sith being by a distance the worst Star Wars film ever made) is that First Class is, objectively, shit. It's much worse than X-Men.

I'd put Rise of Skywalker below Revenge of the Sith, mostly because it doesn't have the scene where Obiwan jumps into mortal peril and just says "Hello!" because he's a cocky SOB.

BCS is a story set before Breaking Bad but as it's not about Jesse or Walter, I don't think it's really a prequel in the traditional sense.

[DMC]

18 minutes ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Um, First Class is clearly a prequel, it has Hugh Jackman and grown up Mystique in cameo roles.

Romijn's cameo was put in as a joke.  As for Jackman's..

 

[DMC]

26 minutes ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Dude, it's a prequel. It was advertised as such. Like...what is hard to get.

Dude, it was advertised as both.  And the director considered it a reboot.  Like...what is hard to get?

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My main goal was to make as good a film that could stand on its own two feet regardless of all the other films. However I thought anything that worked in all the other movies, and I could have some fun with nodding towards, I would. But my main rule was, ‘You know what, we’re trying to reboot and start a whole new X-Men franchise’ and therefore, making a film work on its own two feet was far more important than trying to be referential to the prior movies.

 

[DMC]

6 minutes ago, Mr Meeseeks said:

Reboot and prequel are not mutually exclusive things.

And they're also amorphous definitions that are decidedly open to interpretation.  Don't see why you're so insistent on this.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

THIS THREAD IS TEARING US APART!

I guess I'm just not that invested in the X-Men cannon to care. Reboot, prequel; ehr meh gerd, whatevahs.

Seriously Revenge of the Sith was goddamn Citizen Kane compared to The Rise of Skywalker. 

[Slurktan]

11 hours ago, Vaughn said:

A big problem with the Anakin to Vader transformation is that the fall of Anakin is due to his anger and passion but Vader is a stoic, implacable kind of evil, not a raging, animated kind of evil.

Vader is very much an angry ass in ANH, he basically yells half his lines.  He is not in ESB.  I wonder what happened in between.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Slurktan said:

Vader is very much an angry ass in ANH, he basically yells half his lines.  He is not in ESB.  I wonder what happened in between.

Fatherhood changes a man.

[Kalbear]

I really wish we would have got more of Resentful Anakin - who is pissed he joined the Empire, pissed he joined all this, and therefore takes pretty much whatever excuse he gets to choke any Imperials he can. Because fuck them, that's why. 

But yeah, that kind of attitude was literally nowhere in the prequels for Anakin. 

[Werthead]

14 hours ago, DMC said:

They count The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a prequel.  I guess if you're gonna count it yeah, but I'm not a big Leone fan so I'll defer to others on that one.  Other than that, bupkis.

That's weird. Leone himself has said that his Westerns are not connected to one another.

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I will say that if I was covered in permanent wounds and lived inside a big breathing machine, I would still hate sand as much as I did in my youth.

To be fair, the "hates sand" thing did explain Vader's refusal to set foot on Tatooine and his willingness to send down minions when he was perfectly happy to get his hands dirty and directly go down to Hoth, directly board the Rebel flagship in Rogue One and directly go to Bespin and Endor. But Tatooine? "Yeah, I'm fucking off back to the Death Star, you go down. Keep in touch, thanks."

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Reboot and prequel are not mutually exclusive things.

I never understood why people seem insistent like "reboot" has to mean a complete remake, start-from-scratch thing. My PC doesn't wipe its hard drives every time I reboot it.

The 2003 BSG is a totally new universe and story vaguely based on the original, the 2005 Doctor Who takes place in the same canon and continuity as the original. Both are reboots.

[Vaughn]

52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I never understood why people seem insistent like "reboot" has to mean a complete remake, start-from-scratch thing. My PC doesn't wipe its hard drives every time I reboot it.

 

The X-Men movies to me felt more like the Bond or Spiderman movies, more of reboot which was also a prequel.

[Heartofice]

25 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

The X-Men movies to me felt more like the Bond or Spiderman movies, more of reboot which was also a prequel.

Much like the Bond movies, the prequel / reboot nature of both franchises got really messy, so that it's pointless even considering if there is any continuity between the movies. I much prefer hard breaks between movies, not these sly 'reboots' which aren't complete reboots.

[Caligula_K3]

Now that I have a bit more time and the holidays are approaching, I've decided to rewatch all nine Star Wars movies in number order. This'll be my first time watching the prequels in many years (and I'm pretty sure the last time I watched them was at a marathon where we got high and talked more than we watched the movies) and it'll be my first time watching the sequel trilogy as a trilogy- it'll also be my first time seeing Rise of Skywalker since I watched it in theatres.

Key questions: Is the prequel trilogy as bad as I remembered, or do people have a point in trying to rehabilitate it? How annoying are the Ewoks, really? Is The Rise of Skywalker any better on rewatch? Does the new trilogy hold well together at all?

So far I've watched the Phantom Menace. This is not a movie that should be rehabilitated. It is a very bad movie. Jar Jar Binks is terrible, of course (though it's kind of amusing to note how many scenes there are where he was maybe just inserted at the last minute to throw in one more poop joke). But beyond that, the plot really makes no sense, especially anything to do with Republic politics: "the bureaucrats control everything! But if we raise a vote of no confidence, everybody will suddenly hate the chancellor and vote him out and we can somehow elect a stronger chancellor who can singlehandedly do everything!" On a scene-to-scene level, Liam Neeson does his best, but most scenes fall very flat; the pacing is all over the place.

And for all everyone yells at the sequels for not having a plan, the prequels aren't an argument that having a plan is necessarily any better. When you're hinging your entire trilogy on a romance between two characters, why introduce one of those characters as a nine year old? Why introduce a cool looking villain in Darth Maul and then kill him off immediately, forcing you to introduce a bunch of random villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous? Why does Padme get relegated off to exclusive love interest after this movie, even though there could have been at least some sort of political arc for her in confronting her former mentor? The Phantom Menace does seem to promise some potential that the rest of the trilogy is not going to pick up on.

Anyway, it's a bad movie. But the Duel of the Fates is cool, and I'm feeling the urge to get a copy of that N64 podracing game... Now off to Attack of the Clones, which I remember as being the worst of the worst.