What is wrong with... Attack of the Clones? - a general discussion thread — Page 7

Mavimao said:

The real problem with AOTC is that the idea is sound but is ruined by the execution.

Harmy pointed out that the synopsis of this film is probably the strongest in the three prequels: there’s been an assasination attempt on a senator and one jedi is sent to protect her and one is sent to investigate. The jedi and the senator fall in love (which is forbidden) and the other jedi discovers a gigantic military build up operation.

There’s a great story here! But George’s weaknesses in storytelling and direction hamper the whole thing and the execution is lousy.

I do think one shouldn’t nitpick too much with this movie, but unlike other films with glaring plothole issues that you can forgive, AOTC is so boring and badly acted that these plotholes just stare at you like a thousand deer in headlights.

Granted, much of the dialogue between Anakin and Padmé should have been rewritten. However, the story itself was profound, regardless of the execution.

Also, I never watch a Star Wars movie for compelling dialogue or character development. As long as the story is logically coherent, the action sequences are thrilling, the graphics are brilliant, and the film score is fantastic, I am content with the film.

If I needed to watch a film with compelling dialogue and character development, I would watch not watch a Star Wars film.

LuckyGungan2001 said:
I think they’re all watchable.

If you smoke some good weed maybe.

Overuse of CGI way to much pandering to fanboys(ironically).

Yeah,it is not a very good film.

Well, I think ATOC is the weakest of the PT. But that said, I think all of the PT are pretty awesome movies. They are nowhere near as good at the OT, but they stand far above a lot of the crap out there. There are quite a number of great SF movies that I would place on the scale between the OT and PT. Blade Runner, Stargate, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and others. There are ones I like that I would put below the PT.

I think that the PT are fundamentally different from the OT and I think that should have been more expected and accepted by fans. Sometimes I feel like the fans were expecting the Clone Wars and forgot that the PT wan’t going to be about the best of Anakin, but about the fall of the Republic, the fall of Anakin, Obi-wan, and end with the birth of Anakin’s children. The fall of the Republic is about politics. GL based it on the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. In the PT we have stepped back to an older era and I feel that GL let older movies inspire him. Watch TCM for a week and you’ll see what I mean.

I seriously wonder why people would complain about Anakin’s sand line. Sand is insidious stuff, especially in a desert. GL had personal experience with this in the SW, ROTJ, and TPM shoots. According to several sources, including Mike Verta, there is some serious dirt in the scenes shot in Tunesia. Sand gets everywhere and it is hard to get rid of it. Padme mentions the beach and Anakin instantly thinks of sand. To me that line is very organic and natural.

And let’s be clear. GL had a horrible task in the PT. Take the most iconic film villain of the 20th century and make him a somewhat likable character but with enough flaws so you can see why he fell to the Dark Side. I think he accomplished that. Does it make for a great screen character? No, absolutely not. Anakin is written to fail. That is a hard task. You have to walk the line between writing a likable character and the honest backstory of a great villain. How to you make the audience sympathize with him as you reveal how he became Darth Vader. Did GL do the greatest job? No, but he made 3 very successful movies that took the title of highest grossing movie away from Star Wars and those that had taken the title from it over the years. Bet of all, Eps 5, 6, 1, 2, and 3 are technically independent movies. They were all funded by the merchandising and side businesses that were born of Star Wars. Quite a brilliant move.

I think Lucas’s biggest mistake was directing AOTC and ROTS. Directing is not his greatest strength. He could also use some help with writing. And admittedly he had some unofficial help with Star Wars. I’ve read all the early drafts of the script and somewhere in the editing process is where the genius of the original movie was born. I think that is missing in the PT. In the OT, he had some genius help. Leigh Bracket and Irving Kershner is what made TESB so brilliant. He had no such help with the PT. For Star Wars he had Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola and his other early film friends checking his work. I think he relied too much on himself for the others and tried to stick to the pattern that worked, but it didn’t work as well. It worked financially, but it was not what many fans were expecting. At least not until Ep 3. But then we get the complaints that Anakin’s fall is not believable. I disagree with that. Watch it again. Palpatine catches him at a vulnerable moment after Mace Windu dies and does something to him to seal his final fall. He goes from saving Palpatine from Mace to killing younglings in a short span of time, but he was open to the change or it never could have happened. But if you watch that scene carefully, Anakin has no choice, he is turned by Palpatine using the force.

I think most complaints about the PT are justified. It could be made better with just a bit of editing. I personally hate the droid factory sequence (especially the part with C-3PO) and consider it the worst scene in any Star Wars movie. But I think too many fans ask too much of the Prequels. What we got was something good and what we wanted was the old magic back. I don’t think we will ever get that old magic back. If we could mine the archives and pull out other takes and go in and do some serious tweaking, I think the films could be what they were intended to be, but some of the complaints are about the inherent part of the story that can’t be edited out. The PT is really about Palpatine’s secret climb to power and how he dealt with those who stood in his way and manipulated others to his side. The characters we know from the OT were really just along for the ride.

The state of the Jedi order is also very deliberate. GL is showing us how their inability to bend or see the obvious is what lead to their downfall. Anakin’s fate could have been different had the Jedi not been so bound by tradition. (Anakin being too old for training - not contemplating that a Jedi could fall in love - etc) Yoda is the best of a bad lot. I think Mace Windu is indicative of just what the Jedi had become. Tradition over justice. The Jedi we see are flawed. In the OT, Obi-wan blames himself for Anakin’s fall, but we learn that it was inevitiable because the Jedi could not see that Palpatine was the Sith Lord and Palpatine had been Anakin’s friend and adviser since he arrived on Coruscant. The Jedi only tell Anakin what not to do. They never advise him on how to deal with his feelings, they just keep telling him to not have any. That works when you raise someone from early childhood in the order, but it didn’t work for Anakin.

While I find some of he dialog old fashioned (which I think was deliberate to give us the feel of an older time - which I think was derived from watching movies made in the 30’s and 40’s rather than just those set in the 30’s and 40’s), I find the story to be fascinating and brilliant. If you expected the PT to be just like the OT, you were going to be disappointed. If you went in expecting to see a past revealed you stood a better chance of liking the movies. I have tried from the beginning to see what GL was trying to do and judged him on that. I think he created a brilliant trilogy that could have used some outside input for dialog writing and directing, but I think he nailed the rest of it. Of course the one flaw I do see with what he did was he was too eager to let his imagination run wild, which was not always a good thing. I think the OT benefited from the technology hindrance he claimed to be operating under.

So I find myself agreeing with many of the complaints, but thinking that you are blowing the issue out of proportion. One of the things I found about Anakin is that if you use your imagination and subsitute James Earl Jones’s voice you find that Hayden was speaking like Jones and the lines just come off terrible because of the voice, not the acting. Anakin comes off sounding whiny and imature whereas Vader would sound menacing. Doesn’t work for every line, but works for most, especially when Anakin is falling.

AOTC is the worst of the weaker trilogy. But the Saga as a whole is fantastic and tells a brilliant story of how things crumbled from the top and are restored from the bottom. While TFA may have great characters and dialog, I find the story to be weak and lacking any of the Brilliance of GL’s storytelling. The scenes are far superior to the PT, but the overall movie fails to create a story that can compare even to AOTC. It is still a great movie, but TFA isn’t as great.

yotsuya said:

Well, I think ATOC is the weakest of the PT. But that said, I think all of the PT are pretty awesome movies. They are nowhere near as good at the OT,

Oh, really. I mean don’t get me wrong I grew up with those films but the OT is pretty shallow nowadays and the fact that George Lucas constantly changed them did not help at all(which is probably the only reason I am on this OT fanboy site).

The only thing TFA lacks that the PT has is George’s wild imagination and world building skills. But as far as telling a competent story with likable/layered characters Lucas didn’t showcase any of the talent he once had when making the OT.

Lord Haseo said:

The only thing TFA lacks that the PT has is George’s wild imagination and world building skills. But as far as telling a competent story with likable/layered characters Lucas didn’t showcase any of the talent he once had when making the OT.

I think you have nailed why the PT is not as good as the OT. But I think that GL’s imagination is more important to the overall story than his ability to write characters which is why even though TFA has better character stories, I think it is a weaker film because the overall plot is unimaginative.

yotsuya said:

Lord Haseo said:

The only thing TFA lacks that the PT has is George’s wild imagination and world building skills. But as far as telling a competent story with likable/layered characters Lucas didn’t showcase any of the talent he once had when making the OT.

I think you have nailed why the PT is not as good as the OT. But I think that GL’s imagination is more important to the overall story than his ability to write characters which is why even though TFA has better character stories, I think it is a weaker film because the overall plot is unimaginative.

I can understand you saying that the OT is superior based on that but the PT? The PT had semi imaginative plots with piss poor execution and mostly had dull characters. And plus if you don’t care about your characters you won’t be too invested in the plot anyway.

yotsuya said:

Well, I think ATOC is the weakest of the PT. But that said, I think all of the PT are pretty awesome movies. They are nowhere near as good at the OT, but they stand far above a lot of the crap out there. There are quite a number of great SF movies that I would place on the scale between the OT and PT. Blade Runner, Stargate, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and others. There are ones I like that I would put below the PT.

I think that the PT are fundamentally different from the OT and I think that should have been more expected and accepted by fans. Sometimes I feel like the fans were expecting the Clone Wars and forgot that the PT wan’t going to be about the best of Anakin, but about the fall of the Republic, the fall of Anakin, Obi-wan, and end with the birth of Anakin’s children. The fall of the Republic is about politics. GL based it on the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. In the PT we have stepped back to an older era and I feel that GL let older movies inspire him. Watch TCM for a week and you’ll see what I mean.

I seriously wonder why people would complain about Anakin’s sand line. Sand is insidious stuff, especially in a desert. GL had personal experience with this in the SW, ROTJ, and TPM shoots. According to several sources, including Mike Verta, there is some serious dirt in the scenes shot in Tunesia. Sand gets everywhere and it is hard to get rid of it. Padme mentions the beach and Anakin instantly thinks of sand. To me that line is very organic and natural.

And let’s be clear. GL had a horrible task in the PT. Take the most iconic film villain of the 20th century and make him a somewhat likable character but with enough flaws so you can see why he fell to the Dark Side. I think he accomplished that. Does it make for a great screen character? No, absolutely not. Anakin is written to fail. That is a hard task. You have to walk the line between writing a likable character and the honest backstory of a great villain. How to you make the audience sympathize with him as you reveal how he became Darth Vader. Did GL do the greatest job? No, but he made 3 very successful movies that took the title of highest grossing movie away from Star Wars and those that had taken the title from it over the years. Bet of all, Eps 5, 6, 1, 2, and 3 are technically independent movies. They were all funded by the merchandising and side businesses that were born of Star Wars. Quite a brilliant move.

I think Lucas’s biggest mistake was directing AOTC and ROTS. Directing is not his greatest strength. He could also use some help with writing. And admittedly he had some unofficial help with Star Wars. I’ve read all the early drafts of the script and somewhere in the editing process is where the genius of the original movie was born. I think that is missing in the PT. In the OT, he had some genius help. Leigh Bracket and Irving Kershner is what made TESB so brilliant. He had no such help with the PT. For Star Wars he had Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola and his other early film friends checking his work. I think he relied too much on himself for the others and tried to stick to the pattern that worked, but it didn’t work as well. It worked financially, but it was not what many fans were expecting. At least not until Ep 3. But then we get the complaints that Anakin’s fall is not believable. I disagree with that. Watch it again. Palpatine catches him at a vulnerable moment after Mace Windu dies and does something to him to seal his final fall. He goes from saving Palpatine from Mace to killing younglings in a short span of time, but he was open to the change or it never could have happened. But if you watch that scene carefully, Anakin has no choice, he is turned by Palpatine using the force.

I think most complaints about the PT are justified. It could be made better with just a bit of editing. I personally hate the droid factory sequence (especially the part with C-3PO) and consider it the worst scene in any Star Wars movie. But I think too many fans ask too much of the Prequels. What we got was something good and what we wanted was the old magic back. I don’t think we will ever get that old magic back. If we could mine the archives and pull out other takes and go in and do some serious tweaking, I think the films could be what they were intended to be, but some of the complaints are about the inherent part of the story that can’t be edited out. The PT is really about Palpatine’s secret climb to power and how he dealt with those who stood in his way and manipulated others to his side. The characters we know from the OT were really just along for the ride.

The state of the Jedi Order is also very deliberate. GL is showing us how their inability to bend or see the obvious is what lead to their downfall. Anakin’s fate could have been different had the Jedi not been so bound by tradition. (Anakin being too old for training - not contemplating that a Jedi could fall in love - etc) Yoda is the best of a bad lot. I think Mace Windu is indicative of just what the Jedi had become. Tradition over justice. The Jedi we see are flawed. In the OT, Obi-wan blames himself for Anakin’s fall, but we learn that it was inevitable because the Jedi could not see that Palpatine was the Sith Lord and Palpatine had been Anakin’s friend and adviser since he arrived on Coruscant. The Jedi only tell Anakin what not to do. They never advise him on how to deal with his feelings, they just keep telling him to not have any. That works when you raise someone from early childhood in the order, but it didn’t work for Anakin.

While I find some of he dialog old fashioned (which I think was deliberate to give us the feel of an older time - which I think was derived from watching movies made in the 30’s and 40’s rather than just those set in the 30’s and 40’s), I find the story to be fascinating and brilliant. If you expected the PT to be just like the OT, you were going to be disappointed. If you went in expecting to see a past revealed you stood a better chance of liking the movies. I have tried from the beginning to see what GL was trying to do and judged him on that. I think he created a brilliant trilogy that could have used some outside input for dialog writing and directing, but I think he nailed the rest of it. Of course the one flaw I do see with what he did was he was too eager to let his imagination run wild, which was not always a good thing. I think the OT benefited from the technology hindrance he claimed to be operating under.

So I find myself agreeing with many of the complaints, but thinking that you are blowing the issue out of proportion. One of the things I found about Anakin is that if you use your imagination and substitute James Earl Jones’s voice you find that Hayden was speaking like Jones and the lines just come off terrible because of the voice, not the acting. Anakin comes off sounding whiny and immature whereas Vader would sound menacing. Doesn’t work for every line, but works for most, especially when Anakin is falling.

AOTC is the worst of the weaker trilogy. But the Saga as a whole is fantastic and tells a brilliant story of how things crumbled from the top and are restored from the bottom. While TFA may have great characters and dialog, I find the story to be weak and lacking any of the Brilliance of GL’s storytelling. The scenes are far superior to the PT, but the overall movie fails to create a story that can compare even to AOTC. It is still a great movie, but TFA isn’t as great.

I agree with most of what you said, but I think that The Phantom Menace was far worse than Attack of the Clones. I personally always liked the droid factory scene.

I’ve never, ever seen an episode of Xena. Now I’m almost tempted to.

TV’s Frink said:
He posted an image of a weirdly proportioned Han Solo and said it looked like he had Down syndrome. My wife and I lost our first daughter to a similar genetic abnormality, so I took issue with it.

Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your stay. /b/

Outside of 4chan and (as of now) a youtube comment section the internet should not be like that.

Lord Haseo said:

Outside of 4chan and (as of now) a youtube comment section the internet should not be like that.

But it is

HansiG said:

Lord Haseo said:

Outside of 4chan and (as of now) a youtube comment section the internet should not be like that.

But it is

Well a lot of people do things and behave in a way that they shouldn’t. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mad when offensive things are said and just shrug it off as “That’s how it is”. Definitely doesn’t mean we shouldn’t chastise people like that either.

HansiG said:

Lord Haseo said:

Outside of 4chan and (as of now) a youtube comment section the internet should not be like that.

But it is

I’m frustrated by your apathy.

Lord Haseo said:

HansiG said:

Lord Haseo said:

Outside of 4chan and (as of now) a youtube comment section the internet should not be like that.

But it is

Well a lot of people do things and behave in a way that they shouldn’t. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be mad when offensive things are said and just shrug it off as “That’s how it is”. Definitely doesn’t mean we shouldn’t chastise people like that either.

If you were a PT fan you would get used to getting offended…trust me.

This is an open letter to all ot.com users:

HansiG said:
Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your stay. /b/

No, actually. Originaltrilogy.com used to be above this sort of thing.

Hell, even though I’m a lurker I now feel like I need to speak up about what’s happened to this place as of late.

As mentioned elsewhere, there has been an influx of new users over the last few months (over the last year? I dunno. I’m not gonna go clicking on everybody’s account to see when they joined) and a large portion of these new users have some questionable attitudes regarding forum behavior.

Although I want to refrain from sounding like some cranky old man (I’m 34, if anybody is wondering), many of these new users allude to being VERY young when watching the prequel films. I had to google “/b/” and that was a reference to 4chan if I’m not mistaken, which further supports my suspicions (and more and more anime references are being used for user names). There is absolutely nothing wrong with liking what you like (that’s a general use of the word “you” which I feel the need to point out due to the fact that a majority of these new users don’t seem to understand certain things about the nuances of the English language), as long as it’s not harming anybody else, but ot.com was largly comprised of older individuals that conducted themselves a certain way over the many years this forum has been operating.

Ot.com was one of the very few places on the internet both I and others could visit with the knowledge that it would be free of, well, of the things it hasn’t really been free of lately. It’s hard to quantify, but something has been very off for a while, and only seems to be getting worse.

If people like the prequels, that’s fine, but I’m not going to hang out at my parents’ vinyl parties and try to tell them how good streaming albums from youtube is and spew juvenile insults when everybody rightly and justifiably has a problem with my attitude. Would you? Would you go to a gathering of something you didn’t like? Again, you can like the prequels, but you have to expect to meet opposition.

There is a way to discuss things in the world. Everybody has different opinions, which is one of the many things that make the world interesting, but almost every thread seems to be derailed into boring arguments lately. I can get that on IMDB. There’s a difference between interesting discussion and backhanded bickering that goes on for post after post, page after page, and thread after thread. Wars not make one great.

Taste is subjective, but myself and others on this site think that the prequels are objectively bad movies on a fundamental film making level. I love the movie Star Crash, but I’m not going to pretend that 90% of humans would find it horrible. Just because a movie has “Star Wars” in the title doesn’t give it a free pass (just the fact that people are DESPERATE to try to edit them into better movies shows the power of the name (just move on, guys! 😛 )). If somebody tells me Star Crash is shit, who am I to argue? Why let it bother me? It IS a shit movie! How in any way does somebody not agreeing with me give me the right to stoop to some of the language I’ve seen here? Again, not wanting to sound like a cranky old man, but respectable people don’t use the word “retard” or the other related insults a lot of teenagers use as an insult. I’m really sorry, but if that’s what you expect from the internet, this isn’t the forum you’re looking for. Move along.

All the heat that Frink is catching lately is just more proof of the point I’m trying to make. Frink is a long time member and contributor, and has a mean sarcastic sense of humor. An asshole? Really? A lot of users seem to be taking him literally as of late, which was never the case before.

Can we talk about the increase use of the word “fuck?” For the longest time, I thought curse words weren’t even ALLOWED here. Now every other post is fuck this, fuck that, fucking awesome, fucking whatever. I love the word “fuck” and use it on other forums, but long ago on a forum far, far away, when somebody on ot.com used “fuck” you knew they were being FUCKING SERIOUS. Hey, you wanna say fuck and shit and all that, go ahead, but if you took a look around the forums, you would have seen that this language wasn’t used often.

If you took a look around, you could have seen the behavior was different, too. Yeah yeah, it’s the internet, but just fucking behave like you would in real life, please.

This place was AMAZING in it’s film geekyness. The recent discussion about the type of camera lenses used on Rogue One is one fine example of the type of talk that once flooded this board. Many users on this forum have an insane level of film knowledge, but you are lowering the forum’s standards and diluting what was a very unique corner of the net.

Again, this is to nobody in particular. If my message insults you, if you get defensive over what I’ve said, if you think I’m attacking you, if you feel the need to explain yourself, then you know that your behavior is less than stellar. How about improving it? It might be fun!

eiyosus said:
Can we talk about the increase use of the word “fuck?” For the longest time, I thought curse words weren’t even ALLOWED here. Now every other post is fuck this, fuck that, fucking awesome, fucking whatever. I love the word “fuck” and use it on other forums, but long ago on a forum far, far away, when somebody on ot.com used “fuck” you knew they were being FUCKING SERIOUS. Hey, you wanna say fuck and shit and all that, go ahead, but if you took a look around the forums, you would have seen that this language wasn’t used often.

I think I’m responsible for this actually lol

Sorry