The Phantom Menace. It just dawned on me that the story it tells is nothing more than the backstory to the backstory. We did not need it at all. In fact we don’t need AOTC either; we could have started the PT with the opening scene of ROTS and gone from there.
To be fair it is episode 1, but yeah it’s just so boring, that’s definitely the longest lasting problem for me, plays out like a tv pilot, ROTS might be too far in I still want the arc, but we got a whole Luke arc without starting when he was 9…
I don’t agree with Kasdan’s take on ROTJ but I do think they blinked and if anything could truly be undone I would have wished Gary Kurtz never left, but that’s not really an idea so instead I’ll go with Leia really shouldn’t have been so sidelined in ROTJ.
I think the truth of the matter is having Kurtz around wouldn’t have changed much. Most of the issues present in ROTJ were brought up in the Lucas/Kasdan/Marquand/Kazanjian story meetings. The fact is that Lucas was calling the shots, and Kurtz would have ultimately acquiesced to him, same as the others (the reason TESB is great is because Kurtz basically let Kershner do what he wanted, not because he was keeping Lucas in check).
I’d want Marquand out too, no offense Marquand, but he was less of a creative drive whereas having Kurtz around just on set was another layer of someone who really did understand the story, certain silly things might have been averted but we’ll of course never know, and of course I still think ROTJ pulls it together by the end, just not quite firing on all cylinders to the degree I’d qualify the first two.