…I watched the Prequels on my week off at Thanksgiving. I didn’t hate them.
I’ll not be taking questions at this time. 😀
Congratulations, Anchorhead! It was a long time coming lol.
Since you’ve watched them vanilla now… I’d definitely check out some extended editions. Attack of the Clones is one that greatly benefits from the deleted scenes.
This is maybe the biggest surprise in this forum’s history. Glad to hear you didn’t hate them!
Congratulations, Anchorhead! It was a long time coming lol.
Since you’ve watched them vanilla now… I’d definitely check out some extended editions. Attack of the Clones is one that greatly benefits from the deleted scenes.
Bobson Duggnutt’s and Numeral Joker’s various expanded/extended editions are great.
You must be getting soft Anchorhead
Point taken on getting soft, but the real reason was a bit of tough love from an old friend of mine. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned something about them, I responded with my usual, and he suggested not so subtlety that perhaps if I’d actually seen them… 😉
I accepted his challenge (because he was right) and watched the two I’d never seen.
As to getting soft; I’d say for sure my having watched Bad Batch, Kenobi, and Ashoka certainly softened my 25-year stance. I enjoyed those shows and they were as prequel-adjacent as you can get. I’ve always liked Ewan McGregor, so that was easy, plus Ahsoka was my first time seeing Hayden Christensen. As I may have mentioned last year or so, I could easily see him becoming Vader. His scenes in Ahsoka where she’s a kid and later in that between worlds fight, he was spot-on as a good person who eventually turns bad.
All that was left was for me to prepare for the inevitable Lucasness of the two films. Before I mention the story at large, I’ll say this; Lucas didn’t disappoint - and not in a good way. As expected, they are full of meaningless and completely unnecessary visual distractions, particularly if the scene isn’t meant to be humorous. Lucas doesn’t have even the most rudimentary understanding of less is more. He’s almost childlike in his inability to focus. He just can’t let a scene breathe.
As to what I liked; I liked the underlying story. It actually has a cohesive flow and interesting characters. I just had to make peace with the terrible one-liners, embarrassing repeats of lines from 1977 and 1980, and the above mentioned CGI distractions and candy colored spinning lightsabers.
I also liked that, unlike the Sequels, the story doesn’t center around a universe-ending super weapon. It’s a much more grounded and believable story - a governmental power struggle. I always thought that sounded boring, but he somehow pulled it off.
Of the two, Attack Of The Clones worked better to me and I found it more interesting. That said, I could see myself watching them both again one day. As to Phantom Menace - never again. It’s terrible. Once was more than enough.
Anyway, that’s it. Nothing major. I watched them and they failed where I expected them to fail (visual BS) and succeeded where I did not expect them to succeed (story and acting). They would have been a lot better in the hands of better directors.
I’m young enough to have grown up on the prequels. I loved them as a kid more than the originals. Now, looking back, I can see a lot of their flaws, but the thing that always stood out to me was the very thing you mentioned @Anchorhead - the underlying story. The in-world political story of someone who manipulates a government and its people to gain power, manufactures a war, turns one of the Jedi to infiltrate and use him for his own purposes, and the failures of the Republic (and its people) in both combatting and failing to see all of this, putting trust in people that are untrustworthy, all leading to a Republic that turns into a Empire, and for some of the new shows, how that then impacts the people themselves.
It’s literally brilliant! It has a strong message, and the message for me was always very impactful. But then again, I’ve always loved stories about governmental power struggles, how authoritarian regimes rise, dystopian and utopians. But I love that Star Wars combines this very Sci-fi topic with Fantasy and the Jedi. The prequels do a great job of giving a larger history to the universe as a whole, expanding it outward.
That’s why I like some of these fan edits of the prequels - they take this great underlying story and match the execution to that great story, by cutting all the cringy moments. As for the CGI, I still think it holds up, but I also like the updated CGI, and will continue to like new updates if done right. The cool thing about CGI is you can always improve them, which is the very reason I love CGI stuff (when done well).
This led me to realizing something about George Lucas - he might be not so great at the detailed execution of certain things (too many jokes, etc.), but he is excellent at world-building and overall story. I watched THX 1138 recently, and loved that movie for the very same reasons.
Sometimes the overwhelmingly positive reevaluation of the Prequels that occurred across the Internet around 2015 makes me start thinking that I was too harsh on these movies and I should probably give them another watch and maybe reevaluate the positive aspects. I mean, I really want to like them. But every time I try this, the flaws stand out so sharply to me and I just end up rediscovering why I never liked these movies in the first place.
People often say that the actual story of the Prequels was excellent, and it’s only the implementation or execution that resulted in such flawed films. I agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a particularly compelling or interesting point. The actual story outline of the Prequels - broadly speaking - was already known back in the 1980s: Kenobi trained Anakin to be a Jedi and the two became good friends. A manipulative Senator named Palpatine orchestrated a coup by leveraging influence with Trade Guilds and large corporations, overthrowing the Republic and killing all the Jedi in the process. Anakin betrayed Kenobi and sided with Palpatine who appointed him chief “Jedi Hunter”. Then Anakin and Kenobi dueled near a volcano and Anakin fell into lava. Kenobi then arranged for Anakin’s children to be raised in secret. (Yes, even that specific detail about Trade Guilds was known in the 1980s).
So the basic story outline was already known before Lucas began production of the Prequels in the 1990s, and many Star Wars fans were familiar with this story and how it ends. So the entire point of actually making these Prequel films after all these years was the implementation details - the casting, the dialogue, the performances, the fleshed-out finer-grained plot points surrounding the Clone Wars and Anakin’s fall, the identity and personality of Anakin’s wife, the Jedi Order as it existed during “a more civilized age”, etc. The implementation was what everyone was waiting for. We already knew the story and how it ends, but we wanted to see an implementation of this story realized on the big screen. We wanted to see Kenobi and Anakin fighting side by side while exchanging cheesy quips. We wanted to see their great friendship tragically torn apart after Anakin embraces the Dark Side. And we wanted to see their dramatic final showdown atop the volcano.
And yet, almost every aspect of the implementation was fucked up in some way, beginning with the entire plot of Phantom Menace wasting a whole movie on an irrelevant side quest that had little bearing on the overall saga and prominently featured overtly juvenile characters and tone. The finer-grained implementation details fleshing out the Clone Wars and Palpatine’s conspiracy were mostly under-developed and hand-wavy, and often defied audience expectations in the least interesting way possible or created weirdly unnecessary continuity problems. This botched execution was so consistently pervasive throughout all aspects of all three films that praising the underlying source material registers to me as pointless. I still can’t comprehend how it was even possible to so colossally fuck up such dramatically compelling story material on almost every level. The only major implementation details that genuinely worked well were some of the casting decisions (Ewan McGregor is great), certain elements of the fight choreography, and John William’s score was also great (because of course it was). Even many of the visual effects (which George Lucas is famously known for as a pioneer and visionary) aged poorly due to the over-reliance on early-2000s 3D rendering to portray characters and environments.
You can say what you want about the prequels, but they do reflect Lucas as a filmmaker and all his strengths and weaknesses are on display.
Every director has their style and eccentricities. I just don’t get how people don’t notice the same issues in his earlier films maybe because they are better movies?
Or maybe he had help with the screenplays.
The whole digital cinema and we’ll fake it in cgi and fix it in post, is almost every major comic book or fantasy or science fiction film now.
I think I’m in a minority as someone who thinks The Phantom Menace is the best of the three PT.
Qui-Gonn and Darth Maul the two best characters of the trilogy, and both killed off in the first film!
I like Qui-Gon because of Liam Neeson and the quiet dignity he brings to that character, not quite Sir Alec. But better than people give credit to. The whole problem was Midichlorians. People scoffed at that and still do. May the Midichlorians be with you. Such a bad idea, almost as bad as aliens in Indiana Jones. But at least there the 1950’s cold war era B movies and that conceit lent itself to such an absurd idea it almost worked. Midichlorians were dead on arrival like Jedi as celibate monks.
Every director has their style and eccentricities. I just don’t get how people don’t notice the same issues in his earlier films maybe because they are better movies?
Or maybe he had help with the screenplays.
The whole digital cinema and we’ll fake it in cgi and fix it in post, is almost every major comic book or fantasy or science fiction film now.
Lucas had some help writing the Prequels also - people exaggerate when they claim that Lucas wrote the Prequels entirely by himself. However, it is true that Lucas had way more help writing the Original Trilogy, obviously, where for ESB and ROTJ he mostly wrote plot outlines or very early drafts and then had other people flesh out the actual script.
Also, the Original Trilogy truly had ground-breaking special effects for the time. Nobody had seen anything remotely like the Death Star trench run, for example, with moving star fields and dog fights in space. And while the Prequels certainly had a similar effect in terms of revolutionizing the VFX industry (Jar Jar was the first completely CGI character I think) and pushing digital film-making into the mainstream, the overall impact and “wow factor” was much less pronounced from the perspective of the average audience member.
I mean, I’m fairly old, so I remember experiencing various ground-breaking movies as they were released over the past 30 years. I remember being blown-away by new special-effects technology precisely three times in my life, and the Star Wars Prequels were not one of those three times. Those three times were Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and the portrayal of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. I haven’t seen anything else that truly seemed revolutionary or game-changing to me, except possibly AI Luke Skywalker in the Boba Fett show a few years ago. But the Prequels never stood out to me as particularly revolutionary in terms of visual effects, even though, factually speaking, I realize they had a dramatic impact in terms of pushing Hollywood in general towards digital film-making, paving the way for all the Marvel stuff we have now. Yet even in 1999 when the effects in Phantom Menace truly were state-of-the-art, some people were already complaining about the overuse of CGI, with some early reviews complaining that some scenes looked less like Star Wars and more like “A Bugs Life” or something.
The tech isn’t quite there yet but i was impressed with how ILM did the Carrie Fisher scenes in Rise of Skywalker and the deaged Indy in Dial of Destiny. Much more impressive than what they did in Rogue One or Mando.
But all the deepfaking and deaging still has that telltale fakeness to it. Like Harrison moved like an old man and sounded like an old man despite appearing young. Which gave it away.
But all the deepfaking and deaging still has that telltale fakeness to it. Like Harrison moved like an old man and sounded like an old man despite appearing young. Which gave it away.
An unrelated movie had that same problem: The Irishman. Despite being digitally de-aged, Robert De Niro still moved like a man in his mid-seventies.
It’s “better” than before but still looks bad and every time it’s used I think they should have not done it.
De-aging I’m fine with. Never looks great but used sparingly can be effective.
Digitally reviving the dead is just a deal breaker to me. I will give leeway to TROS because of their circumstances and their approach to repurpose real footage. Did it work? Lord no. It’s not quite as haunting as the average dead-eyed deepfake though. It will never cross the uncanny valley, and it will always be grotesque. As impressive as the tech is, I don’t enjoy seeing a dead man’s face digitally smeared over a puppet.
It will never cross the uncanny valley
If by never you mean by 2027 or something, then yeah, probably.