SparkySywer

Dagenspear said:

JadedSkywalker said:

I think Anakin would have worked better if he was portrayed differently. He is so unlikable. So unrelatable. A problem of the prequel is there no Luke Skywalker to latch onto. No real central protagonist, even though Anakin is supposed to be that. Is he supposed to be an Anti-hero? Lucas didn’t seem to know where he wanted to go with the character.

Hayden acts like he is portraying dark and conflicted/selfish and arrogant. But where is the good friend and star pilot. Damn fool who follows old Obi-Wan on an idealistic quest.

That being said, if Anakin and Obi didn’t have the turmoil, I don’t think it’d make much sense for Vader to wanna kill him. I suppose that could just be about his injuries, but personally, I like the tense emotional resentment and bitterness of a brother who feels like he has to prove he’s better kinda angle to me.

I don’t think that’s true at all. The more their friendship is genuine, the more drama there is when they fight. They don’t need to secretly resent each other to end up fighting.

He’s saying that because he didn’t think he was capable of killing Mace Windu and is shocked at his actions, not because he believes he’s been tricked.

I liked Revenge of the Sith a lot when I saw it back in April. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as or better than The Empire Strikes Back, but I do think it’s about as good as Return of the Jedi. Anakin getting pulled between the Jedi and Palpatine was more compelling than I remembered. I think it’s a little petty to say that Anakin is written just to be an idiot who got tricked into becoming Darth Vader.

There’s definitely a lot of the movie where it feels like it’s relying on the fact that it’s a prequel and we’re more prone to accept where it’s going that we would be otherwise. I can imagine being in my 20s in 2005 and being underwhelmed by how Revenge of the Sith connects the prequels back into the OT. But I wasn’t, so I feel like I have less of an expectation and it bothers me less.

I’ve never really liked the lightsaber fights as much as the OT fights (even when I was a kid), and the Grievous fight is especially bad. The whole movie looks like a cartoon and that’s shit. But I felt like the drama around these characters and the massive transformation the galaxy is undergoing is compelling enough that it doesn’t really ruin the movie for me.

I feel a lot more excited about showing Revenge of the Sith to my kids than I do about other, better Star Wars movies.

I like Matt Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelization a lot, but I also just like the story of Revenge of the Sith in the first place. It improves on the story in some ways, but I think it’s a little overrated in that aspect. Like, for example, they add more of a subplot about an investigation on who the Sith Lord controlling the Senate is, and why they don’t think it’s Palpatine. But I think it just draws attention to this weakness in the story. I also don’t really like that the novel overemphasizes Anakin as uniquely prone to attachment, when I don’t think that’s really the point of the story or necessary. The novel does expand on the movie in great ways though and includes tons of little details that might have made the movie stronger, especially around the middle of the story, and most of the characters are more fleshed out than in the movie.

You do this a lot Bede

Vladius said:

*Doesn’t grasp that all the “the prequels are underrated/secretly genius” people are in full agreement with him about the Jedi in the prequels, they just think it was intentional. Yes, they know the Jedi are (supposedly) a creepy cult conspiracy that kidnaps and brainwashes kids to have no emotions.

I think it’s interesting that you’ve brought this up in a small handful of different threads in the past month or so, on top of having a longer conversation about this subject on the PT gen discussion thread.

BedeHistory731 said:

Vladius said:

To bring in a little more controversy (since apparently my posts rile people up for entertainment value and generate performative “who cares” posts from people who clearly care), Luke is the “Ghost of Kyiv” from early 2022.

Eh, I really don’t care and I find it amusing that you put so much effort into this.

No need to be a dick about it though

Vladius said:

SparkySywer said:

Vladius said:

It muddles the message and apparently causes some viewers to think that the Jedi telling Luke not to get himself killed in a trap, or to go and fight a necessary spiritual battle, is some kind of moral failing on the Jedi’s part, and not something that is genuinely wise.

Does it muddle the message? I think if someone comes away from the movie thinking Obi-Wan and Yoda don’t want Luke running off to Cloud City because it’s against the Jedi rules to have friends, and not any of the things you mentioned, it’s such a large misreading of the movie they’d have to have been looking at their phone the whole time to think it. I don’t think you can blame the prequels for it. It’s also not what Dagenspear is saying about this scene.

It’s a specific reading of the prequels that a gigantic portion (possibly most) fans have right now, which is that the Jedi forbidding attachment is:

1. their major flaw that causes Anakin to fall and screws everything up
2. directly connected to when they tell Luke not to go to Cloud City to help Han and Leia, and to when they tell Luke to kill Vader (note they don’t actually tell him to kill Vader but that’s a separate bugaboo I have)

I blame the prequels for changing the Jedi and causing confusion with poor writing.

Still, in order for someone to say that Obi-Wan and Yoda are wrong for telling Luke not to run off and face Vader, I think you really just have to have forgotten the entire movie. Luke disregards their advice, and as a result gets dismembered WITHOUT having saved Han & Leia. He’s extremely lucky to even be alive by the end of the movie.

The idea that Obi-Wan and Yoda are wrong for telling Luke to complete his training is not one I’ve ever been exposed to before this. It’s not a common reading of the movie like your bugaboo with Return of the Jedi is. I found some Screen Rant articles saying it but they don’t connect it back to the prequels and attachment. I don’t think the prequels can be blamed for a reading as bad as this.

Vladius said:

It muddles the message and apparently causes some viewers to think that the Jedi telling Luke not to get himself killed in a trap, or to go and fight a necessary spiritual battle, is some kind of moral failing on the Jedi’s part, and not something that is genuinely wise.

Does it muddle the message? I think if someone comes away from the movie thinking Obi-Wan and Yoda don’t want Luke running off to Cloud City because it’s against the Jedi rules to have friends, and not any of the things you mentioned, it’s such a large misreading of the movie they’d have to have been looking at their phone the whole time to think it. I don’t think you can blame the prequels for it. It’s also not what Dagenspear is saying about this scene.

Dagenspear said:

SparkySywer said:

Not really. Maybe those are the only two scenes where they’re openly conflicting with each other, but in four out of five of the scenes they have together before they’re suddenly making out, Anakin’s being an asshole and pissing her off. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by a “facial feature thing”, but the emotions the actors are expressing convey the intended effect of the scene. Rewatch their first scene together in the movie. It cuts in reaction shots from Padmé, Captain Typho, and Jar Jar (!!) while Obi-Wan is spanking him to communicate to us that Anakin is making the whole room uncomfortable and being a huge dick. The scene uses Jar Jar to tell us to look down on Anakin’s behavior. What does she see in him?

Give me those scenes where he’s actively making her mad and she gets mad. What are they? Because I remember:

…

Most of those moments between them aren’t angry at all, to me. That’s not even counting the scenes after that, where they talk near the waterfall or the scene and while they’re eating. Even the haunted by the kiss scene isn’t really about anger. Then there’s the tattooine stuff, which is all fairly amicable I think.

What would change your mind? What counts as “actively making her mad”? I think the first scene they have together (starting when they meet, ending when Padmé “retires”) is pretty damning, and that’s why I brought it up like three or four times. Clearly you don’t. What do you think is going through these characters’ minds in these scenes if not a really negative perception of Anakin? Why did George Lucas cut to these reaction shots of everyone in the room being uncomfortable? What was he trying to communicate?

When Anakin makes an inappropriate advance on Padmé within seconds of meeting her for the first time since he was nine, why does she react the way she does? What’s going through her head? And what does her response mean?

It would be one thing if George Lucas was just not very socially gifted and accidentally wrote Anakin in a way that came off as creepy, and an asshole. But the movie seems to intentionally draw attention to it. It’s just baffling. What do you think she sees in him?

Then them walking through Naboo, a fairly amicable scene to me.

I’ll give you this one, I forgot about that scene.

Not really. Maybe those are the only two scenes where they’re openly conflicting with each other, but in four out of five of the scenes they have together before they’re suddenly making out, Anakin’s being an asshole and pissing her off. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by a “facial feature thing”, but the emotions the actors are expressing convey the intended effect of the scene. Rewatch their first scene together in the movie. It cuts in reaction shots from Padmé, Captain Typho, and Jar Jar (!!) while Obi-Wan is spanking him to communicate to us that Anakin is making the whole room uncomfortable and being a huge dick. The scene uses Jar Jar to tell us to look down on Anakin’s behavior. What does she see in him?

The scene where Anakin’s making Padmé feel uncomfortable, and when she tells him to stop he has a weird smirk into a grimace, is pretty creepy. There are multiple scenes at the beginning of Attack of the Clones too where Anakin’s behavior toward and talking about Padmé piss off Padmé, Obi-Wan, and even Jar Jar, even if they all let him off easy. None of this is unintentional. This is how Anakin is meant to come off in Attack of the Clones, and some of it might make some sense given that he’s a hormonal, emotionally unintelligent teenager. But it’s so constant and so extreme, and he has so few redeeming qualities that it’s really baffling why George Lucas wanted to dedicate an entire movie where Anakin is just unbearable. He only barely shows some maturing during the fight with Count Dooku at the end, but he still has to get his ass bailed out by Yoda.

Han and Leia’s romance isn’t great either but it’s playing into older Hollywood romance tropes, whereas Anakin being kind of a creep is the intentional read at least at the beginning of the movie.

Hi

Wow! I never knew that the prequel trilogy had an overreliance on underdeveloped CGI technology, or that it had questionable VFX shots. Good thread!

When Kylo Ren smashes his mask in The Last Jedi, replace his line “Prepare my ship” with “Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival”

Not yet…

Omni said:

This thread loses much of its point when it’s just shamelessly biased.

This thread is rife with this stuff lol

SparkySywer said:

All three sequel trilogy movies definitely use the same recording. This video has TFA’s audio playing in the left ear, TLJ and then TROS’s audio in the right ear, if you have headphones. I thought TROS might have used a different recording but this is definitely the same one.

Actually, I’m totally wrong and you can hear a drumroll right at the beginning of TRoS that isn’t in TFA/TLJ. Not that this is super important. Also, here is a video of Rian Johnson recording John Williams at work during the production of The Last Jedi… where you can hear a version they recorded but ultimately did not use for TLJ.

Anjohan said:

Now, give us a Anakin and Obi-Wan Clone Wars live-action series with Andor’s writers (I haven’t even seen Clone Wars, but I love the concept) - and let’s delve into Asajj, Dooku (recast or deepfake), young Ahsoka (i have no interest for “current Ahsoka”, the performance and characters are sleep inducing) and some of the clones and Republic Troopers. I know, i know: “it’s all there in the animated series”. I don’t care! It’s live action for me, babe.

We also need a full-scale 5-minute recreation of Anakin’s slaughter on the Tuskens as a recurring nightmare he’s trying to suppress. I always hated how it only gets 4 seconds in AotC, but we’re supposed to feel the full extent of it.

“But Anjohan, that’s kind of brutal for a kid’s show!”

• Anakin is burned to a crisp in RotS, kids scroll through creepy videos on tiktok from the age of 8, the world has gone mad and I want me some more psychological Star Wars. This is a no biggie.

Are you trolling

Mocata said:

Star Wars was a film from the late 1970s.

I agree

Could be

The Ghorman plot line is totally leading into the Ghorman massacre from Rebels, where Mon Mothma will join up with all of Dave Filoni’s OCs… How will we feel if we have to see them next week?

Anchorhead said:

And don’t get me started on the episode wasted on watching the young couple Baroque dancing for 20 minutes.

It was in fact 82 seconds

Make Cassian fat and use AI to add lines supporting an implied character arc where he loses weight. For the Rebellion.

Here’s a mockup

You could have ignored their posts, but didn’t. Maybe you can find some understanding for their perspective there?

All three sequel trilogy movies definitely use the same recording. This video has TFA’s audio playing in the left ear, TLJ and then TROS’s audio in the right ear, if you have headphones. I thought TROS might have used a different recording but this is definitely the same one.

I agree that it sounds kind of low energy, it sounds kind of like a midi to me.