It would be better with an episode six made with as much care and attention as 4 and 5.
The problem with ROTJ is that it's all tying up and no story.
Kill off Jabba, Kill off Fett, Kill off Yoda, take Luke out of love triangle, kill off Piett and the Executor, Kill off Palpatine, Kill off Vader, Kill off the whole Empire.
That's the film, a shopping list.
Bingowings said:
It would be better with an episode six made with as much care and attention as 4 and 5.
The problem with ROTJ is that it's all tying up and no story.
Kill off Jabba, Kill off Fett, Kill off Yoda, take Luke out of love triangle, kill off Piett and the Executor, Kill off Palpatine, Kill off Vader, Kill off the whole Empire.
That's the film, a shopping list.
Kill off Owen and Beru, kill off Greedo, kill off Alderaan, kill off Obi-wan, kill off Tarkin and the Death Star.
I would disagree that the Empire is destroyed, despite what the SE trilogy depicts. Crippled? Perhaps.
So by my count, six major players are destroyed in episode 4, if you count either the Death Star or Alderaan. That makes them pretty much even on the kill count. The only difference is that we've had more time to get to know some of the characters in ROTJ, making their deaths mean more.
Many of the things you mentioned are in service to the story. Yoda died to put pressure on Luke, as he was the last trained Jedi. Jabba died to show that Luke was serious in his threats, and was indeed a force to be reckoned with. Either Luke or Han would have ended up out of the love triangle at the end anyway, and Vader gave his life in a heroic sacrifice to kill the Emperor and save his son. These deaths are all in service to the story. Could Yoda have been handled better? Sure. Did Boba Fett need to die in such an inglorious way? Of course not. I agree that it is the weakest of the OT, but to dismiss it as a shopping list is to do it a disservice.
There's nothing quite like death to heighten the stakes. If many characters weren't killed, Lucas would be blamed for trying to sell more action figures. Remember that Gary Kurtz, the man who left Lucasfilm because he thought that Lucas was selling out, thought from the beginning that Han Solo should die. Lucas said that people would buy more Han Solo action figures if he survived to have more adventures in EU land, so in that case, keeping a character alive was to the detriment of the original story.
You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)
Bingowings said:
I already have.
No, you haven't. How does saying that the prequels were a success leads to "every Michael Bay film is a work of art"?
That's non sequitur.
At least admit that you misread my post. There is no shame in that.
Bingowings said:
The problem with ROTJ is that it's all tying up and no story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T_L3RMxa3k
Case closed. Not a movie that needs to be remade, or ever should be remade.
I wish that I could just wish my feelings away...but I can't. Wishful wishing can only lead to wishes wished for in futile wishfulness, which is not what I wish to wish for.
Alexrd said:
Bingowings said:
I already have.
No, you haven't. How does saying that the prequels were a success leads to "every Michael Bay film is a work of art"?
That's non sequitur.
At least admit that you misread my post. There is no shame in that.
Ok I'll spell it out to you seeing as you are clearly finding it to difficult a task to perform unaided.
You said :
The theater ticket, DVD and merchandising sales/records of the prequels speak for themselves.
Almost every Michael Bay movie has done well at the box office, sold well in the home theatre market and sold toys of some description and are a pile of doings. Sparks have released 22 studio albums, most of which were critically acclaimed, they are held up as inspirations for countless other artists and they barely bruise the industry charts. You equated financial gain with artistic merit there's arguably some shame in that.
NeverarGreat said:
Bingowings said:
It would be better with an episode six made with as much care and attention as 4 and 5.
The problem with ROTJ is that it's all tying up and no story.
Kill off Jabba, Kill off Fett, Kill off Yoda, take Luke out of love triangle, kill off Piett and the Executor, Kill off Palpatine, Kill off Vader, Kill off the whole Empire.
That's the film, a shopping list.
Kill off Owen and Beru, kill off Greedo, kill off Alderaan, kill off Obi-wan, kill off Tarkin and the Death Star.
I would disagree that the Empire is destroyed, despite what the SE trilogy depicts. Crippled? Perhaps.
So by my count, six major players are destroyed in episode 4, if you count either the Death Star or Alderaan. That makes them pretty much even on the kill count. The only difference is that we've had more time to get to know some of the characters in ROTJ, making their deaths mean more.
Many of the things you mentioned are in service to the story. Yoda died to put pressure on Luke, as he was the last trained Jedi. Jabba died to show that Luke was serious in his threats, and was indeed a force to be reckoned with. Either Luke or Han would have ended up out of the love triangle at the end anyway, and Vader gave his life in a heroic sacrifice to kill the Emperor and save his son. These deaths are all in service to the story. Could Yoda have been handled better? Sure. Did Boba Fett need to die in such an inglorious way? Of course not. I agree that it is the weakest of the OT, but to dismiss it as a shopping list is to do it a disservice.
There's nothing quite like death to heighten the stakes. If many characters weren't killed, Lucas would be blamed for trying to sell more action figures. Remember that Gary Kurtz, the man who left Lucasfilm because he thought that Lucas was selling out, thought from the beginning that Han Solo should die. Lucas said that people would buy more Han Solo action figures if he survived to have more adventures in EU land, so in that case, keeping a character alive was to the detriment of the original story.
In ANH those deaths are story led.
In ROTJ some of them are, Jabba, Vader, Palpatine, others are not Fett needn't even be there let alone die in such a stupid fashion and Yoda just waits for months for Luke to turn up so he can get ill and die mid conversation.
Hardly any of these death provide tension.
They are boss fights.
It's the action equivalent of a jump scare.
Ben dying in ANH was a master stroke because it was difficult to see that coming.
ESB is full of moments like that.
ROTJ has no moments like that (possibly if you were not paying attention you might have been surprised by the Death Star being operational but we know it's a trap and no tension is drawn from this).
We know that ROTJ wasn't originally meant to be the grand finale and it's eleventh hour 'get it over done with' nature is up there on screen.
It's also tonally wrong.
All three films have a torture scene and the one in ROTJ is played for laughs.
This is compounded by the SE where the death of a slave girl is played for laughs, "Whoops oh, oh!"
I'm not here to convince you of anything but I do find the attachment to ROTJ that some people have perplexing, especially from people who rush to kick the PT for doing much of the same thing.
If the PT is the zenith of Star Wars gone wrong ROTJ is the point of infection which is carried the SEs and into the PT.
1990osu said:
Bingowings said:
The problem with ROTJ is that it's all tying up and no story.
Case closed. Not a movie that needs to be remade, or ever should be remade.
The case may be closed for you and I for one am not advocating remaking ROTJ (it can't be done without remaking the sequence of films and that will not happen in my lifetime).
What Lucas should have done with his SEs was to disassemble and reassemble in a fashion that made the series more consistent and make more narrative sense and put them up there as alternative versions of the original theatrical versions.
Hopefully this Disney business will not prevent people other than Lucas from doing exactly that.
Scintillating!
IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!
"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005
"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM
"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.
If a PT reboot were to be made, I'd want it to take the pre-1999 EU into account and stay faithful to it (the clones would be the enemies, Jedi would have children and marry, lightsabers would come in a large range of colours, etc.). Timothy Zahn and Tom Veitch would serve as creative consultants.
Bingowings said:
You equated financial gain with artistic merit
No, I didn't. I merely said they were successful.
Alexrd said:
Bingowings said:
You equated financial gain with artistic merit
No, I didn't. I merely said they were successful.
Can we agree that they were mildly successful and masterfully terrible, then?
IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!
"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005
"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM
"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.
DuracellEnergizer said:
If a PT reboot were to be made, I'd want it to take the pre-1999 EU into account and stay faithful to it (the clones would be the enemies, Jedi would have children and marry, lightsabers would come in a large range of colours, etc.). Timothy Zahn and Tom Veitch would serve as creative consultants.
I'm thinking of kidnapping Zahn and Veitch and forcing them to show me their story bibles of all of the assumptions they made about the prequel timeframe.
Anyone in? Who can drive the big black van?
IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!
"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005
"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM
"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.
xhonzi said:
DuracellEnergizer said:
If a PT reboot were to be made, I'd want it to take the pre-1999 EU into account and stay faithful to it (the clones would be the enemies, Jedi would have children and marry, lightsabers would come in a large range of colours, etc.). Timothy Zahn and Tom Veitch would serve as creative consultants.
I'm thinking of kidnapping Zahn and Veitch and forcing them to show me their story bibles of all of the assumptions they made about the prequel timeframe.
Anyone in? Who can drive the big black van?
I'd like to know what Zahn meant by "Clone Masters" and what exactly they were.
But in all honesty, I'd rather they stayed away from the Thrawn trilogy, as it didn't really add anything to the Star Wars story in my opinion. There were few new characters, and the established characters were the stars of the show (except for Mara Jade and Thrawn). The problem with that is that those characters had their character arcs already, and they didn't change much (if at all). The final battle of Luke against his clone (cloned from Luke's severed hand) was right out of an amateur fanfic.
You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)
Building off of Zahn's vision of the Clone Wars hardly qualifies as adapting the Thrawn trilogy, so unless you're afraid that Thrawn himself or C'baoth would feature heavily in such a reboot, I have no clue as to what your problem with the idea is.
DuracellEnergizer said:
Building off of Zahn's vision of the Clone Wars hardly qualifies as adapting the Thrawn trilogy, so unless you're afraid that Thrawn himself or C'baoth would feature heavily in such a reboot, I have no clue as to what your problem with the idea is.
Zahn seems to be adept at writing military strategy and large scale conflicts, it's just that I don't see a deep understanding of the characters, or a desire to bring something new to the table as far as the story is concerned. For example, The Empire Strikes Back took Star Wars in an unexpected direction with Vader's revelation, and that type of story turn is absent from almost all EU fiction, for it would risk rocking the boat. Nobody seems willing to take the risks that Empire took, or to play with audience expectation except Lucas himself, for better or worse. One of the biggest problems with fanfiction in general is a blind adherence to previous convention, regardless of what is best for the story.
You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)
The prequels awful little in terms of character development or story.
It was a mistake to make them in the first place if they would not adhere to the already written backstory with the changes of Vader Being the father and Leia the sister.
Luke's story should have been continued and the story brought forward and actually see the characters mature. Otherwise its just 3 static films. And Luke never gets a love interest or actually does anything after becoming a jedi. They just roll credits.
If the prequels had to be made then we should have seen Vader hunting down the Jedi, not leave all the cool bits up to novels and EU merchandising stuff.
Hayden did not look right in the suit he is not tall enough. David Prowse should have been in there somewhere.
The Lightsaber duels in the prequels were too showy they were ridiculous. Should have been more like empire strikes back. The twirling in Sith and i have the high ground come to mind. As does the bad acting when Hayden says you turned her against me. and you underestimate my power.
“Always loved Vader’s wordless self sacrifice. Another shitty, clueless, revision like Greedo and young Anakin’s ghost. What a fucking shame.” -Simon Pegg.