- Post
- #921633
- Topic
- Ranking the Star Wars films
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/921633/action/topic#921633
- Time
- ESB/ROTJ
- ANH
- TPM
- ROTS/AOTC
- TFA
It’s difficult for me to compare TFA directly to the prequels, because I think it’s bad for different reasons, but honestly as much as I dislike the PT TFA is just on another level for me. I feel like it has way better production values and it doesn’t have the glaringly bad acting of the PT, but the whole thing feels so forced and artifical and I found the character interactions to be completely unbelievable and did not care what happened to any of them. I’ve hardly felt so little for characters in a film before. I got the distinct feeling that they were trying very hard to recreate the kind of banter that made ANH great but it just fell flat on its face IMO. The best summation of what I’m trying to get at here is put well in this excerpt from a quora post:
In real life people do not form instant trusting friendships, even when rescued. In Ep4 Luke spends most of the film thinking Han Solo is arrogant and selfish. Despite being saved by him several times, Leia also thinks that Solo is obnoxious, mainly because he is, but she also fancies him. She thinks that Luke is a nobody. R2D2 and C3PO have, at best, a love/hate relationship. These relationships between the characters aren’t wildly complicated, but they are varied, and realistic. Their interactions change as the films progress, and so do our attitudes towards them. It builds involvement.
The way relationships are portrayed In Ep7 is that if someone rescues someone else they are instantly BFFs. And everyone gets on just great. And completely trusts everyone else. All the time. The only relationship between protagonists with any kind of complexity is Han/Leia, which is a carry over from the previous films. This kind of weird emotional landscape is so alien, it destroys any chance of empathy that proper character detailing might have created. Are all of these space people on MDMA?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-hate-The-Force-Awakens
The above killed the movie for me and put it beneath AOTC, because the camaraderie between the different characters I think is where most of the “magic” of Star Wars comes from . As bad as the writing and acting were in the PT, I did actually care about (some) of the characters and found their interactions somewhat realistic, despite the poor dialogue.