What Went Wrong/What Can Be Avoided Thread — Page 3

maybe these new films will help us forget the prequels ever happened.

So one would hope, but they could be just as bad. I say don't get your expectations too high and then you'll better enjoy the movie when it comes.

I didn't have a problem with the prophecy or the 'ahem' virgin birth.

This is a universe with people able to see the future (but always open to misinterpretation) as an established fact from the OT.

It also has clones and the like so inserting a corn-ear into a unploughed field shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The two Sith thing isn't a biggy for me either even if the EU authors went out of their way to pretend it never applied to them.

A good writer would acknowledge the prophecy and then make it clear the Jedi are divided as to it's value and meaning and show us it's being taken advantage of by a canny manipulator/s, like Paul in Dune.

Which seems to be what Lucas wanted to do but in the end all he actually did was throw it at the audience and then change it in the last episode (so is it bringing balance to the Force or destroying the Sith???).

The end result was to make the Jedi look even more stupid and give Mace an excuse to contribute to one of the least likeable fictional personalities in any medium by constantly goading Anakin, isolating Anakin, not including Anakin and never trusting the confused plank.

If it wasn't for the fact that Grevious shows that one doesn't need The Force, I would say that Maul and Grevious should have been the same character. Killing off a character and replacing them with such a similar character is bad storytelling.

Reusing concepts that were dropped for a reason. For example, Lucas dropped the concept of midichlorians at some point during the making of the OOT and than brought the concept back for the PT.

Kids suck. I would have liked to have seen an older Obi-Wan and an older Anakin from the outset of the PT. As much as I swooned over Ewan MacGregor and his padawan crop in my younger years, they could have just given him a beard from the beginning and been done with it (and I still would have swooned). The absolute lower limit on Anakin's age should have been 19. That way, we could have seen Anakin being a loyal friend to Obi-Wan, seen him being a great pilot, seen him being a great warrior, etc.

Anakin needed some flaws besides 'being an inherently unlikable whiny petulant teenager'. He needed a big flaw that would lead to his downfall--something that Obi-Wan either didn't or couldn't help him fix. He needed some smaller flaws, too, to give him more character. Maybe he could have had bad luck with the ladies, or have had Qui-Gon's compulsive gambling habit (placing bets on himself in races, or getting kicked out of space casinos because he used the Force to rig the space roulette wheel and space craps), something, ANYTHING to make him a more balanced protagonist.

I hate what Lucas did to Padme's character. I'd have totally been down with Padme being a Queen Victoria-type who was enthroned as a teenager, and had to struggle for power against corrupt regents under Palpatine's influence. I could have even been down with a love triangle between Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme, if they went with 'jealousy' as Anakin's big character flaw. And hell, if Anakin is going to cause her death, just go all out and have him Force choke her to death, and make the fact that Luke and Leia survived Padme's death be a sign that the Force is strong with them. But that 'dying of a broken heart' thing is flat out insulting.

Never having Yoda draw a lightsaber would have made the films so much better. For the venerable Yoda, the Master of all Masters to sully his hands with the blood and grit of battle is such a disservice to his character, and to the legacy of Jedi we had built up for us in the OT. It's like hearing a story about the Buddha going on a killing spree, or Ghandi being a genocidal dictator of a military state. It just don't jive. I want a Yoda who spends all day in meditation, spouts a never-ending stream of koans, hits people with his walking stick for no apparent reason and eats all of their protein bars. A Yoda who doesn't HAVE to demonstrate his power every five minutes to earn respect, like Vader did.

...or, like was said before, a Yoda who never appears on screen, heightening the mystery and making his final appearance all the more surprising.

The point about how all the Jedi fighting in one big battle with all their lightsabers is a terrible idea is right on the money. When freaking EVERYONE in the story has these powers and weapons, even people who we've never seen before, have no lines, and are never mentioned by name, it makes those powers and weapons not special anymore. (That's one of my problems with the EU, too, for that matter.)

Boo on a virgin birth happening in the same movie where a scientific explanation is given to the Force. Those two things should never happen together in the same series. The Force has to be mystical, because everything else in the series is science/tech. (The fact that midi-chlorians are a complete throwaway plot device is even worse. The story would not be different in any way if they just replaced every instance of 'midi-chlorians' with 'The Force'.)

RicOlie_2 said:

 PT technology should have looked less advanced than OT technology. The SE should have given us more advanced displays like Adywan did so that they would be able to use slightly more advanced technology, but it should not have been more advanced than the OT's tech.

Here I disagree. The events of the OT happened in the frontier. The worlds and the living conditions represented either poor material wealth of inhabitants of these worlds or unexplored areas of the galaxy. The technologies that we saw in the OT can be interpreted as purely unimaginative and functional serving just as means to survive. On a greater scale I think the idea behind such visual tech style of the OT was simply to show mechanical nature of Empire (simple triangular-shaped giant but elephantine warships of unvaried design) against the poverty-struck background of the human existence during the time of oppression. Though I think if Lucas had more sophisticated technology in 1977 he would show us more advanced stuff of Coruscant and the like.

As for pre-Empire era, the intention was obviously to show more prospering society of higher cultural, technical level of development with more elegant and civilized elements of the technical craft far surpassing the dark and poverty of the Imperial rule. In contrast to the frontier life in Outer Rim it would be nice and logical to see civilization at its height, to see the capital of the Republic etc, super high-end facilities of bygone age of agricultural and industrial growth (of the civil industry). None other than ROTJ (kill me, but I LOVE the movie!!) director Richard Marquand who was privy to some drafts of Lucas' outline for his prequels as seen back in circa 1983 commented that these stories were about different times, different technology, different sentiments, different people than that we were introduced in the OT. It was not the visual style but the story composition, plot twists, characterization and the scripts that ruined the PT!

Besides what looks advanced to us doesn't necessarily mean more advanced to the people in the story.

To modern eyes Gothic art looks less advanced than Renaissance art but we aren't medieval people. We don't have the same priorities and values so our instinctive perception on how effective the art of that time is dictated by our understanding of what art means to us.

If you showed a bit of cubism to someone in the Renaissance they may think us more primitive.

Those displays show those characters information which they understand in that context.

A good writer would drop a hint to the audience as to why the design ethos might change which would draw narrative interest out of the imagery.

Lucas isn't a good writer so he should have played safe visually.

Sadako said:

The fact that midi-chlorians are a complete throwaway plot device is even worse. The story would not be different in any way if they just replaced every instance of 'midi-chlorians' with 'The Force'.

This is why I don't like midi-chlorians. It's not that they demystify the Force -- they're clearly meant to be conduits to the Force, not the creators of the Force or the Force itself -- but because they're completely, hopelessly, redundant.

I've got a bit of headcanon that states that midi-chlorians are attracted to the Force and sustain themselves on the Force, and so beings which are Force sensitive can sustain larger colonies of midi-chlorians, but that the connection ends there.

My headcanon also includes the idea that Galactic culture and science has become stagnant (explaining why nothing seemed to advance in the 19 years between ROTS and ANH, or in the 15-odd years between TPM and ROTS, for that matter); therefore, kyttarocentric Jedi researchers from Core worlds began and ended their research at midi-chlorians thousands of years ago, thus marginalizing the status of non-cellular life forms and explaining why there don't seem to be any sentient rock monster Jedi or gaseous cloud-being Jedi populating the CGI ranks of the Order in the prequels.

But again, that's all headcanon that helps me sleep at night after arguing with PT-lovers, or rationalize stuff away when I write fan fiction. Usually, I forget that midi-chlorians are even a thing, BECAUSE they are so redundant and lack any sort of real impact on the story (and because the only way I'll watch the PT is in fanedit format where all mention of midi-chlorians have been removed).

Sadako said:

I've got a bit of headcanon that states that midi-chlorians are attracted to the Force and sustain themselves on the Force, and so beings which are Force sensitive can sustain larger colonies of midi-chlorians, but that the connection ends there.

I go a bit further myself and run with the idea that they're bonafide Force-sucking parasites which rewrite the DNA of their hosts to make them dependant on their presence to survive.

That's awesome. Midi-chlorians as retroviruses...

There isn't really that much that needs to be avoided in the prequels at all. We need to avoid avoiding them, which doesn't seem to be happening with the crew behind the movies so far, which is just a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE.....

Several new Death Stars are built

....HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE injustice.

It was not that long ago that you tried to apologise for being a toss pot and  some of the guys on here said that was cool. Now you are starting the same crap again.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/I-would-like-to-issue-and-apology/topic/16350/

OBI-WAN37 went wrong, and OBI-WAN37 can be avoided.

Possibly the worst scene in all 6 movies:

Um...I don't think a blank screen counts as a scene.*