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What do you think of the Prequel Trilogy? a general discussion thread — Page 2

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The "What's so important" line sounds like it was looped- which is probably why it sounds funky. I think Luke's "but I was going to Toche station" line was also looped, and to me it was really his only cringeworthy delivery in the whole film (the audience actually laughed at that line when I saw the SE in '97). I think it's hard sometimes for the actors to loop the lines- keeping in sync with their mouth movements while at the same time trying to re-create the proper delivery of the lines.

I think overall Harrison did a great job in SW, an even better one in ESB, but seemed to lack enthusiasm a bit in Jedi.

I still think the performances of everyone involved far surpassed the performances in the PT, however.

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I agree completely. I had the same thought in my mind, when Go-Mer-Tonic posted that.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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First off, I didn't mean to say it didn't work without williams score at all, but I think most of the emotion I felt at that point was augmented considerably by Williams score at that moment. The way it wells up is just perfect there to me.

I meant that with the wrong music, it could have come off as cheesier.

Also at the risk of being predictable, I personally thought the acting was at about the same level across the saga. All the films have their great moments and what I would say are "good enough" moments.

I don't think the acting ever gets to a point where it doesn't get the point across, and other parts just floor me.

Liam Neeson in TPM, Ewan, Ian, Lee, Frank Oz, all did a fantastic job for the whole prequel trilogy. I thought Jake lloyd was allright for a kid playing a kid, I thought Hayden really nailed the confusion he was going through regarding the romance in AOTC and his turmoil in ROTS. I even appreciated Natalie's portrayal of Padme. Where a lot of people said she couldn't emote in TPM, I saw that as an intentional restraint on her part. To me when she was the Queen, her eyes said everything her monotone delivery and shiftless posture denied.

I'm not trying to say it's all oscar worthy, but I was able to meet most of it in the middle when it wasn't as great.

And not to put the classic trilogy down, but I think it had it's issues here and there as well.
Your focus determines your reality.
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I disagree completely with you on the subject of Lloyd and Christensen. Their performances were poorer than any in the OOT. The problems were exacerbated by the clumsy script and the focus on the character of Anakin. No matter how good anyone else was, they weren't able to balance it out.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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I personally had no trouble at all with Jake Lloyd or Hayden. I thought Jake played a little kid better than most kids would have, and Hayden just nailed it for me. To me, the romance and his turn to the dark side was rendered extremely well. I was in tears when Padme confessed her love to Anakin before being wheeled out into the arena, and I was beside myself with emotion for the enirety of ROTS. I attribute most of that directly to Hayden, Natalie and Ewan.
Your focus determines your reality.
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I like it. Just not as much as the original trilogy. I like Clones the least, but I'm curious to see if Lucas does anything with it next year. I can't shake the feeling that Lucas wasn't quite happy with it. He was burdened with a lot of extra hassles during that movie: casting Anakin all over again, working the kinks out of the digital camera, a CGi Yoda, bringing in that last-minute writer, who was then not asked back for III, or ever mentioned again. I think it's also significant that he brought in an outside editor for Sith, after Ben Burtt cut Clones all on his own, (AND doing the sound) which could not have been ideal.
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Originally posted by: Zion
But the acting in the OT is far superior and there aren't any lines that make you turn your head in disgust.

I dunno 'bout that. That whole nerfherder thing in Empire had me retching big time.



I really felt the authentic 30's-style banter of Star Wars had been dumbed down for the juvenile set. In fact, I think lots of Star Wars since then has been specifically aimed at the kiddies, while the first had a tone that worked perfectly for adults and children all at the same time.

There's a very fine line between "get this big, walking carpet out of my way" and "nerfherder," but I felt it was definitely crossed.




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Don't get me started on the acting in the prequels. Atrocious across the boards. Even the performances that were alright were clearly some of the worst by the actors giving them (Liam and Ewan come to mind), whereas others (ahem, Natalie) were both awful and the worst of their careers.
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Originally posted by: Guy Caballero
I like it. Just not as much as the original trilogy. I like Clones the least, but I'm curious to see if Lucas does anything with it next year. I can't shake the feeling that Lucas wasn't quite happy with it. He was burdened with a lot of extra hassles during that movie: casting Anakin all over again, working the kinks out of the digital camera, a CGi Yoda, bringing in that last-minute writer, who was then not asked back for III, or ever mentioned again. I think it's also significant that he brought in an outside editor for Sith, after Ben Burtt cut Clones all on his own, (AND doing the sound) which could not have been ideal.



It is funny cause if I had to pick which PT movie is my favorite, and it is kind of like picking whether I loved Algebra, Geometry, or Trig, I would say that AOTC is the one.

I will say that the Anakin/Padme scenes are truly cringeworthy, but I went through the whole movie once, and they equate to about 10 minutes of the movie of them just talking while NOTHING is happening. I will take 10 minutes of awful love dialogue from Anakin/Padme over 2 annoying hours of Jar Jar mucking up every scene.

I actually think AOTC is the most fun of the PT movies, cause it was before Lucas fucked up every plot point he develped when ROTS rolled around. Before ROTS, you didn't know Anakin was going to turn quicker then a light switch, you didn't know Padme would lose the will to live, you still wondered about the duel on the Volcano planet, and you still had hopes that ROTS would be the shit. The last hour of AOTC is just popcorn entertainment that is hell of alot better then some of the awful shit in ROTS, "From my point of the view, the Jedi were always evil!" I still don't know why Anakin says that on Mustafar, didn't he just say after chopping Mace's hand off, "What have I done?" That is the stupid shit that kills ROTS, and stuff I never thought about in 2002.
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http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/ep3_tot1.gif

"Senator Palpatine seduces Anakin to the dark side in about as much time as it takes for you to finish reading this sentence."

Come on, not funny?

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Originally posted by: Obi Jeewhyen
Heehee, CO is the brother I never knew I had.



If this were George Lucas's world, that could be arranged in the next movie cause who really cares what happened in our past, as long as it works in the present.
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i didn't know where else to post this but it kinda goes along with my thoughts on the pt...

funny vid I don't use locations. I have computers.

http://articles.closeup.de/large/F/F327875.JPG Still I guess there's some irony to how even as a puppet, George fucked Yoda up.
He big in nothing important in good elephant.

"Miss you, I will, Original Trilogy..."

"Your midichlorians are weak, Old man." -Darth Vader 2007 super deluxe extra special dipped in chocolate sauce edition.

http://prequelsstink.ytmnd.com/
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Originally posted by: Obi Jeewhyen
"nerfherder"

Erm... This may be the most patronising thing ever, Obi Jeewhyen, so apologies in advance, but you do know she's saying "nerve-hurter", don't you? I like this line because she's struggling to come up with a real crusher to send Solo away licking his wounds but instead ends up giving out the lamest insult ever.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Yeah, and there's another line usually misinterpreted. In Echo Base, most people hear Han say, "You look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark." He actually says Luke can pull "the years off a gunned ark," that is, make an aged battleship appear new. It's apparently an old Corellian compliment to one's resilience or durability.
"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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Tee-hee. Gunned ark. Tee-hee.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Another misinterpreted line in AOTC is, "I don't like sand, it is coarse, and it gets all over."

.....................No wait, he really does say that awful line!
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I'm probably in a minority here, but I didn't mind the CGI or the movies themselves. Excuse me if I speak heresy, but Star Wars was never that great. They were fun action-adventure flicks that left the possibility of a larger universe open to us, but plot-wise the movies were back to back cliches in new trappings that didn't really do anything to innovate the field except add more special effects. Don't say originality is dead or that all movies are rip-offs of something else, because I could point out story upon story that was original or unique in times where it was contemporary. In this light, the prequels aren't so bad, as they maintain that same quality: They do nothing original but are still decent action-adventure films. I mean, who didn't love that lightsaber fight at the end of Phantom Menace?

However, as I said, one thing I found Star Wars did was open my mind to a large fantasy universe. Just watching the original trilogy, I find myself wondering what else has happened before, after, and during the adventures I see in these films. However I'll never read an expanded universe novel because I don't really want that question answered--my imagination does it better than any franchise book... that and, to be honest, I HAVE read a few Expanded Universe novels and found them to be completely dull, and moreover the answers they gave were ones I didn't like.

The prequels, to an extent, suffer from that latter problem, of giving answers nobody likes. Midichloriens being a popular example. However I think the bigger problem is simply that they're prequels. Prequels of any stripe are usually made for one reason: To answer questions posed by an existing story, to show how it all came to be... to explain things. Prequels almost universally suck because the answers they give are never totally necessary, if they were ever necessary to begin with. Come to think of it I can't recall a single prequel I'm familiar with that ever enhanced or shed light on the thing that it was a prequel to. Did we really need a prequel to The Exorcist? to Amityville? to Dune? to Superman?

But since this is a Star Wars topic, let's discuss the Star Wars prequels: The Prequel Trilogy fell into the common trap of feeling like it needed to "explain" the original trilogy, so we get things like the origin of the Empire, Palpatine's rise to power, how Anakin met Obi-Wan and became Darth Vader, how several important characters came to be where we find them in the original trilogy, and so on and so forth. And of course, no one likes the answers. This is both because they deny our imagination, replacing our various hypothesized scenarios with concrete answers, and as I said earlier, because the answers the movies give us suck. Moreover, these answers simply were never necessary in the first place! There were no aspects of the original trilogy that didn't or couldn't make sense on their own without any external knowledge. We don't need to know the backstory of the Star Wars universe to understand the original trilogy any more than we need to know the complete history of Arrakis to understand Dune.

On a more personal note, I've always felt the prequels were too much like an entry in the Expanded Universe--suddenly we have terms such as "Padawan" and "Sith" being thrown around. I also never liked how the EU introduced this "Star Wars naming convention" where every character has to have this name made up of three syllables--two for the personal name and one for the surname, and the more flat it sounds the better, names such as Quigon Jinn and Jar Jar Binks, and bad guys have to have some derivitive, "evil-sounding" name such as (to use an example from the novels) Thrawn or General Grievous. I mean, watch the original trilogy: The heroes had names such as Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, Leia Organa and bad guys had names such as General Tharkin. The sudden change from mostly nominal (if a little exhuberant) or even just plain "normal" names to these suddenly comic book-esque "alien" or "evil-sounding" names has always been one of my pet peeves with the Expanded Universe.

Personally, and excuse my arrogance, if I had written the Star Wars prequels, I would not have done it as George Lucas did. The empire would already be in place and making motion after motion to sweep aside and eliminate the Republic, the rebels would already be in place and striking back. The Jedi would be a widespread religious order that is slowly being driven underground. These would not be explanations of the original trilogy but rather events previous to the trilogy that may or may not have a bearing on future events. And so many things would be different that I have honestly considered doing my own Star Wars prequels in the form of a fanfic, being held back only by the thought that if I have the imagination and inclination to do that then I should darn well write original stories.

That's my thought, anyway.
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[[Oops... accidentally quoted my previous message while attempting to edit it... Ummm... does anyone know how to delete one's own posts?]]
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Hey, JamesEightBitStar, why don't you step over to 'What did the PT need?' - you will find like-minded people there.
Don't you call me a mindless philosopher...!
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Methinks I'll find like-minded people everywhere.

Ever since posting, I've honestly considered writing out summaries of my ideas for a Star Wars prequel trilogy (as well as a sequel trilogy, since I have several ideas for one). Anyone interested in seeing it?
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To be fair, they couldn't have prequels that didn't explain how the Republic became the Empire, how Anakin turned to the dark side. I mean it couldn't have been: "Look at all these things that have nothing to do with the last half I already came up with originally!" I understand some people would rather they get to dream up what really happened in their own head (it shows originality and creativity which is a great thing), but you can't really blame Lucas for doing that exact same thing himself.

As far as introducing "new terms and things" that we never heard in the classic trilogy, Lucas has been doing that with each episode, starting with ESB. He introduces new characters, new vehicles, new plot points, the classic trilogy was the same way. I can undertsand how it could end up just sounding foriegn compared to what we are used to, and new doesn't always = "great". But you don't see that as some kind of change in Lucas' approach to this series do you?

Also some things like the word "Sith" were actually around since the very beginning. With Darth supposedly being short for "Dark Lord of the Sith". It may not have come up in the films, but the books (both novels and children's) had it.
Your focus determines your reality.
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Actually, not explaining how the empire came to be would have worked just fine. In fact, it probably would have been preferrable.
40,000 million notches away
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Originally posted by: Windexed
Actually, not explaining how the empire came to be would have worked just fine. In fact, it probably would have been preferrable.


Especially considering that anyone who REALLY wants to know can simply read the prologue to the A New Hope novelization.

And it explained it in just over a page instead of three movies.

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You know, I actually liked the "nerfherder" exchange. It makes me chuckle every time, especially the payoff in, "Who's scruffy looking?"

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.