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Canon-Strike III: Star Wars

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    #31
    Yeah this one plumbs the depths even more than Episode 1. Again, the emphasis feels like it's on providing backstory and explanation for stuff that happens in the later films, rather than on simply telling a good story with interesting characters.

    When you think about it, the whole prequel trilogy is like Star Wars: Gaiden. Actually it's not even that. It's more like fan fiction for the originals. Bad, inconsistent fan fiction.

    My dad refused to go with me to see this after he saw the trailer. And he was right.

    EDIT: Here's a piece of trivia I'm going to share even though I can't imagine it will be of interest to anyone. My brother is an extra in this. He plays Senator Dowmeia. So during those boring council sequences, that's my brother in the alien suit for Dowmeia. You're welcome.
    Last edited by wakka; 19-04-2021, 11:50.

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      #32
      Originally posted by Dogg Thang View Post
      This is a really bad film. I think it's a more consistently poor film than Phantom Menace even though I think Phantom Menace has lower lows. This film commits the crime of being boring. The overuse of CG becomes much more apparent here and so, generally, I think the film looks worse than the previous movie and has aged really badly visually. Anakin is totally unlikeable as a character. I didn't buy his relationship with Padme and some of the dialogue is unbelieveably bad. And as Asura mentioned earlier, there are weird plot things just dropped in that are never followed up. It's boring and messy.

      The Jango Fett fight in the rain was pretty cool. And those sonic charges or whatever they were - those were incredible. Actually one area where the prequels need recognition is in the sound. So much of the sound is fantastic in these movies. Christopher Lee was great, although that only served to highlight how messy the film is - they totally squandered him.

      It's a bad movie.
      Nail, head.

      Even the good ideas are totally squandered.

      Like consider this; you've never seen the movie, and it's being pitched to you.

      There's a scene where Anakin, who was taken from his mother as a child, feels her through the force; she's alone and in pain, and calls out to him. Ten years of harsh training and his dedication to his master is forgotten as, in that moment, he feels like a frightened child who is about to lose their mother forever. He jumps into a ship and rushes across the galaxy, against everything that warns him not to, crossing the vast burning deserts until he finds her, alive, enslaved by the sand people.

      And he only gets one moment, the briefest flicker of her last embers of life, where he remembers what he gave up.

      He sees red. A lifetime of repression shatters like so much glass as his anger explodes in a cry that is felt across the vast distances of interstellar space. He ignites his sword, and going from house to house, drunk on abject fury, he slaughers every living thing; man, woman, child. He chokes them. He slashes them. He delights in causing them pain, and hearing their cries echo his own. Tears stream down his face as, once done, he watches as their meagre village burns to the ground, set alight by his own hand.

      He carries his mother back home, walking the entire distance. Sand blown up from the desert tears into his skin, but he feels numb. It's not until he sees the Lars homestead that his rage begins to falter, and Padme rushes to meet him. He puts down his mother and cries bitter tears.

      He's a murderer. A traitor. A butcher. A perpetrator of genocide. And as he buries his mother, he is troubled even more by something else.

      He was powerful. He was feared. And he liked it.
      The version in the movie is totally, absolutely flat. It carries absolutely no weight. Anakin becomes a bloody war criminal and his rant about it afterwards sounds like a teenager being told they can't go out with their friend who has the collection of lockback knives.

      It's just ****.

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        #33
        Movie 03 - Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
        The last entry from George Lucas finally brought the narrative of the prequels together with that of the original trilogy and delivering the moment that the three films had been building toward, the arrival of Darth Vader... for about 3 minutes. With the film setting up the Emperor's position of power in the universe, detailing Yoda and Obi-Wan's exhiles, the births of Luke and Leia and Anakin's transformation this entry contains the most relevance to the tale of the original trilogy but one of its main hurdles was always going to be having that depiction measure up to the one that had been built in fans minds in the twenty years since the opening crawl of the original film first made its way up the cinema screen.



        Does the final prequel film make it all worthwhile and if not where did it all go wrong?

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          #34
          A few things stuck out about Episode 3 on my recent rewatch.

          I think it's a decent movie; there's a lot of bad in it, but I believe pretty much everything bad comes from that it has to be a sequel to Ep2 and that movie drags it down. Like everything with Anakin & Padme makes your skin crawl; they just have zero chemistry... But then it's not like they could recast the actors or recontextualise their relationship. It tries to pull the visual style closer to Ep4; it fails, but it gets closer than the prior movies.

          Though I can't defend Vader's NuuuooOOooIOyuyyyOOOOO line.

          I might be alone in this but I really expected Luke & Leia to be born on Dagobah, because of Luke's line in Empire when he goes there, and says (paraphrasing) "there's something familiar about this place... More like something from a dream." As a kid, once I knew that Luke & Leia were hidden from Vader, this was what I always assumed happened, but having them born on some rando space station kinda leaves this line adrift; surprised Lucas didn't have the gall to cut it, like he re-edited the Vader/Palpatine conversation during the movie.

          Also, there's the whole topic of how it spoils the "No, I am your father" moment in Empire if you watch them in story-order. I think, though, there's a greater issue with it.

          Luke & Leia need to be put into hiding.

          So in the vast galaxy of trillions of people, Obi-Wan takes Luke to someone Vader knows?

          And Leia gets made into a princess of a planet, i.e. one of the most visible people in the galaxy, likely to meet the Emperor multiple times in her childhood?

          Now, I'm not one of those Star Wars fans who needs to know the name of every person in Jabba's Palace, and what socks the pilot guy was wearing in the Cantina. But prior to the prequels, both of these things - that Luke & Leia were siblings and thrown into these divergent life paths - there was a mystery there. I mean, we all now know that it was because Lucas didn't originally write them as siblings (they straight-up fall in love in the unmade sequel Splinter of the Mind's Eye) but putting that aside, I think it's a great example of how you can wreck something by explaining it.

          Tons of stuff in these movies "happens offscreen". The movie could've easily ended with the kids being born on Dagobah, and Obi-wan/Yoday being all like "... now what do we do?", and that would've kept those events shrouded. The audience would have to assume a series of events transpires that leads to this weird outcome being the best choice.

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            #35
            I agree. When I watched the Star Wars films for the first time, I was filled with wonder and fascination at this vast galaxy of seemingly limitless possibility. The original films do such a great job of that in part through the script's hints at dark, mysterious pasts, the mystical 'religion' of the Force, and visual incidentals like odd little robots popping up out of the sand, or alien forms glimpsed in alleyways or in the darkness of the Cantina.

            That sense of mystery is at the heart of what made Star Wars so compelling for me. But in the prequels, Lucas does his level best to undo it by explaining everything that he possibly can. Inevitably, this reverse-engineering approach to storytelling only ever underwhelms, because once everything is laid down in cold hard facts, it's not nearly as intriguing as so many tantalising possibilities (especially ones imagined for over a decade or more between films).

            Ironically, Lucas actually shrinks the galaxy in the prequels. All the unnecessary detail and urge to connect characters and plot points that don't need connecting begins to make it feel like a neighbourhood dominated by a couple of families, instead of this huge, strange place. It shows a misunderstanding, for me, of what made the first couple of films work.

            EDIT: As for the third one, I haven't seen it since it was released. I remember it being better than the other two, but I can't imagine I would ever bother to spend the time watching it again today.
            Last edited by wakka; 21-04-2021, 09:06.

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              #36
              Oooh, I forgot to add, there's a weird thing in this movie.

              There's a deleted scene where they see Shaak Ti die, which was cut I believe for pacing, but also that it would be meaningless to anyone who hadn't seen the cartoon The Clone Wars.

              But then General Grievous in the movie is injured, which is why he's not a great fighter, and that's because he was nearly killed by Mace Windu in the same cartoon.

              It's not a "plot hole", because Grievous doesn't appear in Episode 2, so for movie fans, he's always this weird, coughing droid-like enemy. But in the Clone Wars cartoon (the original one, which was 2D and animated like Samurai Jack), Grievous is a fearsome foe. I remember that we were excited to see him in the movies, but he ended up being something of a non-starter...

              ... kinda like Phasma, strangely. Phasma is the same because she had a high billing, but in the end, just wasn't in the movie enough to make much of an impression. But her depiction in the book which fleshes out her backstory is fantastic.

              I also kinda wish that Boba Fett had come back to kill Mace Windu. I think he could've been a bit older in Ep2, and then Fett could've been more of a character in Ep3.

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                #37
                I remember when I first saw Ep3, I felt the opening was much stronger. It felt like the first time I saw Anakin and Obi-Wan do their thing together where they actually felt like people who knew each other, where they felt like a team. It wasn't quite as wooden, even though there are some seriously awful, awful lines. But it highlighted that, if this was the story they were going to tell, this is what we should have been seeing in the first movie, not the last. It was too late.

                And the movie goes seriously downhill from there. It's makes some really terrible choices and doesn't make a huge amount of sense while in turn making the originals make less sense. On a more recent rewatch, I'd feel the same about these things but with the added element that the CG work is, in places, really atrocious. And they use CG for things they shouldn't be using CG for, like with R2 at the start of the movie. It really affects the movie.

                The main feeling I got watching this movie back in the day was closure. I was able to switch off completely from Star Wars. It was done for me. The prequels had turned out to be a chore. And every time someone hated something about them, Lucas would then add those things into the original movies making them worse too. Even now, all these years later, it's hard to enjoy the end of Return of the Jedi in the form it's in.

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                  #38
                  The whole prequel trilogy reeks of no one saying NO to George Lucas.
                  The scripts and story needed an extra helping rewrite to tighten it all up.

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                    #39
                    Originally posted by Cassius_Smoke View Post
                    The whole prequel trilogy reeks of no one saying NO to George Lucas.
                    The scripts and story needed an extra helping rewrite to tighten it all up.
                    But on the other hand, the sequel trilogy reeks of design-by-committee. You can't really win

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                      #40
                      Originally posted by Asura View Post
                      But on the other hand, the sequel trilogy reeks of design-by-committee. You can't really win
                      I guess we'll get to that later but I disagree with this. Exhibit A: The Last Jedi. The extent to which this seems like a singular vision, flaws and all, really took me by surprise. Exhibit B: Rise of Skywalker. Because committee notes should have prevented most of the crimes of this movie from happening. Abrams seems to have been left unchecked.

                      But I definitely agree that the prequels are the result of a guy who has real strengths but needed a strong team around him and he just didn't have that. Every whim was indulged. Every weakness was left to exist on screen. Whereas it's very clear that the original movie (like almost every great movie) was the result of a very collaborative process.

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                        #41
                        Originally posted by Dogg Thang View Post
                        I guess we'll get to that later but I disagree with this. Exhibit A: The Last Jedi. The extent to which this seems like a singular vision, flaws and all, really took me by surprise. Exhibit B: Rise of Skywalker. Because committee notes should have prevented most of the crimes of this movie from happening. Abrams seems to have been left unchecked.
                        I meant when taken as a unit, though; that while the prequel trilogy might be seen as a singular vision (just maybe a bad one), the sequel trilogy suffers from being a melange of multiple people's visions.
                        Last edited by Asura; 21-04-2021, 11:19.

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                          #42
                          I honestly think that there are two good Star Wars films - Star Wars and Star Wars 2 (Empire).

                          The rest of them range from average to poor.

                          Agree? Disagree?

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                            #43
                            I guess for me it’s a different set of answers depending on whether it’s about which films I think are really strong films and which films I enjoy watching. I tend to consider it about enjoyment more and, outside of the prequels, I enjoy most of the Star Wars films.

                            Edit: actually that closure I got from watching Ep3 has a lot to do with that. Since that movie, I haven’t really ever had my panties in a bunch about anything related to Star Wars. I never expected any decent Star Wars ever again. Any moment of enjoyment is a bonus. If there is stuff I don’t like, who cares? They’re just movies.
                            Last edited by Dogg Thang; 21-04-2021, 12:15.

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                              #44
                              I can wrap up this thread:

                              We have had 9 'episode' movies. Out of those, 2 are good, 1.5 are middleing and the rest are ****e. ****e!

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                                #45
                                I kind of want to hold off but in terms of grenades I'll toss into the room but won't explain till later:

                                -There's only one Star Wars film that is in of itself a genuinely great film (Empire)
                                -The entire sequel trilogy is superior to the entire prequel trilogy
                                -The Last Jedi is the worst sequel trilogy entry - but not for the reason most complain about


                                Bringing it back around to Ep3 though, it's easily the best of the prequels but like has been said it's a rushed playbook of tick box moments in a film where the opening is close to being where the entire trilogy should have begun. It takes a tiny amount of imagination to take the same pieces and to come up with a better structured arc and highlights why Lucas might be a successful filmmaker but he's never been a good one.

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