Alderaan said:
Tyrphanax said:
but the difference is that Rogue One and Civil War will still be decent movies.
No, they won’t be. One day you’ll be embarrassed you felt this way.
Please stop, okay? Film enjoyment is subjective. I enjoyed both of those movies, and will continue to enjoy them. I’m sorry that they weren’t Citizen Kane and that you didn’t like them, but I don’t need reminding that you didn’t like them and that you think I’m an idiot for liking them every time they come up. Thanks.
Ryan-SWI said:
Tyrphanax said:
Oh, it isn’t of course. There is a reason we have effects-driven blockbusters today and its in large part thanks to George Lucas.
My point is more that PT gets its rightful bad rap from being just plain bad films moreso than effects in my mind, and I think most here would agree on that point (I would still argue that there is an over-reliance on CGI in the PT, moreso than the Sequel Trilogy or most of the Marvel movies, or at least that it’s used more judiciously, or at least that it’s more forgivable because the movies are better, but that could all be disputed).
The effects used in the PT are very dated at this point (when at the time of release they were very impressive), and I imagine it’ll be the same looking back on Rogue One or Captain America: Civil War seventeen years from now (I remember when the Nintendo 64 looked “lifelike” to me), but the difference is that Rogue One and Civil War will still be decent movies. Going back to the PT today is not only seeing dated CGI, but compounding that on top of the atrocious writing and acting.
I don’t disagree at all for the most part on the technical aspects of the films, I was more referring to the common jab of the prequels being bad films because CGI, without any elaboration. I’m not saying that’s the case here obviously, it was more of a general statement.
Sure, I get that. No harm, no foul. For what it’s worth, I feel like in the day of 3D printing and being at the point of technology where we can translate CGI into physical props, it would be really interesting to see a Star Wars film with the massive Disney/LFL budget behind it using totally physical props again. I remember first seeing the trailers for Rogue One and trying to figure out if that Star Destroyer was a prop or not, though.
Could you elaborate on why you think Rogue One is a decent film, yet Revenge of the Sith isn’t?
Despite ROTS being my favourite Star Wars film I’m not ignorant to its objective flaws, and taking a step back R1 and ROTS have similar issues with effects, characters, plot structure, etc.
Sure, and I think it’s very simple reason (for me at least).
I agree that Rogue One doesn’t have the most amazingly-developed characters in the saga, no argument there. But the difference between Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith for me is that Rogue One isn’t about the characters as much as it is about the state of the galaxy and how that state affects the people living in it. It adds to the universe we saw in Star Wars in a way that doesn’t shrink it or step on many toes (in my view). It’s a “war movie lite” that stands outside the main saga (though it is connected), and I’ve said it a lot but it’s more of a Black Hawk Down telling of events that happened (in that it’s more about the event than the people involved) than it is Saving Private Ryan (which is about characters with the war as a backdrop). More importantly, I had fun during the movie. It’s hard to stay engaged for two hours and fifteen minutes sitting in a seat (even the Marvel movies can lose me there), but I was locked into Rogue One the whole time, both times I’ve seen it so far. These explanations may not work for some, but they were my immediate thoughts leaving the theater the first time.
Revenge of the Sith falls flat for me against this same metric because it depends so much on the flat acting and bad writing (character-, acting-, and story-wise) of the previous two films. I have said many times here and elsewhere that the core concepts and story of the Prequel Trilogy are fantastic. The rise of the Empire, the seduction of Anakin Skywalker by the Dark Side, the birth of Darth Vader, the purge of the Jedi and the collapse of the Old Republic are all amazing concepts. Stuff I wanted to see since I heard Ben Kenobi relate the story of Luke’s father to him on Tatooine and then Endor. But Lucas managed to find so many ways to just ruin those amazing concepts in the most disappointing and thorough ways, not to mention wring some of the worst performances out of otherwise-decent (or great) actors. Where Rogue One was about an event and the people involved, Revenge of the Sith is about characters and their deep impact on the galaxy. The problem is that all these characters are so poorly-written and acted that I don’t care about them or what happens to them at all. I should, because they’re the point of the movie, they’re doing things I always wanted to see, but I just do not. I grew up while the PT was being released, but I never had the same excitement or drive towards them as I did with the OT. I got the Special Editions on VHS in 1997 (I was 8) and watched them weekly. When the PT came out, I think I might have had TPM on VHS but that was it. It was more an obligation to see them than it was that I was excited about seeing what happened next.
I really enjoyed Rogue One but the film is far from being without faults, and I honestly have no doubt that had the film come out in the early 2000s it would be lumped in with those “crap prequel films.” A lot of the complaints levelled at the prequels are glaringly apparent in R1, so why is it excused?
The most hypocritical response I’ve seen is the same people calling the ROTS space battle a “pointless video game cut-scene”, but the Rogue One space battle is brilliant… Why? It has the same plot significance as ROTS and almost the entire thing was created on a computer.
It seems more and more apparent among fans that everything Star Wars is perfectly fine as long as it’s attached to the hip of the OT, any deviation and it’s automatically a huge pile of crap.
I can’t speak so much to this. Rogue One has its faults but it just feels better and was more enjoyable for me. Also, if it had come out in the 2000s, Lucas would have written and produced and directed it and it would have been a mess like the PT, haha. There are just different feels to the two films, and Rogue One feels like Star Wars to me, whereas the Prequels just… don’t so much.
Like I said before, the effects for the PT were cutting-edge at the time, so it’s not so much that as it is the reliance on it. In TPM you had a lot more real sets and practical effects. Those were all nice. But, as time went on, with AOTC and ROTS they just kept on pushing and pushing the boundaries to the point where Obi-Wan’s scenes on Utapau are Ewan McGregor on a greenscreen the entire time interacting with mostly characters that are either not there at all or a guy in a green bodysuit. Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting on Mustafar is the same thing. At least with Rogue One we had a lot of this and this, we had a lot of this and this too, but having the first thing makes the second thing look more believable. When you have a lot of this and this it makes this and this look less believable (especially when you pile a ton of post-production CGI on it).